Adobe Photoshop

Apple keyboards are now safe for calibrated Apple LCD monitors

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the monitor brightness is obviously a big no-no if you’re maintaining a color-managed environment, because the monitor no longer represents the conditions under which it was profiled.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 thanks to newer hardware, it looks like this problem can now slowly fade into history. If you use the new slim aluminum Apple keyboard, you can require that the Fn key has to also be pressed 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.

Photoshop: Preview checkbox shortcut in dialog boxes

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.

Back up important preferences files

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?

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 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.

Those aren’t even all of the possibilities. Some might take two or more of the bays and make a faster or safer RAID out of them, using Disk Utility or a RAID card.

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.