Actions SDK

Actions SDK provides you with necessary tools and instructions to create actions that the program can apply to images once these actions are loaded and added to the actions gallery. Basic understanding of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and some knowledge of either C# 2.0 or Visual Basic .NET 2005 (or later) is required however. You can thus develop custom actions using this SDK with Microsoft Visual Studio, or free tools like Microsoft Visual C# Express or Microsoft Visual Basic. NET Express, depending on the programming language you prefer.

One of the simplest custom actions that one can create could be just drawing a horizontal line across the image. But of course, much, much more sophisticated actions can be created. All of this is possible, because at the core of a custom action lies just one basic method (routine), that at its core takes one parameter – an original image, and returns one object – a modified image (which could be completely different from the original image).

Formats SDK

Like Actions SDK, Formats SDK provides you with necessary tools and instructions to create library that would allow the program to read and save images in one or several non-supported formats. For example, provided you know the Adobe Illustrator file format and some programming, with this SDK you could create a library that would allow the program to load images saved in .AI format.

Just as with Actions SDK, basic understanding of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and some knowledge of either C# 2.0 or Visual Basic .NET 2005 (or later) is required however. For development you can use either Microsoft Visual Studio or free tools like Microsoft Visual C# Express or Microsoft Visual Basic. NET Express, depending on the programming language you prefer.

At the core, to create a “custom format”, you just need to specify several things: name and default file extension, and whether or not this format supports reading images, saving images, or both. You would then need to create routines for reading and/or saving images. In the case of reading an image, your routine would take file path as a parameter and be expected to return a standard .NET image object. In the case of saving an image, your routine would take the standard .NET image object and save file path as parameters and then would need to physically save the image to the specified file according to the specifications of the underlying image format.