Photoshop Extensions with React & Redux
I’ve been working on a web-based design tool for a few months (more on that soon). After demoing it today someone asked if they could use it with Photoshop. The quick answer was “no, it’s a web app that renders React components”, but I realized I’d been avoiding even exploring Photoshop extension creation, so I took the afternoon and looked into it.
The ecosystem is…interesting…
There are a TON of outdated buzzwords out there, but eventually I found great resources on Davide Barrance’s blog.
Turns out the panels are basically HTML + CSS + JS that communicate with CreativeCloud apps through JSX files (not that kind of JSX. Adobe ExtendScript).
ExtendScript sucks a lot but I figured I could take some of the pain out of the process and at least build the UI how I know best - React, Redux and Ramda.