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Camera Raw: Detailed image inspection with one key

February 1, 2008 by conrad

Camera Raw 4.1 and later add a very useful feature that appeared first in Lightroom. If you want to inspect an image closely for dust or other defects that need retouching, the Page Down key takes you through the entire image, from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. Here’s how it works:

1. In Camera Raw, zoom to 100% view or higher.
2. Press the Home key to view the top left corner of the image.
3. Press the Page Down key to move down one screen.
4. Press Page Down again to move down another screen. This is the cool part: If you hit the bottom of the image and press Page Down, Camera Raw automatically jumps to the top of the image one screen to the right! This means that all you have to do to check the entire image is keep pressing Page Down, until you reach the bottom right corner of the image.

On notebook computers without separate Home, End, Page Up, or Page Down keys, remember that they may be available as second functions on your arrow or other keys. For example, on Mac notebooks, these four functions are overlaid on the four arrow keys, and invoked when you also press the Fn (function) key. So to use Page Down, you’d press Fn+Down Arrow.

Posted in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Digital Photography | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Open Raw files in Adobe Camera Raw by default

January 31, 2008 by conrad

If you use Adobe Camera Raw as your raw converter for digital camera raw files, you might want to be able to open your raw files in Camera Raw when you double-click them. For most files, you would do this in your operating system by changing which application opens the camera raw file type.

But with Camera Raw, there’s a catch. Camera Raw is not a standalone application, so you can’t associate it directly with a file type. It turns out that this is not a big deal, because Adobe Photoshop must open camera raw files in Camera Raw anyway. So the solution is to associate camera raw files with Photoshop. I show the steps below for Mac OS X; the steps for Windows are similar.

1. On the desktop, select a raw file of the type you want to open in Photoshop. I’ve selected a CR2 file from a Canon digital SLR.

Select a raw file

2. Choose File > Get Info (Command+I).

Open the Get Info window

3. From the Open With pop-up menu in the Get Info window, choose the version of Photoshop that you want to use to open your raw files.

Assign Photoshop to the file type

4. The file icon updates to indicate that Photoshop will now open it.

Icon indicates new association

5. Click “Change All” so that your change applies to all files of the same type. Other file icons may not update immediately, but the change has taken effect. From now on, when you double-click that type of a raw file, it will open in Photoshop, which will then open it in Adobe Camera Raw.

Set this association as the default

Because the file association is tied to a specific file type, making this change affects only the file type you’ve changed. You’ll need to associate each different raw file type separately. For example, if you made this change for NEF (Nikon) raw files and then you later work with some CR2 (Canon) raw files, you’ll have to associate the CR2 files with Photoshop too.

(If you’re having trouble getting Camera Raw to see your raw files in the first place, try updating Camera Raw. Support for new cameras is added several times a year. Either download the latest version from adobe.com, or run the Adobe Updater utility that came with Photoshop. Note that the current version of Camera Raw may not work with older versions of Photoshop. If you are trying to edit a new camera’s raw files in a version of Photoshop that’s too old for the current version of Camera Raw, you should either upgrade Photoshop or use the free Adobe DNG converter to convert raw files to the DNG format, which older versions of Camera Raw can edit.)

Thanks to Céline C. for asking this question!

Posted in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors

August 18, 2007 by conrad

If you’ve carefully calibrated your monitor and you use the white Apple keyboard that came with the iMacs and Mac Pros, you may have encountered that nasty surprise when accidentally pressing the F14 and F15 keys: They change the monitor brightness.

Changing the monitor brightness is obviously a big no-no if you’re maintaining a color-managed environment, because the monitor no longer represents the conditions under which it was profiled. Even worse, you may not notice that you’ve hit the key, or you may not know how far off you changed the brightness. All you can do is re-profile the monitor. The constant risk of accidentally hitting F14 or F15 and invalidating your monitor profile is an unusual misstep for Apple, which promotes color management as a Mac platform advantage.

There used to be no way to disable or remap the F14 and F15 keys on the Apple keyboard, but it looks like this problem will slowly fade into history. If you use the new slim aluminum Apple keyboard, you can make it so that you have to press Fn to set brightness with F1 or F1. If you have the older white Apple keyboard, you can take advantage of new keyboard shortcut editing options in Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later.

Changing keyboard brightness control with the slim aluminum Apple keyboard

The slim aluminum Apple keyboard introduced in 2007 puts the brightness keys on the function row along with the Exposé, Dashboard, and media keys. Why is this good? Because now you can bury the brightness function. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard tab.
4. Click to enable the box “Use the F1-F12 keys to control software features.”
5. Close System Preferences.

After enabling the “Use the F1-F12 keys…” option, you must press the Fn key (to the right of the Delete key) to use F1-F12 to use the alternate labels on the F1-F12 keys, such as brightness and the media keys. That means if you accidentally hit F1, you won’t throw your system out of its calibrated state.

If you still want single-key access to Dashboard and others, just redefine their shortcuts. You can do this in the System Preferences pane for each feature (such as Dashboard & Exposé), or in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse preferences pane.

Changing or disabling keyboard brightness control with the white Apple keyboard

It turns out that Apple Keyboard Software Update 1.1 or later adds a keyboard shortcut option to disable or change keyboard brightness control for the older white Apple keyboard. To do this:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse.
3. Click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Scroll all the way down to where it says Displays.
5. Disable the check box for “Display” Or, if you just want to change the shortcuts, click in the Shortcut column and press the new shortcut. For example, if you change Increase Display Brightness to Shift+F15, you prevent unintended brightness changes due to accidental key presses, but by adding Shift you can still control brightness with the keyboard when you really intend to.

OS X keyboard shortcuts after Keyboard Update 1.1

6. Close System Preferences.

Note: You won’t see the Display section if you’re using the slim Aluminum keyboard, only if you are using the older white Apple keyboard.

Posted in Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Apple hardware, Color management, Digital Photography | 1 Comment »

Mac OS X: Keyboard shortcuts to launch any application

June 28, 2007 by conrad

Some of the search queries that land people on this blog seem to be looking for shortcuts for applications. With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you don’t need to create or even learn shortcuts for applications. They’re already there, but not in the form you may be expecting.

The key is Spotlight, the search utility built into OS X. Spotlight makes a decent application launcher. Just hit the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (Command+spacebar unless you changed it), type the first few letters of the application’s name, and if the application’s name is the Top Hit, press Return to launch it. (In OS X 10.4, you need to press Command+Return; In 10.5, Apple simplified it to just Return.) If it isn’t the Top Hit, use the usual Spotlight shortcuts to get to it in the list: Use the up and down arrow keys either alone, or with the Command key to jump categories.

So for example, if I want to use Activity Monitor, I press Command+spacebar, then type “act” and boom, there it is. Depending on which files and applications are on your computer, Activity Monitor may appear before you get to the third letter.

If you’re annoyed because you have to type a few letters before Spotlight narrows it down to the application you want to launch, have patience. At least in my experience, if you keep picking the same item from the search results, OS X will eventually turn it into the Top Hit, and over time you’ll need to type fewer and fewer characters to get it. (You can accelerate searching for multiple words through abbreviation; read about it here.)

By now I’ve got my Mac trained so that after pressing the Spotlight shortcut, Safari becomes the Top Hit as soon as I type “sa”, and Photoshop shows up as soon as I type “ph”. Yeah, it’s more than a single keystroke, but on the other hand, to get this feature I didn’t have to modify my system, spend an hour configuring shortcuts, or add a utility such as LaunchBar. Spotlight is already capable of launching any application on your system without any further setup.

There’s a second benefit to leaning on Spotlight for this purpose: You never have to dig down to open an application or utility that isn’t already in the Dock. You don’t even need to know where it is in your hard disk! Using Spotlight as an application launcher can also let you reduce the number of application alias icons littering your desktop or Dock.

Of course, if you really do want to manually define system shortcuts, you can open System Preferences, click Keyboard & Mouse, click Keyboard Shortcuts, and edit the list of shortcuts.

And yes, before OS X 10.4 came out with Spotlight, I used to be a devotee of LaunchBar, and I tried Quicksilver. The problem is that even if a launcher app is free, the second indexing engine drags on the system and adds complexity, another database to store and manage, and removes another set of keyboard shortcuts from the pool. When Spotlight came out, I realized that it does most of what I need, and well enough. The things Spotlight can’t do that the other utilities can do I’ve mostly covered by having Spotlight trigger AppleScripts…but that’s a subject for another entry.

Update: There are so many Web searches that come here looking for an Activity Monitor shortcut that I have to add this: If you frequently want to monitor Mac system status information, you should download iStat menus (used to be free, I decided to pay) and simply have all of that CPU, RAM, disk, network, etc. information right up there in your menu bar. Ultimately, iStat menus is why I don’t need to open Activity Monitor. For a free alternative, try MenuMeters.

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X | 11 Comments »

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac: Free a stuck Help window

June 5, 2007 by conrad

The Microsoft Office Help window’s title bar can sometimes get stuck under the menu bar. When that happens, you can’t move the Help window, and you can’t close it because the close button is part of the title bar. Because the Help window is more like a palette than a window, it doesn’t respond to any Close Window keyboard shortcut or the arrangement commands under the Window menu, and it floats above all other windows. It basically blocks your document window until you restart the application.

Short answer

Throw out the file com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist, or if you want to be more precise, instead of throwing out that file, open it and increase the value for Help/Help_Top so that it clears the menu bar.

Long answer

Or, how I figured this out:

The usual suggestion for a problem like this is to delete an application’s Preferences file. I didn’t want to throw out the Preferences file because I’ve heavily customized my Office installation (toolbars, etc.) and I didn’t want to reconfigure everything from scratch. I suspected that there must be a setting in a preferences file somewhere that controls the position of the Help window, and if I could change that one thing I wouldn’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so I went looking for that setting.

First I tried AppleScript. I used the Script Editor to open the AppleScript dictionary for Excel, where I was having the problem, but I couldn’t find any commands that controlled the Help window.

I then started looking in the Preferences folder, in my Home/Library folder. You can read these files in TextEdit, but it’s nicer to use the free utility Pref Setter, which lets you view and edit the contents of a preferences file in a clean, easy, point-and-click way. I guess you could also use your favorite XML utility.

Now to find that window preference:

I looked in the file com.microsoft.excel.plist, but found nothing that looked right. While many Microsoft and Adobe applications have a preference (.plist) file at the top level of the Preferences folder, it turns out that these usually contain only information for the Open and Save dialog boxes. The real preferences files are usually buried deeper. But how was I going to find it? I typed “excel” into the Find field in Pref Setter’s Open Domain Quickly window, and it revealed a list of files inside the Preferences folder with Excel in the title.

Unfortunately, I still didn’t find what I was looking for. I thought to myself, maybe it isn’t specific to Excel…if it’s Help, maybe it’s an Office-wide preference. To test that, I typed “microsoft” into Pref Setter’s Find field and it turned up many more files, including some in a Microsoft sub-folder.

I opened com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist. It’s a long list of preferences, and I wasn’t sure I could find the one I wanted. But there’s a Find field in the com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist window, so I typed “help” into it to try and narrow down the list.

Aha! That revealed several preference settings:
Assistant\AsstWithHelp
Help\Help_Bottom
Help\Help_Left
Help\Help_LeftPaneWidth
Help\Help_Right
Help\Help_Top
Help\Help_ZoomedOut

Bingo.

Help\Help_Top was set to 22. I was pretty sure that was a vertical offset from the top of the screen, and guessed that if I set that to a much higher number, the window would move down. I changed the number to 100, saved the document, started Excel, and opened Excel Help.

Fixed!!!

I hope this serves as an example of how to locate application preference settings with the help of a utility like Pref Setter.

Posted in Mac OS X, Microsoft Office | 9 Comments »

InDesign: Paragraph rules don’t show up

May 18, 2007 by conrad

If you’re applying paragraph rules in Adobe InDesign but they aren’t visible, check the following in the Paragraph Rules dialog box (or the Paragraph Rules pane of the Paragraph Style Options dialog box if you’re editing a style):

  • Make sure Rule On is enabled.
  • If Weight is set to 0, increase the stroke weight.
  • If Color is set to None, give it an actual color.
  • Check the Width, Offset, Left Indent, and Right Indent. If any of these values is too high, it can push the rule outside the text frame where you can’t see it.

Last time this happened to me, it was because I had built a style on top of another style that had a large rule indent. I set the indent to 0 and the rule became visible inside the text frame.

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe InDesign | Leave a Comment »

Photoshop: Preview checkbox shortcut in dialog boxes

May 16, 2007 by conrad

One of my favorite new features in Adobe Photoshop CS3 is the new keyboard shortcut for clicking the Preview checkbox in dialog boxes. Just press the P key!

Adobe wisely brought in this shortcut from Adobe Camera Raw, and it saves a lot of repetitive mousing when you’re doing before/after comparisons. It’s one of those enhancements that’s so small nobody notices, yet has a large actual effect on productivity.

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography | Leave a Comment »

InDesign: Aligning by nudging, despite fractional units

March 8, 2007 by conrad

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.

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe InDesign | 1 Comment »

Stuttering video playback on PowerBooks and iBooks

February 24, 2007 by conrad

If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple PowerBook or iBook, it might be because of the settings in your Energy Saver system preferences.

Open your System Preferences and click Energy Saver. In Energy Saver, click the Options tab. Now check the setting for Processor Performance. If it’s set to Reduced, change it to Highest or Automatic. Video playback may be smooth now.

If you’re running on battery, be sure to change the Processor Performance setting back to Automatic or Reduced when you’re done watching video. The Highest setting drains the battery the fastest. Note that on a notebook, the Energy Saver preference lets you save different settings for Battery and Power Adapter.

You might see the effect of the Reduced setting any time you perform processor-intensive tasks such as audio or video rendering, or gameplay. In those situations, you’ll want to set Processor Performance to Automatic or Highest.

If you set Processor Performance to Highest and you still see choppy performance, the cause may be another application that’s using processor cycles. Open your Activity Monitor utility, view the CPU tab, show all processes, and sort the list by %CPU to see if any applications are using an unusually high percentage of CPU cycles.

Note: This tip won’t work with MacBooks and MacBook Pros, because Intel CPUs automatically try to balance smooth playback against battery drain. The older PowerPC CPUs were not as smart. On an Intel-based Mac, troubleshoot for the following:

  • For internet video, does the video need more throughput than your Internet connection is capable of?
  • For HD video, was the video encoded using a codec that demand a higher data rate than your hard disk can deliver? The codecs in some raw and professional footage are designed to prioritize quality over playback performance, and are intended to be edited on high-end systems. They can be too demanding for notebook computers and low-end desktops.
  • Is your CPU busy doing something else, keeping it from throwing all of its power behind playing back the video? See the Activity Monitor tip earlier.

Keywords: iBook, PowerBook, laptop

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X | Leave a Comment »

Acrobat: Select multiple comments

February 5, 2007 by conrad

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.

Posted in Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Creative Suite | Leave a Comment »

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