Challenge
Take a predefined set of color Swatches and a design that includes different items with different colors, then generate and save all possible color variations for final review. An additional challenge within Photoshop has to do with the fact that length is not supported for the Swatches panel, meaning that when the code asks Photoshop how many swatches there are in order to dynamically pull the color data values in for each, it's impossible to do so. Conditional statements are left... speechless.
Solution: Photoshop:
Take a predefined set of color Swatches and a design that includes different items with different colors, then generate and save all possible color variations for final review. An additional challenge within Photoshop has to do with the fact that length is not supported for the Swatches panel, meaning that when the code asks Photoshop how many swatches there are in order to dynamically pull the color data values in for each, it's impossible to do so. Conditional statements are left... speechless.
Solution: Photoshop:
To solve the latter challenge, I connected to Illustrator to begin with because the control of the Swatches panel is superior to Photoshop, allowing me to pull in the color data for all of the Swatches. Using an algorithm I wrote in MATLAB, which then controls Photoshop, I then generated a finite number of color set variations and programmatically drew each set in Photoshop. In this example, I fed the algorithm 21 colors with 3 colors per set to create 21^3 = 9,261 sets.
Special thanks to Tom Ruark for helping solve the puzzle of wrapping ExtendScript up in MATLAB to get the two apps to talk to each other.
Solution: Illustrator
Since the time the original algorithm was created, the code has been ported to custom Flash plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator with the objective of automtically generating a large number of iterative color combinations that are exported out as PNG and AI files. This gives the Creative Director an opportunity to see a complete batch of images in Adobe Bridge vs. a small subset that a designer would create within the same amount of time.
