Archive for the ‘Adobe Creative Suite’ Category
InDesign: Aligning by nudging, despite fractional units
When aligning selected objects in InDesign, you can nudge them by pressing the arrow keys. In some cases it can be impossible to use the arrow keys to align two objects when either object’s position is a fractional unit, such as an X position of 124.582 points. If the second object is positioned at 124 or 124.839 points, nudging it won’t line it up with 124.582 points because each arrow key nudge is one whole point from its original position.
If you just want the two objects to line up and you don’t care what the numbers are, select both objects and use the align buttons, which you can find on the Align palette and the Control palette. If you want to get rid of the fractional units, try these other two methods:
Enable View > Snap to Grid if you want them to nudge to grid increments.
If you want to nudge by single whole units using arrow keys, first click in the X or Y field in the Control palette, and then press the up arrow and down arrow keys. When a field is active in the Control palette, nudging snaps the field’s value to the nearest whole number. This makes it easy to nudge object after object to the same exact position.
Acrobat: Select multiple comments
You can select multiple comments in the Comments panel in Acrobat, but not in the way you’d expect. Let’s say you want to set the status of three comments to “Completed.” Your natural inclination would be to Shift-click or Command-click them, but it somehow doesn’t work like it does in other programs: even though you’re holding down a modifier key, the only comment selected is the last one you clicked.
To select multiple comments, you need to click just below the top edge of each comment while holding down a modifier key. For example, to select a range of comments, click the first comment you want to select, and then Shift-click just below the top edge of the last comment you want to select. It might take a little practice, but you’ll get it.
This is the behavior I’ve seen in Acrobat 7 and 8 on Mac OS X. I’m not sure if it works better in the Windows versions of Acrobat.
Mysterious application failures caused by delocalization
Filed under: Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Illustrator, Apple, Mac OS X |
Leave a Comment OS X supports a large number of world languages, but if you only understand one language, you’re hauling around many megabytes of files you don’t need. Many Mac users try to free up some disk space by using a utility that removes versions of files for languages they don’t want. This has given rise to a class of utilities that hunt down and delete all the files for specified languages. Some of these utilities are:
Delocalizer
Macaroni
Monolingual
Youpi Optimizer
Nearly all of my applications run fine after delocalization, but there are a few that don’t like to have their localized resources deleted, and they refuse to run without them. These applications might not display a specific error message for this, so all you see is a general error message that leaves you guessing.
The applications that I know about that don’t like to be delocalized are:
Adobe Illustrator CS2 (the 12.0.1 updater fails to install the update)
Adobe Acrobat 7 (Macaroni users update to Macaroni 2.0.6 or later)
Adobe Acrobat 8 (application will not launch, says “A required component was not found.”)
(NOTE: Macaroni 2.0.8 is now available, and according to its release notes, it will no longer delocalize any Adobe applications. This should prevent future Macaroni delocalization problems with Adobe apps.)
If you run a delocalizer and those applications or their updaters stop working, you must reinstall the application. Then you have a choice: Either see if your delocalizer utility has a way to exclude specific applications, or don’t delocalize again. Read on for why that second option might be realistic.
Nobody likes to have something not work, especially if it’s just one pesky app that breaks after delocalization when all the other apps are fine. And delocalization can benefit users with small hard disks. But you may not need to delocalize if you have an up-to-date computer. Today’s hard drives, now typically 100-500GB, are so large that a hundred or so megabytes of localized files are unlikely to be the major cause of a full hard drive. If your Mac hard drive is filling up, you’ll probably get a lot further by moving unneeded movies, photos, and music to another drive. One hour of miniDV format video from is around 13GB, many times larger than all your localized files. Also, the digital audio and graphics samples that come with multimedia applications such as GarageBand, Apple Soundtrack, and Apple LiveType take up several gigabytes on their own, so you might want to clean house there unless you need those samples.
Bridge CS2: Renaming files with the keyboard, whether you meant to or not…
Filed under: Adobe Bridge, Adobe Creative Suite, Digital Photography |
Comments (1) To rename a selected file or folder in Adobe Bridge CS2 without using the mouse, press the spacebar, type the name, and then press Return or Enter. (For Bridge CS3 and later, see the note at the end of this post.)
If you pressed the spacebar without intending to change the filename of the selected file, your next keystroke will accidentally change the filename, and it will become permanent as soon as you click anywhere else. Once a new filename is committed, you can’t undo it. This can be a disaster if you never realize you renamed a file that was selected, and you go looking for it later without knowing that it’s under a new name. If you suddenly realize you’ve entered filename editing mode by accident, immediately press the Esc key to escape that mode without changing the original filename.
Pressing the spacebar to rename may not be intuitive if you’re used to pressing Return on Mac OS X to rename a file, but in Bridge, the Return key is already taken: it opens the file in the default editor for its file type. That use of the Return/Enter key is consistent with Windows.
Why would anyone have a reason to press the spacebar in a file browser other than to rename a file? Sometimes it’s because of the habits people pick up in other programs. Some people press the spacebar to get to the top of an alphabetical list, and others are used to pressing the spacebar in other Adobe applications to get a hand tool to pan a document in a window.
Note: In Bridge CS3, accidental renaming is much less likely because the renaming shortcut was changed to the F2 key. You can still click the filename after the file is selected; just don’t double-click the file or you’ll open it.
Back up important preferences files
Filed under: Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Mac OS X |
Leave a Comment When an application isn’t quite working right, sometimes the cause is a preferences file that’s gotten corrupted, so a common troubleshooting step is to delete an application’s preferences file. That’s easy to do, but with many of today’s more complex software programs, preferences are key to your workflow, and when you lose your preferences, the program may no longer do what you expect it to because it’s reverted to the factory defaults. If you’re trying to get jobs out fast, reset preferences can slow you down until you get all of them back to the way they were.
Let’s take Photoshop, for example. The preferences control everything from how keyboard shortcuts work to which disks are used for scratch files. If you’ve changed 24 preference settings and then one day you have to delete the preferences file to solve a problem, it’s hard to remember all of the options you changed. Keyboard shortcuts, units of measure, tool defaults, printer profile choices, and scratch disk locations can all be changed to settings you aren’t used to.
Here’s an easy way to restore your preferences easily in case you have to delete your preferences. After you get preferences set up the way you want, and before a problem happens, just create a .zip archive of your preferences. Whether you use Mac OS X or Windows this is easy and just takes a second.
First, find the preferences file you want to preserve.
Then, on Mac OS X, select the file and choose File > Create Archive Of (the filename).
On Windows, right-click the file and choose Send to > Compressed (Zipped) Folder.
You can just leave the zip archive next to the original preferences file because the program that uses that file will ignore it if it has the .zip filename extension instead of its normal one. Because the zip archive is created in the same location with a nearly identical filename, you don’t have to fish it out of a backup somewhere; it’s already in the right place.
When you have a problem that requires deleting preferences, delete the actual preferences file and then simply extract the backup preferences from the zip archive by double-clicking it. On Mac OS X, the file appears in the same place you zipped it, which should already be the right place if you zipped it in its proper folder location. On Windows, you may have to go through the extra step of dragging it out of the containing folder that the Extraction Wizard creates and then deleting that extraction folder. On either OS, the zip archive remains in place so you can easily extract the backup again in case you have another problem in the future.
Some applications have entire folders of preferences, or additional folders in the Application Support folder on Mac OS X or the Common Files folder in Windows. If those folders contain presets or other files that can’t be reinstalled from the original disks because they’re unique to you, it can be a good idea to back those up in place too.
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.
Mac Pro: Why four hard drive bays are great for Photoshop
Apple announced the new Mac Pro tower this week. For a Photoshop user, the Mac Pro’s quad SATA hard drive bays are just as useful as the quad cores of the two Xeon CPUs.
Why would a Mac Photoshop user need to use up four drive bays? Actually, it isn’t that hard. First, we know drive number 1 is the system drive that also contains all user folders and their documents. But I like to keep my photo archive on a drive other than the system drive, partly because it’s huge, but also so that if crazy things start happening to the system drive, my photo archive is less likely to be affected. This also simplifies backing up the entire archive to one of my external archive mirror drives. Right now my photo archive is on an external drive, but if I buy a Mac Pro then the photo archive can go to internal drive number 2 and get some clutter off the desk.
I would use drive number 3 as a Photoshop scratch disk. Photoshop has its own virtual memory that’s independent of the virtual memory that OS X and Windows XP use, and it’s optimized for how Photoshop must deal with image data. If you want the best Photoshop performance, in addition to having tons of RAM you should also have a separate, fast hard disk that’s assigned as a dedicated Photoshop scratch disk (set this up in Preferences > Plug-Ins and Scratch Disks). Again, another disk inside the machine instead of on the desk.
What about the fourth drive bay? At the moment, I could leave it empty. But when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes along sometime in the spring of 2007, it will include the Time Machine continuous backup feature, which requires a dedicated volume. Why not stick a drive in bay 4 and make it the Time Machine backup drive? That would be perfect.
And that’s it…all four internal bays of a Mac Pro quickly used up to help optimize Photoshop and also OS X 10.5 when it gets here. With all the drives that won’t have to sit in external cases on my desk, I might be able to get rid of a whole power strip.
“Folder not found” error when batch processing in Photoshop
Filed under: Adobe Bridge, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop |
Leave a Comment If you try to run a batch process in Adobe Photoshop (either from Photoshop or from Adobe Bridge) and you get an error message that says a folder wasn’t found, here are some things to check:
- In the Batch Processing dialog box, look at the Errors section at the bottom of the dialog box. If you have the Errors pop-up menu set to Log Errors to File, click Save As and reset the error log file location. Pointing the log file to a disk or disk name that isn’t mounted or no longer exists can cause the error message. For example, maybe you renamed or deleted the folder that the error log was pointed to before.
- Check the action you’re running, and if there any folder paths in any action step, make sure those paths are still valid. Folder paths can exist in can Open step, a Save step, or a Load or Save step. For example, you might have a step that loads a saved curve from disk into the Curves dialog box.
- If you action calls other actions, check the folder paths in those sub-actions.
Bridge 1.0: Photoshop batch processing bug?
Tonight I was using Adobe Bridge on Mac OS X to process some camera raw files using the Tools > Photoshop > Batch command. An error alert appeared and directed me to the batch processing error log, which contained a number of errors I didn’t expect. I checked the filenames in the error log and realized they were not in the Bridge browser window of the file I selected. However, they were in another open Bridge browser window that was behind the window containing the files I selected.
I avoided the error by closing the other Bridge browser window, leaving only the window containing the files I actually wanted to process.
Note that Bridge has no controls for managing multiple windows. To get to the window behind the frontmost window in Bridge, which covered the entire screen, I used the Mac OS X keyboard shortcut for cycling to the next window, Command+`(back accent, the key above the Tab key on U.S. English keyboards). On Windows, press Alt+Tab.
Photoshop CS2: Use Print with Preview
The File > Print with Preview dialog box shows you how your image fits on the printer and paper size that’s selected, and lets you position the image on the page. By double-checking the document in Print with Preview before printing, you can avoid just about all wasted print jobs caused by incorrect image size, paper size, or orientation. While you’re in Print with Preview, click Page Setup to confirm that the printer and paper size are correct. The margins you see in Print with Preview are supplied by the selected printer driver, not Photoshop.
The Print with Preview dialog box has a Print button, so you can go straight to the Print dialog box from there. For this reason, you might want to use the keyboard shortcut editor (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts) to assign Command/Ctrl+P to the Print with Preview command instead of the Print command.
Note that in Photoshop CS3, the Print with Preview dialog box is now the default print dialog box.
