Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers • Hacker News Board

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#31

Post by bmelton » Thu, Jan 22, 2009, 3:45 PM UTC

pclark wrote: post #17

very clever. Now give me an example of this being useful?

In this particular form, it's probably not very useful at all -- but identifying edges, or extracting 'foreground' images from 'background' images automatically with clean edges is something that would be ridiculously useful for videography, photo editing, or just graphic design in general.

Furthermore, if you advance the technology to being able to scan a photo of, say, an airport lobby, break each component into layers, and then perform shape identification on each of the identified pieces, you've got left-package detection or weapon identification technologies available to you (potentially.)

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#32

Post by vetinari » Thu, Jan 22, 2009, 4:17 PM UTC

icey wrote: post #3

It's pretty cool, but I'm not sold on it being $15 of cool.

Well, it is also €15.95. This guy should really investigate others banks, right now he is asking Europeans for $20.70.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#33

Post by wmeredith » Thu, Jan 22, 2009, 4:31 PM UTC

m_eiman wrote: post #8

river_styx wrote: post #5

This is cool and all, but what's the utility? You can already isolate individual windows and arbitrary screen regions with the built-in OS X screenshot grabber.

Agreed. While I can see that it's a clever thing and nicely done, I can't think of anyone who routinely needs to screenshot all (or at least multiple) windows at once but separately. Someone who saves a ton of time using this, please tell us what you're using it for!

For $15, It would only have to save me a little time. About 30 minutes over the lifetime of the product would suffice.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#34

Post by wmeredith » Thu, Jan 22, 2009, 4:32 PM UTC

pclark wrote: post #17

very clever. Now give me an example of this being useful?

User manual authoring.

Re: Clever screenshot app turns your desktop into Photoshop layers

#35

Post by asjo » Thu, Jan 22, 2009, 9:06 PM UTC

showerst wrote: post #26

yan wrote: post #2

This is actually brilliant. Is wrapping a web rendering engine and exporting the web page as a PSD file the next step?

I just spent a few hours looking into doing this, and all I can say is kudos to them for decoding the psd file format =P. None of the big graphics libraries (GD, Image Magick, etc) support writing of layered PSD files (Imagick can read them, and export non-layered's, but that's it as far as I can tell.), and the format specs require you to sign an NDA/non-compete with Adobe. Taking the screenshots is doable if a bit…

The Gimp (http://gimp.org/) can load _and_ save PSD-files with layers, so you could probably find most of the reverse engineering already done in the code there.

While you are at it, why not just save the file in Gimp format and be done with it? :-)