Adobe plugin and extension development.
Custom panels, automation, and plugins for After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop, and the rest of the Adobe apps your team lives in. This is a narrow specialty, and we are deep in it: we built, signed, licensed, and sell our own commercial After Effects extension, and we run a pipeline that drives After Effects unattended in the cloud. Whatever you are trying to build inside Adobe, we have already built the hard version of it.
Part of our Cincinnati software studio// 01 · WHAT WE BUILD
TOOLS THAT LIVE INSIDE THE APPS
YOUR TEAM ALREADY USES.
Custom extensions for the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, built around the work your people actually do in them.
Workflow panels.
A panel docked right in After Effects or Premiere that does the repetitive thing your artists do by hand, in one click.
Automation and scripting.
Code that drives the Adobe app itself: batch jobs, renders, exports, and file wrangling, the work nobody wants to do by hand.
Products you can sell.
A commercial plugin, built, signed, licensed per seat, and set up to distribute and get paid for. We have done exactly this with our own.
Integrations.
Connecting an Adobe app to your systems, your cloud, or an outside service, so a designer’s work flows straight into the rest of your pipeline.
// 02 · BUILT TO SHIP AND SELL
SIGNED, LICENSED, AND READY TO DISTRIBUTE, NOT JUST A PANEL ON YOUR OWN MACHINE.
Plenty of people can hack together an Adobe panel that runs on their own computer. Getting it onto other people’s machines, trusted, installable, and if you are selling it, licensed and paid for, is a different job, and it is the one that actually decides whether the thing is real. We do all of it.
We sign extensions with Adobe’s own tooling so they install without warnings, package them as proper installers for both Mac and Windows, and set them up either to list on the Adobe marketplace or to distribute directly, whichever suits you. For a plugin you intend to sell, we handle the parts that protect the business: licensing tied per seat to the machine, so one purchase does not quietly get shared across a whole studio, settings that follow a user across their computers, and the code protected so your work is not trivially copied. We know this end to end because we did it for our own product, from first line of code to paying customer.
// 03 · RUNNING ADOBE APPS WITHOUT THE ARTIST
WE CAN RUN AFTER EFFECTS WITH NOBODY SITTING IN FRONT OF IT.
Here is the thing almost nobody in this field can do. A plugin normally waits for an artist to click a button. We built a pipeline that takes the artist out of the loop completely: a job lands in a queue, a machine in the cloud opens the project in After Effects, runs the work, and reports back when it is done, fully unattended. Every one of After Effects’ pop-up dialogs is answered automatically, so a job never hangs waiting for a human, and a heartbeat watches the whole thing so a stuck job is caught in seconds instead of discovered hours later.
What that unlocks is the real point. A task that used to tie up one artist at one machine, one project at a time, becomes something that runs on its own, at scale, around the clock. If your bottleneck is a person manually grinding through Adobe projects, this is how you take it out.
// 04 · PROOF
A COMMERCIAL ADOBE PRODUCT
WE BUILT, AND RUN.
It is also the reason our broader desktop work goes as deep as it does. The same team that ships a signed, licensed Adobe product also built a native Mac app to replace software an agency had been told was dead.
See the Hedge case study// 05 · FAQ
COMMON QUESTIONS.
Which Adobe apps do you work in?
Most of our work is in After Effects and Premiere, where the heavy automation lives, and we build for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign as well. If your team lives in a Creative Cloud app, we can almost certainly build inside it.
CEP or UXP?
Both. CEP is the established panel platform and where most After Effects and Premiere work still happens today; UXP is the newer one Adobe is moving toward. We build on whichever your target app and version actually support, and we will tell you plainly which that is before you commit to anything.
Can you get it listed on the Adobe marketplace?
Yes. We sign and package it to Adobe’s requirements and can prepare it for an Adobe Exchange listing, or set it up to distribute directly if you would rather not go through the marketplace.
We want to sell our plugin. Can you handle licensing and payment?
Yes. We have built per-seat licensing, machine-based activation, and the plumbing to take payment and manage customers, for our own commercial product. This is not new ground for us.
Can it run automatically, without an artist at the keyboard?
Yes, and it is one of the things we are known for. We have run After Effects fully unattended in the cloud, working through jobs from a queue with nobody sitting in front of it.
How much will it cost?
Scoped to a fixed number before you commit, with a smaller first version if the full idea is more than the budget right now.
Who owns it?
You do. The code and the extension are yours.
// START HERE
TELL US WHAT
YOU'RE BUILDING.
Twenty minutes with a senior engineer, and you'll leave with how we'd build it, roughly what it takes, and what we'd worry about first. We read every message ourselves and reply within one business day.
A rough idea is enough to start.
That's in front of us now.
You'll hear back within one business day, from an engineer rather than a form letter. Nothing else needed on your end.
Or just email us at hello@queencity.io