Adobe Creative Suite

Open Raw files in Adobe Camera Raw by default

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!

InDesign: Paragraph rules don’t show up

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.

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.

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 with each other, 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 but still nudge with the arrow keys, try these other two methods:

  • To nudge to grid increments, enable View > Snap to Grid.
  • To nudge by a single whole unit of measure, first click in the X or Y field in the Control palette, and then press the up arrow and down arrow keys. When a number field is active in the Control palette, nudging snaps the field’s value to the nearest whole number.

Both techniques are slightly different ways to easily nudge object after object to the same absolute, non-fractional position.

Acrobat: Select multiple comments

Note: The following behavior is what 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. Also, this technique may not apply in Acrobat X and later because the comment list interface is slightly different.

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.