Publish your LAB curves in a snap (Windows)

LAB.rat

Hi all

Been going through the DM reading group a week ago and am in my first chapters of the book. Because of the outcries for an easy way to publish your curves - and also as thanks to Rutt and others putting so much effort in - I got inspired to try and make an automation that pastes your curves together and uploads it to ImageShack, all in one go.

Well basically... it's working great :thumb though it takes about a minute. Still have some work to do, so you may look forward to it somewhere next week. I'll try and include a 2-up before/after action as well, which will also paste the curves next to them.

At the moment it's producing DM style curves like these, though you have some options to include the white bg/colors or not.



I'll also be making a vertical version to go next to the portrait 2-ups.

Currently, it's taking curves from one instance, so if you use 3 layers you're out of luck, although I might add this option as well.

I'll not be devoting my life to this however, so try to be happy with what you're getting It's taken me time enough already, so I hope at least a lot of us will be able to share more curves, so we can all learn more :thumb You'll get all editable script sources anyway, and they're not that difficult to customize.

Like I said, the current process is as good as a one click operation:
- select your curves layer
- play the action
- image is uploaded and URL is copied to clipboard for you to paste in here, that's all

FYI: The first part of the script is made with AutoIt3, a great free tool for automation.

Oh BTW: do any of you know of a keyboard shortcut for opening a curves layer when it's selected? (instead of double-clicking) I've had to solve this by using a script, called by an action with an assigned shortcut, so it would be nice if I could get that shortcut back available...

01af

Another approach

LAB.rat wrote:

Because of the outcries for an easy way to publish your curves---and also as thanks to Rutt and others putting so much effort in---I got inspired to try and make an automation that pastes your curves together and uploads it to ImageShack, all in one go. Well basically... it's working great though it takes about a minute.

Great work! The outcome looks good, very pro-like.

May I still make a suggestion for yet another way of sharing Lab curves (or any kind of curves)? Why not simply describe your curves as a series of pairs of integer numbers? That's easy to do and wouldn't rely on a external site like Imageshack. The description of the curves in your example above would go like this (values estimated from the image):

Lab: L((0, 0), (18, 6), (87, 90), (100, 100)) a((11, 0), (41, 41), (50, 50), (84, 100)) b((28, 0), (72, 100))

The same format would work for RGB and for CMYK sets of curves (that's what the label at the beginning is meant for). Okay, that's not very readable and definitely does not look as nice as your image. But it's easy to create, easy to transfer via plain ASCII text, and easy to feed into someone else's Photoshop session. You may write a simple parser and an Action to create and to read these textual descriptions automatically, to make it even simpler.

And oh, by the way: it's Lab, not LAB.

-- Olaf

LAB.rat

May I still make a suggestion for yet another way of sharing Lab curves (or any kind of curves) [...] Okay, that's not very readable and definitely does not look as nice as your image.

Indeed... It's still much quicker to follow a tutorial if you have immediate visuals. I for one would not like to open all sorts of stuff to get an idea.
Additional / sometimes lesser alternatives are always welcome though, that's true.

But it's easy to create [...] You may write a simple parser and an Action to create and to read these textual descriptions automatically, to make it even simpler.

There lies the problem though. At least on the automatically reading side which I'm most interested in. I've asked in the PS-scripts forum and no-one knows of a way to read out these curve points (writing them is no problem).
I've asked because I wanted to design a handy Lab curve interface first.

And oh, by the way: it's Lab, not LAB.

Dan got it wrong on his book cover then So now you think I'm a genuine LAB rat then? :ivar

ratcheer

IMHO, it is LAB.

Tim