Zoomify – an Explanation

I note from comments I have received from viewers of the 'Zoom into St. Tropez' item in my galleries, that many people are unaware that the Zoomify plugin is installed in Photoshop, nor do they know how it can be used, so I thought I would give a short explanation.

It uses components of Flash to do its magic, and it is a great little tool to allow photographers to put up a large image to the Web within a zoomable and pannable window (so I have just added two new words to your vocabulary! – but I am sure you get my drift).

In my case, when I had stitched the several views of the St. Tropez waterfront together, it was the ideal vehicle to use so others could get an impression of what I had achieved.

The plugin resides in the File menu of Photoshop from Export. Depending on how you have your menus set, you may first have to go to 'Show All Menu Items', but it is at the bottom of the Export list.

Here is the dialog box from where you control how Zoomify will display in the Web browser. You set where the components are to be saved, the compression you apply and how large the viewer window is to be. The plugin does the rest. It creates a folder and a file, which you need to upload to the Web.

It makes no attempt to personalise the end result, but with a small amount of HTML knowledge you should be able to alter the coding to allow the end result to fit into your own style. I just did some judicious copying and pasting to add a return link to my blog, just as I had to for the Lightroom-generated galleries.

I hope the foregoing helps others to do a little more with Photoshop.

St. Tropez Visit

I was lucky to get a short break to wander round the off-season scenes around the harbour, so here are some of my memories, I was fascinated by the concrete seats which covered some of the controls for the harbour plumbing that required a crane to lift, and some of the vendors determined to accost the few tourists. Overall, how friendly everyone seemed compared to high season. The paucity of boats meant you could see the waterfront buildings. The light and colour lends itself to the artists, some of whom have real talent and style; but not all.

St.Tropez – A Taster

When in Provence to give six days' one-to-one training, I did get some time off in the small French resort, and I strolled onto an empty pontoon and took a series of images handheld with the idea of stitching them into a panorama. I exported the series from Lightroom into a layer stack within Photoshop CS4, auto-aligned and auto-blended them before downsampling them to a manageable size for the export to Zoomify. It is now available to view from the Galleries, whilst I finally sort out the rest of my images from the trip.

Catching Up…

For several reasons, basically a full life, I have got very behind in keeping up with writing my blog, and getting galleries of images up. I have now come back from giving six days' one-to-one training in Provence, and have had to build a RAID 5 disk array to ensure I do not run out of disc space. I am now almost up to date, so there will be some images from a weekend trip to Axminster and on to Ringmore over the Bank Holiday weekend.

The trip to Axminster was to catch up with my ex-Assistant Chief Pit Marshall friend Peter and his wife Ann, then on to my brother, Mike and his wife Alison at Ringmore, where the day after we all visited the excellent Bolt Head Air Show.

So, not long from now there will be galleries to cover that weekend and some images from my free time when down in the south of France.