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.
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.
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.
conrad chavez | blog 