How to Interface PAX-it with Photoshop and other Imaging Applications

PAX-it gives users the ability to make adjustments to image properties such as brightness & contrast manipulations, conversion to grayscale, tweaks to the red, green, and blue color channels, and more. However, some of our customers are Adobe Photoshop users, and prefer to manipulate their images there. Photoshop gives a much deeper suite of tools for working with the nuances of image manipulation, and we do not try to duplicate that specialized functionality for our users.   PAX-it does however, supply an easy-to-use bridge to Photoshop, so that you can make the best of both worlds—using PAX-it to store, manage, and process your images, while using Photoshop for image manipulations.

To set up this bridge—called a PAX-it “hotlink” to Photoshop—visit Options… Preferences… Hotlinks. Point PAX-it to the path to the executable file  that starts your version o f Photoshop, and give that link a name to reference it (perhaps something original, like “Photoshop”). This name will appear in a dropdown list on the “image” item of the PAX-it main menu.

When an image is opened in PAX-it, simply drop down the “Image”menu and select your named hotlink. Photoshop will open, and the PAX-it image will load for you automatically into its workspace. Edits that you perform on the Photoshop side will be saved to the image in PAX-it if you perform the Photoshop “File… Save” function.

Note that for some users it is preferred that Photoshop NOT save the changes by overwriting the original image in PAX-it, yet PAX-it is preferred to store the edited image. In this case you can take advantage of an option to “save a copy or the original file“ on the Hotlinks Preference page. PAX-it will automatically create a copy of any image sent to Photoshop, and save the changes to the copied file, which is housed in the original PAX-it folder. Easy!

Other notes related to this hotlink operation:

• Using Photoshop version that includes a log of user changes to images, that log file may be sent into PAX-it along with the altered image. In this way, users who view the original and altered images can duplicate the changes that were made, simply by noting the steps in the log. That log is attached to the new image as a PAX-it notepad entry, and the function is turned on by checking the “send log’ box on the Preferences Hotlinks page.
• Other imaging applications can be set up asa hotlink also; it is not limited to Photoshop. MS-Paint, specialized scientific imaging  software, Paintshop Pro, and other imaging applications can be added to your list of hotlinks.
• Sending an image to a hotlinked application can happen at the image icon level (inside a PAX-it folder) as well. When viewing image icons, a “Send to…” option is available if a single icon is highlighted and the right-click menu is displayed.   This may be preferable to opening the image into the workspace to accomplish the link.
• If an image has been altered in another application, you may need to refresh its icon in the PAX-it folder in order for the icon to reflect the changes. Simply highlight the icon, right click, and choose “Refresh Icons” from the menu.