Tip of the Day | Page 26

Zoom Scroll

Rather than using a keyboard shortcut to zoom in and out, use your scroll wheel! Most mice these days have a center scroll wheel on them. If you press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and use the scroll wheel on the mouse, you can zoom in and out of your document.

October 22nd, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Undo Heaven, Just Add History States

If you are like me, and love having a good amount of undos in the event that you go overboard with your adjustments, you can change the amount of History States that you have in Photoshop CS3. Note that the location of the History States preference has changed as well. Choose Photoshop>Preferences>General (PC: Edit>Preferences>General) and notice that there is now a Performance option on the left. You can change the History States in this area. Keep in mind though, if you are excessively using History States, you may want to rethink what you are doing wrong in the first place. I know I have to.

October 21st, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Finding the Panel Tabs Hard to Read? Change the Font Size

Sometimes, it’s a bit hard to read the type in the panels. Choose Photoshop>Preferences>General (PC: Edit>Preferences>General) and change the UI Font Size. This will make the type in the panels larger. You will need to restart Photoshop to see the type change.

October 20th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Know All of the How To Tutorials? Make Your Own!

At the bottom of the Help menu, there is an option that teaches you how to create your own How To tutorials for Photoshop. In order to create How To tutorials, you will need some HTML skills and to know the directory where you need to place the How To files. Sorry, there is no How To for HTML. This is Photoshop.

October 17th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Check Out the How To Tutorials in CS3

Starting off in a similar manner to our CS2 tips, there are really cool features and tutorials packed right inside of Photoshop CS3. If you choose Help>How To, you can run through some tutorials on how to expand your knowledge on a variety of Photoshop topics.

October 16th, 2008 | 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.

October 15th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Read The Web Color Onscreen

Want to know the hexadecimal Web color values of any color in your image? The Info palette can tell you instantly. Go under the Window menu and choose Info. In the Info palette, click on the little Eyedropper icon next to the CMYK readout and a pop-up menu appears. Choose Web Color, and you’ll get the hexadecimal readouts right in the palette.

October 9th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Exercising Your Influence On GIFs

This is an old trick we use to influence how Photoshop builds its color table when creating GIF images. We put a selection around the area of the image that’s most important to us (for example, if we had a product shot, we’d put a selection around it), then we’d convert to Index Color (by choosing it from the Mode submenu under the Image menu). Photoshop will look at the colors contained in your selection and build the Indexed Color Table giving preference to those colors. It’s another slick way to use less colors, creating a smaller file, but with a better-looking image.

October 8th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Got A Folder Full Of Images For The Web? Batch ‘Em!

Do you have a whole folder of images that you’re going to convert to Web graphics? If the images are somewhat similar, don’t do them one at a time—automate the process using actions. Start by opening one image from the folder. Go to the Actions palette (under the Window menu) and click on the Create New Action button. Give this action a name (something like Optimize as JPEGs) then go about the business of optimizing this one graphic into a JPEG for the Web. When you’re done optimizing it, click the Stop button at the bottom of the Actions palette. Continue Reading »

October 7th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Get Super-Clean Type For The Web

If you’ve been faced with having to create small type on the Web (usually 12 points or fewer), you know the smaller you go, the blurrier your type gets. That’s because of the anti-aliasing that’s automatically applied to the type, which works fine at larger sizes but tends to run together at smaller sizes, making your type look fuzzy. You can adjust the amount of aliasing (from the Options Bar), but here’s a tip that many Web designers feel works even better: Once you get below 12 points, start adding positive tracking to your type (anywhere between 20 to 50 points) in the Character palette. This increases the amount of space between letters, and therefore, decreases the amount of blurriness. Increasing the space between your letters this way minimizes the effects of anti-aliasing and makes your type cleaner and more readable at smaller sizes. As a general rule—the smaller the type, the larger the tracking amount.

October 6th, 2008 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

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Photoshop Tutorials

- Reverse Restoration
  Corey shows you how to make a new photo look damaged by blending in some unusual textures.
- Rain Drops
  In this tutorial, Corey not only creates the raindrops, but also the splashes that are formed with the raindrops hit the hands.
- G.I. Joe
  Corey's tutorial this week was inspired by a real American hero!

More Fun with 3D

Continue exploring the possibilities with Photoshop’s new 3D tools.
Reverse Restoration

Corey shows you how to make a new photo look damaged by blending in some unusual textures.
3D Background Effects

Use Photoshop’s new 3D tools to create some dazzling background effects.
Striking Match, Part 2

In the second part of this tutorial, Corey finishes creating this illustration of a striking match.

Layers TV: Episode 110
New episodes are coming soon. In this old episode, RC goes start to finish through a Flash CS4 project using the new 3D tools and importing an audio file. Corey talks about the distortion features inside of Adobe Illustrator. You can download each episode by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes. var so = new SWFObject('http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/players/player.swf','mpl','500','300','7'); so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true'); // so.addVariable('type','rtmp'); so.addVariable('file','http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/switch/video/layers-tv-episode-110.mp4'); so.addVariable('plugins','hd-1'); so.addVariable('hd.file','http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/switch/video/layers-tv-episode-110-hd.mp4'); so.addVariable('hd.state','false'); so.addVariable('image','http://www.layersmagazine.com/images/layerstv-logo.jpg'); so.addVariable('height','300'); so.addVariable('width','500'); so.addVariable('autostart','false'); so.addVariable("backcolor","0x000000"); so.addVariable("frontcolor","0xF1F1F1"); so.addVariable("lightcolor","0xF88E21"); so.addVariable("quality","100"); so.write('player'); [...]
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac
The new professional-level Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 GB of memory brings a much-needed performance upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup.
Prezi
Prezi is a Flash-based visualization, storytelling, and presentation tool that allows you to create nonlinear presentations.
Terry White’s New App | Printing from Lightroom 2
Happy Thursday everyone! Just wanted to pop on in and share what’s new in the intranets: Terry White’s New Iphone App Terry white over at his techblog is usually covering all sorts of technology and letting us know what his favorite apps are for the iphone. He’s taken that love and mixed it with [...]

Adding Keywords to Multiple files

In Bridge, you can add keywords to images to make searching for pictures a little less cumbersome. You don’t, however, want the process to become tedious as well. By either Command-clicking (PC: Ctrl-clicking) or Shift-clicking on images, you can select multiple files inside Bridge. Once you have the files selected, you can go to the Keywords panel and turn on any keyword you like. This will apply the keyword to all of the files that you have selected. It takes away a little bit of the pain of categorization, but just a little.