Dave Dyer's work page


I am now retired, mainly working on my web site Boardspace.net.

 I used to work for Andromeda Software.. For Andromeda I made plugins for Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Indesign.  The Indesign plugins were all custom software engineered for Jostens, and were never sold commercially.  Sadly, Andromeda has essentially abandoned the photoshop plugin business,  and these plugins are essentially dead and unavailable.

My areas of special expertise

Andromeda Projects

My Fourth Major Opus at Andromead is the Scatterlight Lenses filter.  This filter was originally inspired by the desire to simulate the surreal effects produced by the Dreamagon lens.  After a lot of hands-on research with the Dreamagon and less extreme soft focus lenses such as the Zeiss Softar, start effect and fog effect filters, the result is a pretty general simulation of lens imprefections which some photographers (and their clients) like.  In the digital world, this is doubly important because these effects lenses aren't even available in digital form factors.


original
original image
 simulation
Scatterlight DreamOptics
real dreamagon image
More examples


My third major Opus at Andromeda was the Lens Doctor filter, which is really unique. Lens doctor corrects barrel and pincusion distortion which is inherent in all real photographs, but which is especially severe in zoom lenes, wide angle lenses, and lenses whose optical charactgeristics have been altered by closeup or telephoto adapters.   It also allows you to fix keystone distortion and rotation through a very simple user interface.
 

My second Major Opus at Andromeda was to produce the Measurement filter.  It's the tool I've always wanted for inspected images in detail.  You can open any number of windows on an image, and using bezier paths as guides, get histograms, profiles, and magnified views in either numeric or graphic format.


 


My first Major Opus at Andromeda was to produce the Shadow Filter, a Photoshop plugin that produces geometricly correct shadows from a silhouette extracted from an image. For example,
 
 
 
The boring looking logo below can be transformed into the dramatic one at the right.
Since the Shadow filter is using a 3-D model to generate the shadows, it was easy to add the capability to output anaglyph (red-green) stereo.

Historical Notes:

Triple-I Projects

I'm primarily worked on some image manipulation utilities for Triple-I's InfoFax product line. The draft documentation for that program is found here. The most unusual thing about these utilities is that they included support for JBIG format (extrememe compression for fax-like images).

Although I worked for Triple-i, I spent quite a bit of working time on behalf of another company nFX; I worked on enhancing the graphical output from nFx animation program, using C, OpenGL, on PC and Iris platforms.

A more complete description of the nFX player program is found here
 

Symbolics Projects

At symbolics, I was "Mr Color".  More or less all of Symbolics' color framebuffer and basic image manipulation software was designed and implemented by me.  In those days, black and white was the default configuration, and the window system was largely designed with 1 bit/pixel in mind. My biggest challenges were making the color software as compatible as possible with the dominant black-and-white paradigm of the operating system, and keeping the programming API for wildly different color and black and white hardware as simple as possible.  All symbolics software, right down to the bare machine, was written in Lisp.

Information Sciences Institute Projects

At ISI, I was one of a two or three person team who implemented the Interlisp dialect of Lisp on VAX computers under the UNIX operating system.  My piece of the pie was the overall architecture of the implementation and the vax machine code generator for the lisp compiler.

Triple-I projects (again)

Back at the dawn of time (from my point of view) I worked at Information International as a student and afterwards.  My projects there involved operating system level coding to support specialized hardware attached to PDP-10 computers, including such exotica (at the time) as display processors, scanners, disk controllers, and special purpose co-processors.  I was also involved with the support and debugging of the F-1 supercomputer (by the standards of the time).
 

Resources

  • Cross platform converters
  • A Homepage for Macintosh resources, and another
  • Macintosh Street price index
  • Info about Ada 95
  • Info about Perl

    • Network Resources

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