Hiya!
I’m Tim and I’ve been a professional retoucher for over 20 years (including analogue retouching!).
I got into CEP and ExtendScript a couple of years ago when I basically taught myself HTML, CSS, JS, and ExtendScript in three months, whilst simultaneously building a CEP panel that semi-automated my then employer’s retouching pipeline.
I’ve been playing around with it ever since and am really excited to get stuck in to UXP.
Unsurprisingly, Photoshop is my main thing, but I have just finished building my first InDesign panel as a freelance developer.
Being self-taught, I often have quite glaring gaps in my knowledge, and have a tendency to write quite convoluted code, so please go easy on me!
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Hi there! Happy to have you on board! Waving from a sunny part of Maryland today. It’s absolutely stunning out today.
I love stories like these – it proves that the work the team does to enable extensibility can span the gamut and even get people interested in writing code. Love it!
If you have questions about Ps, UXP, or anything really, let us know!
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Hey Kerri,
frankly speaking, I’m surprised it took me this long! I’ve dabbled with code since I got my first computer (an Amstrad 464) back in the late 80s, but never really mastered it, and definitely not to the extent of making an actual finished product. Like many people, I laboured under the illusion that you needed to be good at maths to code, and I wasn’t, so I didn’t.
Skip forward 25-30 years and I know a lot about Photoshop and get asked as Senior Retoucher if I could write an action that would use colour range to select a specific RGB value and apply as a mask.
As I said, three months later I released v1.0 of my panel, and it did a hell of a lot more than that color range/mask! That panel has now been processing approx 4,000 images a week for the last 2.5 years and increased productivity by well over 100% (turns out all those save operations really add up).
I cannot understate how empowering that process was and how it has changed me as a person.
It gave me a sense of achievement for sure, but an also opened a window on a whole new world of learning that just keeps that feeling going.
When I decided to go freelance last year and wanted to build a website I went and did it in .NET/Umbraco, from scratch, with naught but my wits and Stack Overflow etc. It’s not perfect, but I’m a damn sight happier with it than I would be with a janky Wordpress site hamstrung by plugins (it’s also built with a metadata system that plugs in to my existing workflow and populates a load of the website content directly from the image files!). I’ll admit, it was HARD, there were literal tears at one point, but I did it, and I wouldn’t have without all those hours at the coalface the ESTK.
The “limited” scope of CEP was a great entry point into OOP for me, being that I understood Photoshop so well already, and I had a clear idea of not just my end goal, but also all the steps to get there. I’ve previously liked it to a chef learning how to be a butcher, they’re going to find it a lot easier than the rest of us.
I’m genuinely excited by the prospect of what UXP has to offer and, and am seeing it as the perfect “intermediate” stage in my coding progression. It’s going to be nice being able to debug my code without having to use alerts in place of breakpoints!
Happy to be here, and thanks for having me!
PS - I’d like to add, this forum software is lovely. Easily the best forum experience I’ve had.
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Welcome @Timothy_Bennett ! Glad to have you here and you’re in great company. Developers in these forums span the entire range of skillsets, and I think you’ll find it’s a friendly place to be 
I’m genuinely excited by the prospect of what UXP has to offer and, and am seeing it as the perfect “intermediate” stage in my coding progression.
Let us know if you have any feeedback as you progress.
PS - I’d like to add, this forum software is lovely. Easily the best forum experience I’ve had.
Happy to hear this! In case you’re wondering, we’re using Discourse.