A couple of months down the road since the first release of TychBuilder, and I’ve just hit ‘publish’ on an update to version 1.1.0.

Some of this was driven by wanting to squish a couple of bugs (most notably when switching between presets on the edit dialog; sorry about that one!). But I also wanted to add a few new tools.

As an example, I was recently using TychBuilder to lay out pages for a photobook of my son’s wedding. I almost always end up tearing my hair out trying to get the design that I want in commercial photobook creation tools. I figured I could make a single JPEG file for each page, with all of the images I wanted placed exactly as I want them. That way I can size, align and crop each one precisely and not have the tool decide that it should be re-cropped. I will admit that I added text in the online photobook software because I wasn’t convinced that it would look as crisp as it should if I included in the JPEG.

But … some of my layouts only had a single image on a page. When I originally wrote TychBuilder I was thinking of it solely as a way to put multiple images together. As I built my pages I found that I really wanted a consistent workflow to get a consistent result, even for those pages with one big image on each.

So, as from version 1.1 the limitation on needing to be placing at least two graphics has been removed.

The plugin also now saves the preset used to make each layout inside the Photoshop document itself. You can retrieve that preset from it again if you need to re-process the file for any reason, or you just want to make sure that you use exactly the same settings for a different set of graphics.

Looking through some additional sample files, I also realised that I’d neglected some layer types. So version 1.1 fully supports solid, gradient and pattern fill layers. In version 1.0 those could sometimes end up covering the whole of the layout instead of just one area within it, when they were used as a background rather than as a fill for a vector graphic. While I’m not convinced that it really makes sense to use TychBuilder on a file that uses those layer types in that way, they now work consistently with the way in which images, text and vector fills are handled.

I also took another look at video layers. If you happen to be building something like a kiosk front end and want to place one or more videos together, with one or more text blocks or images, you can now use TychBuilder to do that. Then just add all the graphics into the timeline and you can have multiple videos all running in parallel. I’m guessing that you’d disable the sound on all but one of them, though!

You may have noticed that I added a quick-start page to my web site a few weeks ago. There’s now a quick-start guide in the plugin itself, accessed through the About dialog.

There are a few other improvements in speed and in messaging, most importantly for rare cases where TychBuilder decides that it’s simply not possible to build a layout without clipping or distorting graphics. That will only crop up when the document’s layer structure will end up with a huge contrast in the sizes of graphics, with some ending up very large in the design, and others very small. It’s also more likely when the spacing between rows or between columns is quite large, and can usually be worked around by reducing that spacing.

That’s all for now, hope you enjoy using it!

Several years ago, I tripped over a plugin for Photoshop called TychPanel by a man called Reimund Trost. I already loved making panels, including diptychs and triptychs, because they allow you to say more about a place, an object, an event or a subject than a single image ever could. TychPanel made that so much easier; I didn’t have to sit down with a calculator and figure out exactly what dimensions I needed to scale images to for them to fit together nicely.

Well, time moves on and unfortunately TychPanel hasn’t aged well. It was written with an older plugin API in Photoshop and is no longer reliable. I reached out to Reimund to ask him if he had any plans to transfer his plugin to UXP, the new plugin API, but didn’t get any response. I know there are a lot of older plugins whose authors are struggling with that transition.

So I started wondering if I could write something similar myself. As it happens I was struggling with long Covid at the time, and having a project to stop myself stupidly doing anything requiring much physical effort seemed like a good idea.

As I worked on it, I realised that I also had the opportunity to address a couple of things that were slightly annoying in TychPanel. The primary one was that any panel containing more than one row or more than one column had to be made in steps. If I didn’t like the result or wanted to try a different layout I would have to start again from the beginning. I decided that my plugin must allow a design to be reworked with minimum effort and with minimum loss of quality from doing so.

What I’ve ended up with is a new plugin called TychBuilder. You can use it to create pretty much any kind of panel from a simple diptych of two images to … well, the only limit is your imagination (and a photoshop limit for nesting groups inside each other that I’ve never even come close to hitting).

Take a look at the TychBuilder page on my web site; there are links from there to download the user guide and some sample files and to the Adobe marketplace for the plugin itself.