Articles by Web Editor | Page 23

Renaming Your Label Colors

Although you can’t change the color of the color labels themselves, you can change each color’s name to something that makes more sense to you when you’re sorting your images. For example, if you want change the Green label to read “Keepers,” just press Command-K (PC: Control-K) to go to the Bridge Preferences, click on Labels (along the list on the left side of the dialog), and then delete the word “Green” that appears to the right of the green dot, type “Keepers.” Click OK to close the Preferences dialog. Now, when you look in the Label menu, it will be updated with your new name.

May 11th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Uncluttering Your View

Want to hide all of that distracting info that appears beneath your thumbnails? Just press Command-T (PC: Control-T) and all that stuff (even the file names) is hidden, giving you a clean, unobstructed view of just your images and nothing more. When you want the all the distracting junk back, just press the shortcut again.

May 10th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

A Sneak Peak At Your Photo’s Data

You don’t have to go digging through your photo’s EXIF data to learn more about the image. Just hover your cursor over a photo’s thumbnail for a moment, and a little yellow window will pop up with some brief background info, like the file’s format, size, pixel dimensions, date created, date modified, resolution, etc. However, this only works if you have Tooltips turned on, so if you don’t, press Command-K (PC: Control-K) to open the Bridge Preferences, choose General (from the left side of the dialog), and turn on the checkbox for Show Tooltips; now try the hovering trick again.

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

Rating Your Images In Full Screen Mode

This is one of the most effective ways to sort your photos after you’ve imported them from your digital camera, because you can only really tell which photos are in sharp focus when they’re viewed at nearly full screen. So in Bridge, Shift-click on all the contiguous photos you want to review, press Command-L to launch the slide show, press W to see the images full screen, and then press Spacebar to start the slide show. As a photo appears full screen, just press numbers (1–5) to rate that photo instantly. For example, a photo appears onscreen and it’s not that great, type 3 and it gets a three-star rating right on the spot. Try this once, and you’ll start doing this all the time. Unless of course, you hate it—then you’ll probably never do it again.

May 8th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Separating Your “Best Of The Best”

If you’ve rated some of your photos as five-star photos (the best of the bunch), aren’t there some five-star photos that are better than the others? You know, the best of your best? Of course there are, and now you can separate just those (so you can really see the cream of the crop). Here’s how: First you must view just your five-star photos, so choose Show 5 Stars from the Unfiltered pop-up menu near the top right of the Options Bar. Then Command-click (PC: Control-click) on just your best five-star images to select them. Control-click (PC: Right-click) on any selected image and choose a color from the Label submenu in the contextual menu that appears (I chose Red). That color is now tagging your best five-star images. To see just your red five-star photos, go back to the Filtered pop-up menu (it’ll change from Unfiltered to Filtered once you’ve selected an option), and choose Show Red Label. Now you’re seeing your “Best of the Best.”

May 7th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Creating New Folders The Fast Way

Want to create a folder from right within Bridge? Scroll down to any open space (you’ll usually find a blank spot at the bottom of your list of thumbnails, so scroll down there), then Control-click (PC: Right-click) and from the contextual menu that appears, choose New Folder. Note: If you don’t see any empty space, adjust the size of your images using the Thumbnail Size slider along the bottom of the Bridge window.

May 4th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Rating Multiple Photos At Once

If you see a number of photos in Bridge that you want to have the same rating, first select the images (Shift-click on them or Command-click [PC: Control-click] noncontiguous images), then drag your cursor over the rating area (those five dots that appear below any selected thumbnail). The rating you apply to that one photo will be applied to all your selected photos.

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

Open Any Folder With A Simple Drag-And-Drop

Want to open a folder of images in Bridge? Just drag-and-drop the folder directly onto the Preview panel. That’s it. I wish this tip was longer, but it’s just not.

May 2nd, 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.

April 30th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Undocumented Bridge SlideShow Tip

Here’s one that slipped below the radar—if you’re watching a slide show of your images in Bridge (by pressing Command-L [PC: Control-L]), and you come across an image you want to open in Photoshop CS2, just press the letter O.

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

Blur That JPEG And Shrink It Down

Here’s a cool tip for when you’re creating JPEG images. This tip doesn’t work for all images, but can really come in handy for others. The tip is this: Because of the way JPEG compression works, if you can slightly blur your image, the file size will be smaller. You could just add a Gaussian Blur, or you could blur the image directly from the Save for Web dialog by entering a number in the Blur field. However, you’re usually better off putting a selection around the important areas of your image, then inverting the selection (by choosing Inverse from the Select menu) and blurring just the background. That way, the important parts stay sharp, and the noncritical areas become more compressed.

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

Use Layer-Based Slices

If you’re getting ready to slice an image for the Web and you still have your layers intact, don’t flatten that image before you slice. Instead, let Photoshop create the (layer-based) slices for you. There are two main advantages: (1) it’s easier. You don’t have to drag out slices—Photoshop does it automatically, perfectly slicing at the size of your layer. But even better is (2), when you create a layer-based slice, you can move the layer and (get this) Photoshop will automatically adjust all the slices to accommodate your move, and it will create a new slice for your layer as well. If you slice manually and move your layer—you’re out of luck—the old slice stays right where it was. Plus, creating a layer-based slice couldn’t be easier. Click on the layer you want to slice, then go under the Layer menu and choose New Layer Based Slice—Photoshop does the rest.

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

Don’t Load That Bogus Slice!

If you’re slicing images for the Web in Photoshop (using the Slice tool), here’s a tip to save even more space. If you have a slice in your image that’s going to be the same color as your background (for example, you’ve got a solid white slice going on a solid white background), you can save file size by having that slice load no image at all. Sound like a plan? (I thought you’d like that.) Here’s how to do it: Once your slice is in place, make it active (using the Slice Select tool), and then double-click within the selection to get the Slice Options dialog. In the Slice Type pop-up menu, choose No Image and click OK. That way, when Photoshop generates its HTML for the page, there will be no image in that spot, just the white background showing through, giving you a faster loading Web page. Pretty sweet!

April 24th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Make Sure You See It The Same Way They See It

If you’re designing Web graphics on a Macintosh, you can be sure they’re going to be viewed by lots of people using a PC, and vice versa. A design problem arises because the monitors on Macs and on PCs display with different levels of brightness. For example, if you design Web graphics on a Macintosh, they’ll look more than 10% darker when viewed on a PC using Windows. Photoshop will let you see an approximation of how those graphics will look when viewed on a PC. Here’s how: Choose Save for Web from the File menu. Then, at the top right of the preview window you’ll see a pop-up menu called the Preview Menu. From that menu, choose Standard Windows Color to get a preview of how your currently opened graphic will look when viewed on a standard Windows monitor. Windows designers can do the same thing and view how their Web graphics will look when viewed on a Mac (they’ll look lighter). Knowing how your graphics will look on each platform will help you find a happy middle ground that looks good on both.

April 23rd, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Imageready’s Auto Tile Maker

ImageReady has a built-in tool for creating seamless backgrounds. It’s called Tile Maker and it’s found under the Filter menu, under Other. It brings up a dialog where you can choose how much you want to blend the edges of your images (the default setting of 10 percent works fairly well for most images), but you can increase it if it doesn’t look smooth enough to you.

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

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Photoshop Tutorials

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.
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.

Halftone Smudge Brush

Here is an unusual way of using the Smudge tool to generate interesting halftone streaks.
Scale Effects

Now this is something that still seems to stump people in Photoshop when it come to Layer Styles.
Energize That Photo

Learn how to add excitement and energy to your photo in just a few simple steps.
Design Elements from Photos

Here is a cool way to use parts of you photos as abstract design elements.

Acrobat 9 PDF Security
In this tutorial, learn about applying and removing security options in Acrobat 9
Flash Video the Easy Way, Pt. 3
Tom Green demonstrates how to embed a Flash document into a Dreamweaver document and play it on a browser using the Insert>Flash Video menu in Dreamweaver.
Premiere Pro CS4 Nest Command
In this video, Franklin McMahon uses Premiere Pro CS4 to create a nested sequence and then overlay it over a backdrop.
Roundtrip Logo From Illustrator to Photoshop
Dave Cross creates some grungy text using graphics with a texture image.

Imageready’s Supercharged Eyedropper

In previous versions of Photoshop, you could only use the Eyedropper tool to sample a color from other open images in Photoshop, but for some reason, ImageReady had a supercharged Eyedropper. If you clicked the mouse button within your image and held it down, you could leave your image window and sample colors from, well… just about anything—including your computer desktop or any other open application. Freaky! Fortunately, Adobe finally added this same power to Photoshop’s Eyedropper tool.