Articles by Web Editor | Page 19

Using The Lasso Tool? Keep It Straight

We normally use the Lasso tool (L) for drawing freeform selections, but sometimes you’ll find that while drawing your selection you’ll need to draw a perfectly straight segment, even for just a few pixels. You can do just that by holding the Option key (PC: Alt key), releasing the mouse button, and continuing to draw your selection. You’ll notice that your cursor changes to the Polygonal Lasso tool, and that as you move the mouse, a perfectly straight selection will drag out. When you’ve dragged the straight selection where you want, click-and-hold the mouse button (to add a point), release the Option/Alt key, and you’ll be back to the regular Lasso tool again. Drag the mouse to continue drawing your selection.

July 9th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Getting A Fresh Histogram In One Click

When you have the Histogram palette open to monitor your tonal adjustments to an image, you may see a tiny warning symbol in the top-right corner of your histogram. That’s its way of letting you know that you’re looking at a histogram reading from the histogram’s memory cache—not a fresh reading. If you want to refresh the histogram and get a new reading (and you should), you can click directly on the tiny warning symbol and it will refresh immediately for you.

July 6th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

The Hidden Measurement Pop-Up Menu

You probably already know the trick about entering values in measurement fields in the Options Bar. You can change your unit of measure by typing the appropriate abbreviation after the value (for example, if you want 100 pixels, you’d type in “100 px”). But there’s an even easier way (and you don’t have to memorize a bunch of abbreviations). Just type your number, Control-click (PC: Right-click) in the field, and a pop-up menu of measurement units will appear. Just choose the one you want and it’ll take care of the rest.

July 5th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Lost Your Cursor? Find It Fast!

Photoshop’s cursors can be easy to lose onscreen, especially if you’re working on a big screen or with the crosshair cursor (meaning you have the Caps Lock key active). Well, the next time you’re working on an image, and you say to yourself, “Hey, where in the heck is my cursor?” (but you use a different word in place of “heck”), try this—just hold the Spacebar down for a moment. This temporarily changes your cursor into the Hand tool, whose icon is larger, white, and easy to see. Once it appears, you’ll see right where your cursor is, and you can release the Spacebar.

July 3rd, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

A Tip For People Who Train New Photoshop Users

If you’re responsible for training beginners, especially in a corporate environment where you’re training people to do specific tasks in a specific order (like prepress), you can use this and the previous two tips to make your (and their) life easier. First, go to the Menus command (found under the Edit menu) and hide every menu item you don’t want them to see or mess with, leaving only the items they’ll actually use visible. You can even hide palettes they don’t need to see (by double-clicking on the word “Window” in the dialog and turning off the Eye icons to hide palettes). This makes Photoshop appear less cluttered, and therefore less intimidating. As they learn more and get better, you can reveal additional features to them.

July 2nd, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Don’t Use It? Hide It!

Photoshop has more than a hundred different filters, and most of us probably use just a handful in our daily work. In fact, so far as we’ve been able to determine (through years of user-testing), only three people in the world today use either the Pattern Maker filter or the Fiber filter, and even they don’t like them. So, if there are filters you never use, do they have to hang around clogging up your filter menus? Absolutely not (if you have CS2). Just go under the Edit menu and choose Menus. In the list of Application Menus commands, double-click on Filter to reveal a list of all Photoshop filters. Now, just turn off the Eye icon (a.k.a. the Visibility button) beside the filters you don’t want to see. Don’t worry, if for some reason you decide you need to temporarily access one of those hidden filters, just go under the Filter menu, to the submenu where it used to appear, and choose Show All Menu Items.

June 29th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Want Some Hints For The Tool You’re Currently Using?

If you want some tips about the tool you currently have selected, just go to the Window menu and choose Info. This brings up the Info palette and at the bottom of the palette you’ll find a tip or two for the tool you’re using. If you don’t see these tips, go to the Info palette’s flyout menu and choose Palette Options. When the options appear, at the bottom turn on the checkbox for Show Tool Hints.

June 28th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Side-By-Side Photo Review

Want to compare two photos side-by-side? Just open both in Photoshop CS2, then go under the Window menu, under Arrange, and choose Tile Vertically, which places both photos onscreen, side-by-side, at their maximum “fit-in-window” size.

June 27th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Cursor Too Small? Make It Bigger

At long last, bigger brush cursors are here. Just go to Preferences under the Photoshop menu (or under the Edit menu in Windows), under Display & Cursors, and choose Full Size Brush Tip. You also have the option of adding a crosshair to the center of your brush cursor by turning on that option (which appears just below the Full Size Brush Tip).

June 26th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Saving Bridge Workspaces

In Bridge, your custom setups can be saved as workspaces. For example, if you shoot a lot of portraits, you could use the previous tip to set up your Bridge window to your liking and then save it by going to the Window menu, under Workspace, and choosing Save Workspace (name it something you’ll remember, like “Bridge Portrait”). Then, next time you’re looking through some proofs, you can have huge previews in just one click. You can do the same thing for wide horizontal photos—just drag the divider bar along the Panel area to the right until the preview takes up most of the Bridge window. Now switching between huge portrait and landscape previews only takes one click.

June 25th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Making The Preview Palette Bigger

Want a taller preview in Bridge for photos taken in a portrait orientation (tall rather than wide)? Just double-click on the Folders (or Favorites) tab, then double-click the Metadata (or Keywords) tab), and they will both “roll up,” allowing the Preview pane to expand, giving you a preview that’s twice as tall.

June 22nd, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Nesting Your Bridge Panes

Nesting palettes (putting commonly used palettes together in one palette, with just their tabs showing) is very popular in Photoshop, and you’re able to do that within Bridge as well. Just drag-and-drop the tab of one palette onto another palette (just like you would outside Bridge). For example, if you’d like all four Bridge pane tabs side-by-side at the top of the Bridge’s Panel area, just drag the lower three tabs up to the Folders pane, one by one.

June 21st, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Changing Metadata Font Sizes

If you’re older than 17, chances are you’ll find the font size Adobe uses for the Metadata palette in Bridge way, way too small. Luckily, Adobe doesn’t have many 17-year-olds on the payroll, so they included a way to increase the font size for the metadata. Just click on the flyout menu (it’s the little round button with a right-facing triangle in it on the top-right side of the Metadata palette) and choose Increase Font Size from the contextual menu. The cool thing is—you can choose this command more than once, making your font size bigger and bigger each time you choose it.

June 20th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Batch Renaming Earns A Shortcut

Finally, the Batch Rename command (where you rename multiple photos at once) has a keyboard shortcut. It’s Command-Shift-R (PC: Control-Shift-R), which brings up the Batch Rename dialog.

June 19th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Scrolling Thru The Views

Want to quickly scroll through the different thumbnail views in Bridge? Press-and-hold Command (PC: Control) and the Backslash key (\). Hey, don’t scoff at this seemingly innocent shortcut—Mac users have been waiting years for any shortcut that makes use of the Backslash key. In the captures shown here, I’ve scrolled from Thumbnails view to Filmstrip view.

June 18th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

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Photoshop Tutorials

Lighting Effects

Corey jazzed up this photo by making a custom brush and applying an outer glow layer style to create the repeating patterns
Pin-up Effect

Using a mixture of filters and blending modes, Corey takes a stock photo and transforms it into an old, classic 1950’s pin-up poster.
Embossed Glass Logo

Instead of using a displacement map, here’s another method for taking a custom file and distorting it to match a background image.
Sci-Fi Text Effect

Corey stumbled upon this effect while experimenting with the smudge tool and its finger painting feature. Start off by

Text Shape Layers
Converting text into shapes allows you to distort the text as you like while retaining straight, clean edges.
Borders Under a Minute
Create really cool borders in under a minute to use on virtually any one of your photos or even video for that matter.
Design Effects
Corey shows how to use the luminosity of an image to create a cool design effect and spice up your simple photos.
Stylized Comic Book Effect
Using this effect, you can transform anyone into a comic book character with a halftone, saturated look.

Blend Tool Revisited
Corey's tutorial is about using Illustrator's blend tool to create some really interesting design effects.
HD Video in Flash Professional CS3
Flash CS3 Professional offers users a quick way to get HD content onto their web pages.
Managing Bookmarks in Acrobat
Rearrange and organize your bookmarks, as well as force the bookmarks panel open when someone opens the PDF.
Smokey Type Effect in After Effects
Type animation is one of the most wonderful functions to play with in After Effects, especially since version 6 introduced actual text character animation control.

Will More RAM Make Photoshop Run Faster?

Problem: You added more RAM to your system and assigned more RAM to Photoshop, but it doesn’t seem to run any faster. Reason: Adding RAM doesn’t always make Photoshop run faster. It only works if you didn’t have enough RAM to begin with. Adding RAM will only help to make your computer run as fast as it can, but it won’t make your 800-MHz computer run at 801 MHz. For example, if you work on Web images and the average image you work on is 3 MB, you only need about 15 or 20 MB assigned to Photoshop to have it run at full speed. If you’ve got that, and add another 256 MB of RAM, Photoshop won’t run any faster, because Photoshop only needs that 15 or 20 MB that you already had. Freaky. To check your RAM usage, go under the Photoshop menu, under Preferences, and choose Memory & Image Cache (on a Windows PC, Preferences are under the Edit menu).