Went to an Adobe conference yesterday and they claim photoshop 6 has been tested with images up to 8000 layers. They said it can probably handle more but that is where they stopped testing. How many layers are we supporting? (heh... memory is cheap!) There were also some very interesting new features in Photoshop 6 including a tool called the "extractor" that can do (good) clipping paths very very quickly. The demo was impressive but the image they started with was probably hand picked so it worked perfectly with the extractor every time. The other biggie was limited support for _vector_ stuff. Mainly type but you are also able to import layers from Illustrator files. It would be kinda cool to pull in gfig elements and keep them as vector layers when the image is saved as .xcf.gz The vector layers would be rasterized as part of export to some other image format. Another very interesting tool was the ability to export an image to SWF where each layer becomes a frame in the flash animation. The demonstration used something sorta like a gimp hose brush to spray some leaves in an "S" pattern. Then they did something to automatically break each leaf the brush sprayed into its own layer. When exported to .swf it generated the file along with a web page containing the HTML to embed the movie. When you played it the leaf moved across the movie following the S pattern. (simmilar to how we do .gif anims but this was going to .swf) I've seen requests for some of this functionality before and I've also seen gimp developers belly ache about it. I know Gimp is a bitmap program... I also know Photoshop _used_to_be_ a bitmap program and now their users have some really nice tools that I would like to see in the Gimp some day. I would code this stuff myself if I knew how... I'm learning... Some day I'll check something in. Until then... Keep up the Good Work! GO WILBUR! -- Jon Winters O 0 0 0 0 0 0 "History Will Prove us right" <O> <B> <S> <C> <U> <R> <A> http://www.obscurasite.com/jon/ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \
