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.