Peachpit adobe photoshop CS CS2 breakthroughs dec 2005 ISBN 0321334108

In the default Photoshop work area, you see the Tools palette on the far left, the menu bar across the top, and the Options bar under the... In Photoshop CS2, Adobe uses the bottom of th

By David Blatner, Conrad Chavez

Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub Date: November 23, 2005 ISBN: 0-321-33410-8

Pages: 288

Table of Contents | Index

Adobe Photoshop is industry standard digital image software and users are hungry for solutions to their myriad concerns from how best to manage the program's sometimes

unwieldy interface to how to use the new Vanishing Point tool Photoshop guru David

Blatner has scoured the online forums, interviewed Adobe engineers, and gathered

together answers to over 200 of the most-commonly asked questions Written in a sassy, fun-to-read style, this book tackles every major Photoshop problem with a lay-it-on-the- line solution Adobe Photoshop CS/CS2 Breakthroughs is for anyone who has been using Photoshop long enough to realize that the solution to their problems isn't always as obvious as one would expect.

By David Blatner, Conrad Chavez

Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub Date: November 23, 2005 ISBN: 0-321-33410-8

Notice of Rights

permission for reprints and excerpts, contact

permissions@peachpit.com

Disclaimer

The information in this book is distributed on an "As Is" basis,without warranty While every precaution has been taken in thepreparation of the book, neither the authors nor Peachpit Pressshall have any liability to any person or entity with respect toany loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly orindirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by thecomputer software and hardware products described in it

Trademarks

Throughout this book trademarked names are used Rather

than put a trademark symbol in every occurrence of a

trademarked name, we state we are using the names only in aneditorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with

no intention of infringement of the trademark All trademarks orservice marks are the property of their respective owners

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Dedication

David: For Don and Thirzalyn, who have been so supportive and loving for all these years

HEY BUDDY, WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM? No, wait, we're not trying

to be obnoxious; we really do want to know what your problemiswell, as long as it involves Adobe Photoshop After all, that isour job: listening to problems and coming up with breakthroughsolutions

In fact, we've spent much of the past couple of years listening

to seminar attendees about their problems, teaching new andadvanced users, working with clients, reading online Photoshopforums, and talking with other Photoshop trainers We

discovered that there are certain questions that are asked overand over againquestions about resolution, opening Camera Rawfiles, adjusting tone and color, saving files to disk

This book is a compendium of those commonly encounteredproblems, andmore importantlytheir solutions! Some solutionsare simple, such as pointing out a feature that you might neverhave known about Other solutions are complex, requiring

multi-step procedures and waving witchbane around your headwhile standing on one foot

A few solutions involve problems with Photoshop CS which werefixed in Photoshop CS2, while some are more concerned withnew problems that popped up in this most recent version Most

of the solutions in this book are applicable to both CS and CS2

Of course, with all this talk about problems and solutions, youmight get the feeling that we think Photoshop is buggy or

causes headaches No way: We love Photoshop and it is amongthe most stable, functional pieces of software we own But

we've been around long enough to know that all software has

bugsand they usually bite you just before a big deadline And

every major application can cause you to reach for the

Ibuprofen at the end of a long day

Photoshop is the best image-editing software we've ever used(and we've used a lot of them), but if you don't encounter anyfrustrations with it, then you're just not working hard enough.

As much as we'd love to fly out to [insert name of your cityhere] and sit by your side as you work, we just can't right now.That's where this book comes in: Each chapter of this bookcovers an area we know people have problems withorganizingmyriad images, for instance, or keeping color consistent Wedon't expect you to read the whole thing cover to cover Rather,skip around the book, gathering what you need when you needit

You might strategically leave this book wherever you go whenyou have a major problem: For David, it's next to the

refrigerator Conrad prefers a nook at his local coffee house

Note that we have no intention of this book covering every

feature in Photoshop Sure, we cover a lot of ground, and wetake an in-depth look at some areas that often cause confusionwith users But we expect that you'll use this book in

conjunction with other resources on Photoshop For example,

we don't cover how to script Photoshop or create cool effectsthat look like fire or ice or whatever else you're in the mood toadd to your images Fortunately, there are other resources outthere Here's a few places you can go for more information

Real World Adobe Photoshop CS2 While we are a bit

biased (this book was written by David Blatner and our

friend Bruce Fraser), this is also the book recommended bymembers of the Photoshop development team at Adobe

Adobe Photoshop CS2 Visual QuickStart Guide This

big step-by-step instruction book by Elaine Weinmann andPeter Lourekas offers a great introduction to Photoshop We

Magazines There are an ever-growing number of

magazines that cover cool Photoshop techniques Some of

our favorites are DG Magazine (formerly Digital Graphics, from Australia), PhotoshopUser (from the NAPP), and

Layers Magazine.

Any undertaking that involves Adobe Photoshop necessarily

taps into the rich and deep web that surrounds this amazingprogram We wrote the words, but we couldn't have done it

without that infrastructure!

Thanks to Peachpit publisher Nancy Ruenzel, who liked the idea

of Blatner Books To our editor, Nancy Davis, for her

extraordinary patience and suggestions And to our productioneditor Lisa Brazieal for her happy, reassuring voice on the end

of the telephone To Pamela Pfiffner, our champion embeddedinside the Peachpit fortress And to Don Sellers, for his excellentcopyediting

Our sincere appreciation goes to Bruce Fraser, Anne-Marie

Concepción, Deke McClelland, Greg Vander Houwen, and

participants in the Photoshop User to User Forums

David: "I am so thankful to my wife, Debbie, and our two boys,Gabriel and Daniel, who have supported me and this project in

so many ways Thanks, too, to my mom and step-dad, who

loaned me the money to buy a laser printer back in the 1980s,even though they thought it was a crazy thing for me to do And

a huge round of applause to my co-author Conrad, who wasinstrumental in making this book a reality"

Conrad: "My thanks go out to my parents, who from the

beginning gave me the kind of support that allowed me to

learn, and then to teach Many thanks also to my friends andfamily and my co-author David, for their encouragement andpatience during those intensive final weeks of writing and

editing Finally, thanks to the entire Photoshop community ofdevelopers and users who have turned dry lines of code into aspectacular creative universe"

WHEN YOU FIRST MOVE INTO A NEW HOME, it's easy to findthe basics, such as the kitchen and the shower But you neverquite feel at home until you've got all your stuff arranged justthe way you like it: the TV in the best corner of the living roomfor watching movies, the kitchen utensils stored right whereyou'd reach for them when you cook, and the alarm clock atjust the right position on the nightstand for when your arm

swings over to crush the snooze button every morning

Anyone who spends a lot of time in any software program

typically starts treating it like a home, positioning windows,customizing controls, and otherwise tweaking its behavior Eachperson uses Photoshop in a slightly different way, and combinedwith the fact that Photoshop is a very deep program, there isvalue in bringing forward the parts of the program that you

most want to use so that the areas where you spend the mosttime are most easily accessible to you This chapter is aboutpersonalizing Photoshop until you feel quite comfortable movingaround in it

Menu bar As in other programs, the menu bar contains

commands you can apply to alter an image or Photoshop'sbehavior

Options bar Located just below the menu bar, the Options

bar presents controls for the tool you've selected in theTools palette

Palettes The Tools palette appears along the left edge of

the work area, while other palettes appear along the rightedge You can arrange palettes by dragging the tab at thetop of a palette, and you can show or hide palettes usingthe commands under the Window menu We give you morepalette-arranging tips in "Windows and Palettes," later in

Tip

Because the controls on the Options bar changewhen you change tools, the Options bar isn't likethose unchanging horizontal toolbars found inother programs Note that you can always jump

to the first editable field of the Options bar(when there is one) by pressing the

Return/Enter key If there is more than one field,you can Tab or Shift-Tab from one to the next

Document window Photoshop makes good use of the

space around the document window Along the top of thewindow you see the normal title bar To the left of the title is

a preview icon that's dimmed (on the Mac OS) if recent

changes aren't saved To the right of the title are the zoompercentage, the color mode, and the bit depthplus the

preview mode, if View > Proof Colors is turned on (not

shown in Figure 1.1)

Along the bottom edge of the document window, at the leftedge, you'll find a numerical field you can use to control theview magnification To the right of that is a Version Cue

indicator icon (it won't do anything if Version Cue is

disabled), and to the right of that is a status bar you cancustomize by clicking the triangle

Figure 1.1 In the default Photoshop work area, you see the Tools palette on the far left, the menu bar across the top, and the Options bar under the

menu bar At the far right of the Options bar is the palette well, and to the left of the palette well

While there's been much grumbling about the increasingrarity of printed manuals, information about Photoshop is muchfaster and easier to find onlineboth on your own computer, and

The online help system contains all of the topics in the printedmanual along with additional topics, so you're more likely tofind and answer there Open the help system by choosing Help

> Photoshop Help (Figure 1.2)

Figure 1.2 The Photoshop help system

[View full size image]

If you need a quick description of a tool or control that you cansee in front of you, a tool tip might help (Figure 1.3) If tooltips don't appear when you hover your cursor over a tool orpalette, you might need to turn them on; choose Photoshop >Preferences (Mac OS X) or Edit > Preferences (Windows) andturn on Show Tool Tips

In Photoshop CS2, Adobe uses the bottom of the Info palette toprovide a little more information than they could fit in the tooltips (Figure 1.4) The Info palette goes beyond simply tellingyou about the currently selected tool It reminds you how

modifier keys can change the tool's behavior

Figure 1.4 The bottom of the Info palette for the Marquee tool with no keys pressed (left) and with

Shift key pressed (right)

"Photoshop tutorials" into your favorite online search engine.And, of course, there are always books on the subject, such as

this one, David's Real World Photoshop (which he co-authored

with Bruce Fraser) and others

Because Photoshop is upgraded every 18 months or so, youmay experience the upgrade process a few times before you'veeven accumulated five years of experience with the program.But upgrading can lose files and settings that your workflowmay depend on Therefore, we want to include a few topics thathelp you upgrade Photoshop without throwing your workflowinto a tailspin

Migrating Your Plug-ins

I upgraded to Photoshop CS2 and none of my non-Adobe plug-ins came along for the ride Do I have to buy them all over again?

Photoshop plug-ins are installed into the Plug-ins folder

inside each Photoshop version's application folder This meansthat plug-ins don't automatically appear in a newer version ofPhotoshopyou have to move them manually Before you deleteyour old Photoshop folder, locate each non-Adobe plug-in anddrag it to the corresponding folder in the Photoshop CS2 Plug-ins folder (Figure 1.5)

Figure 1.5 The Plug-ins folder inside the

Photoshop CS2 folder

[View full size image]

Migrating Actions

OK, so I've got my plug-ins working in the upgrade.

But now I don't see all of my carefully crafted Photoshop actions What's the answer this time?

Before you upgrade, save your actions from the Actions

palette to a file on disk (This is also a good way to back upyour actions at any time.) Here's how:

1 In the Actions palette, click the Create New Set button.

2 Name the folder and click OK Now you've got a folder

where you can store just the actions you create (Figure 1.6)

clicking Load

You'll probably want to test any actions you migrate betweenversions Some actions might not work correctly if they depend

on commands, palettes, dialog boxes, and file locations thathave changed

Tip

Instead of having to write down all of your settings, we like totake a screen capture of each pane and refer to them as we set

up our new version of Photoshop Note that if you put your set

of Preferences screen shots into their own folder, you can useFile Browser (in CS) or Adobe Bridge (in CS2) to browse to thatfolder so that you can easily cycle through the screen shots asyou adjust each one in the new version of Photoshop (Figure 1.7)

On Mac OS X, workspaces are stored here:

Is it just me, or does it seem like Adobe is always

changing keyboard shortcuts? Why do they do that, and

is there any way to stop it? Old habits die hard, and all that.

Well, it's not easy to come up with a single set of keyboardshortcuts that works for everybody In addition, Photoshop

doesn't exist in a vacuum Over the years, Photoshop has

changed shortcuts to be consistent with the other Adobe

products that people like to use together; also, the Mac andWindows operating systems have added shortcuts that

sometimes clash with Photoshop shortcuts

Fortunately, Adobe has implemented the right solution: If youcan't please each person, let each person do what they want.Photoshop does this by letting you customize keyboard

Figure 1.8 The Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus dialog box lets you assign any shortcut to any menu item.

It no longer makes much sense to print a card when the

shortcuts are so easy to change What you now have instead isthe ability to generate a list of the current shortcut set In theKeyboard Shortcuts pane of the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menusdialog box, click Summarize You'll quickly get a reference list inHTML format You can save the HTML document in any folderand make a convenient bookmark to it in any web browser, or

Summarize button, of course, is that you can always keep yourshortcut reference up to date if you change shortcuts

Roll Your Own Menus

Every time I upgrade, the menus in Photoshop get

longer and longer I don't even use half of the commands that are available Can't Adobe make Photoshop modular

so that we don't have to see the features we don't use?

ins), but you shouldn't have to worry about that anywaywhileall features are made available at startup, they don't actuallyload into memory unless you start using them (That's why itoften takes longer to use a feature the first time.)

There isn't a way to turn features off (unless they're plug-On the other hand, there is a way to simplify the menus

Starting with Photoshop CS2, Adobe makes it possible for you

to hide menu items You can make Photoshop display only thecommands that are useful to you or your workgroup In

addition, you can highlight menu commands with a color Thisfeature can be useful for emphasizing preferred workflows, or ifyou want to associate certain commands with each other

The controls to customize the menus are in a different tab inthe same dialog box as the one to customize keyboard

shortcuts To customize menus:

1 Choose Edit > Menus.

2 In the Menus tab of the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus

dialog box, choose a menu set from the Menu For popupmenu

3 Scroll to locate the menu command you want to edit.

4 For the command you're editing, click the Visibility column

to hide or show the command, or click the Color column toapply a color to the command

5 Click the Save icon (the first one to the right of the Set

popup menu) to save your changes to the current set

6 Click the Save New Set icon (second from the left) to create

a new set based on the current settings After you create anew set, you can choose it from the Window > Workspacesubmenu Photoshop comes with several custom menu

workspaces already installed; to try them, choose one fromthe Window > Workspace submenu

vertically, so they're all visible at once You can combine

grouping and docking (Figure 1.9) To dock a palette, drag itspalette tab to the bottom of another paletteyou can let go whenyou see the dark black line appear at the bottom of the palette.Grouped palettes always appear and disappear at the sametime For example, David always docks his Character and

Paragraph palettes together

Figure 1.9 Here, the Histogram and Info palettes are docked, and the Info and Color palettes are grouped Dragging the title bar moves all three

palettes.

Figure 1.10 Clicking the Brushes palette tab in the palette well reveals the entire palette.

situations For example, when Conrad plugs his calibrated

monitor into his laptop, he chooses a workspace that fills thelaptop monitor with palettes

of its layers (Figure 1.11) If the document doesn't have anylayers, the first and second numbers are probably the same

Figure 1.11 The status bar at the bottom of a document window can display different kinds of document information, such as the disk usage

information shown at right.

If you click-and-hold on that information, you can see how the

How can you tell that they're document sizes? Because it saysso: Click the black triangle to the right of the status bar to see apopup menu of the different kinds of information you can

display in the status bar You can choose a different status bardisplay from the popup menu, such as the document

increments, add the Shift key; it's like clicking the scroll bararrows

Press Home to scroll to the top left corner of a document, or

Figure 1.12 Multiple document windows cascaded (left) and tiled (above).

[View full size image]

To see all open document windows evenly spaced across thescreen, choose Window > Arrange > Tile Horizontally or Tile

Tab to cycle backward; yes, that's the Control key, even onthe Macintosh) This is useful for flipping through a stack oflarge windows, particularly when your windows are in FullScreen mode

To cycle through each window, press Ctrl-Tab (or Shift-Ctrl-Tip

You probably already know that palette edgessnap to each other But you can also snap apalette to the nearest edge of the screen byShift-dragging a palette's title bar

On Mac OS X, press F10 to use the Exposé window-selection feature on the current application's windows only(in this case, Photoshop) You can't edit documents in thismode, so it's useful mostly for comparing documents

To close all open image windows, press Option (Mac OS) orShift (Windows) while clicking any image window's closebutton If any open images have unsaved changes, you'll beasked whether you want to save them before closing thedocument

Preserve Windows when Zooming

I arranged my document windows on the screen just

the way I like them, but when I use the keyboard

shortcut to zoom in or out, the size of a window changes,

me nuts please, make it stop!

Don't worry, there is a way out of this By default, Photoshopresizes the image window when you zoom a window using thekeyboard shortcuts, such as Command-+ (plus sign) (Mac OS)

or Ctrl-+ (Windows) (Figure 1.13) This can sometimes beinconvenient, such as when you have a carefully tiled windowarrangement that you want to preserve

Figure 1.13 Original (left), zoomed in without window resizing (middle), and zoomed in with

window resizing (right).

[View full size image]

You can prevent Photoshop from resizing windows when

keyboard zooming, and you can set which behavior is the

override it this one time, press Command-Option-+ (plus key)instead of Command-+

The Big Screen Experience

Is there a way to fill the screen with an image, similar

to when you view a slide show?

Photoshop provides two full screen modeswith or without themenu bar Either way, you'll hide all of the window trimmingsand have an unobstructed view of the current document Tochange the screen mode, click one of the three screen modeicons on the toolbox To cycle through the three screen modeswhen the toolbox is hidden, press F repeatedly

To hide and show the menu bar, press Shift-F

To hide and show all palettes, use the Tab key

If you're addicted to the status bar, you can display the

same information in the Info palette (choose Palette Optionsfrom the palette's menu) and leave the palette open

You can still switch tools and open palettes using keyboardshortcuts Remember, you can customize Photoshop's

keyboard shortcuts!

To zoom and scroll, use the Navigator palette If you prefer

to hide the Navigator palette, use keyboard shortcuts or amouse wheel to zoom and scroll See the topic "Navigatingthe Seas of Photoshop," earlier in this chapter

If you move the document window to another monitor

before entering full screen mode, the document displays infull screen mode on that monitor without affecting othermonitors