Photoshop: Preview checkbox shortcut in dialog boxes
Filed under: Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography |
Leave a Comment 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.
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.
Stuttering video playback on Mac notebooks
If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple notebook, 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. (I have these options in my PowerBook that has a PowerPC CPU, but I’m not sure if these options are on the newer notebooks that use Intel CPUs.)
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.
Keywords: iBook, PowerBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro, laptop
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.
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.
Select a menu command by typing
In Mac OS X, when a menu is open you can select a menu command by typing its name. You can actually go well beyond that, but most Mac users are not aware of how to do it. Running menus from the keyboard sounds like a minor feature, but in fact, selecting a command by typing can save you time when a very long menu is open, such as a font menu containing more fonts than will fit on the screen.
Another common example of this time-saving technique is when you’re checking out of an online store and you have to enter your state from a pop-up menu. Let’s say you live in Wisconsin, which is usually represented by its abbreviation WI. The normal way to get to WI in the pop-up menu is to tediously and carefully scroll all the way down to the name of their state, which is way past the bottom of the screen. If you accidentally release the mouse, you have to start over. The quicker way to do this is to open the menu and simply type “WI” which selects the command. Now press Return to confirm the command selection.
Long font menus are another place where typing the name is much faster than scrolling the menu with the mouse.
Compared to Windows users, Mac users are often less familiar with selecting commands with the keyboard, because the Mac generally emphasizes the mouse much more than the keyboard. In Windows, each command contains one underlined letter that you can press together with the Alt key to select that command. Because Mac OS X doesn’t have those underlines, many Windows users don’t think you can select commands with the keyboard in OS X. In one way, the Mac version is actually easier, because you only have to know the name of the command you’re typing, and type that. In Windows, you have to know which single letter selects the command, and that letter is often not one of the first couple of letters because so many commands start with similar letters.
The last missing piece in selecting commands with the keyboard is opening the menus in the first place, if you don’t want to open menus with the mouse. In Mac OS X, you can select the Apple menu by pressing Ctrl+F2. Once you’re there, type the first letters of the menu you want to select, press Return to drop the menu, and then type the name of the command. Once a menu is open you can also use arrow keys to navigate the menus, or abandon the menu by pressing Esc. If you think this is too many steps, see if the command has a keyboard shortcut listed to the right of the command on its menu, and just press that. If the command doesn’t have a shortcut, assign one yourself. Many Adobe and Microsoft products let you customize keyboard shortcuts, and for other products, you can often use the Keyboard Shortcuts editor in the Keyboard & Mouse system preference.
When you’re in a dialog box or palette, you can normally press Tab or Shift+Tab to move from one text entry field to another. To be able to select any control with the Tab key, including pop-up menus, radio buttons, and check boxes, open the Keyboard & Mouse system preference, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and select All Controls. When All Controls is on, as you press Tab, a selected control displays a soft outline, and when a control is selected you can press the spacebar to select or toggle it. For example, if a pop-up menu is selected, press the spacebar to pop it open. If a checkbox is selected, press the spacebar to enable or disable it. You may not be able to use the Tab key to select dialog box and palette controls in applications that use special code to draw dialog boxes and windows, such as many Adobe products.
In Safari, you can use Tab to select controls on a web page. Open Preferences, click Advanced, and select Press Tab to Highlight Each Item on a Webpage.
