Archive for September, 2006|Monthly archive page
Spotlight: Speed search term entry by abbreviating
If you’ve used both Spotlight and one of the third-party file indexers/launchers that came before it, like LaunchBar or QuickSilver, you know that entering a search takes a little more effort in Spotlight. LaunchBar and QuickSilver can find a file using very short abbreviations, they learn which abbreviations you prefer, and they interpret abbreviations very intelligently. For example, LaunchBar knows that if I type “wrd” I want my network location named “Linksys Wired”. Spotlight can’t do that because it only abbreviates starting from the beginning of the search term; it won’t find an abbreviation that doesn’t match the beginning of the term. (On a side note, Spotlight also can’t bring up network locations. I wish it would.)
However, Spotlight will find matches starting from the beginning of each word, and it doesn’t necessarily need the whole word. If I want to find “meeting minutes,” I only have to enter “mee mi” and they’ll be found.
I think this is important to mention because some people think you have to type the entire search term from the beginning, but you don’t have to. Just the beginning of each word can be enough, and taking advantage of this shortcut can make Spotlight search term entry significantly faster and more convenient.
Dr. Brown’s Place-O-Matic: Camera Raw color space not used?
Filed under: Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography |
Leave a Comment If you use the Dr. Brown’s Place-O-Matic plug-in for Photoshop and the Space in the Adobe Camera Raw dialog box doesn’t seem to be applied to the Photoshop document containing the Smart Objects generated by the plug-in, change your Color Settings in Photoshop (Edit > Color Settings) before using Dr. Brown’s Place-O-Matic. Dr. Brown’s Place-O-Matic sets up the Photoshop document using the current Color Settings.
I came across this when I selected ProPhoto RGB and 16 Bits/Channel in the Camera Raw dialog box, and noticed that the resulting Photoshop document was in sRGB. When I changed my Color Settings to use ProPhoto RGB, the Photoshop document created by Dr. Brown’s Place-O-Matic was created with ProPhoto RGB.
Dr. Brown’s Place-O-Matic is a free Photoshop plug-in available from the Tips and Techniques page on Russell Brown’s web site. It helps you create one image from two different conversions of the same camera raw format image, such as when you want to combine the very light and very dark parts of the same image. Because the plug-in imports two versions of a camera raw image as smart objects, you can alter the conversion settings at any time, which gives you a lot of flexibility.
