Abobe launched there new Photopshop Express web application the other day. This is a completely online version of Photoshop power by Adobe’s Flash.
“Crop, rotate, tweak, and show off your photos here on Photoshop Express, on your blog or Facebook page. Give your friend a tragically oversized head or get rid of the mole on his cheek that’s the size of a small asteroid. It’s totally up to you.”
With an account you also get 2 GB of storage space for your photos. There is also an online test drive, I only tried out the gallery, but it is nicely animated and very slick looking. I don’t think I’ll be dumping the full version of Photoshop anytime soon, but I’m sure an app like this will be great for a lot of people out there just looking to touch up and show off their photos.
Okay, this may be super obvious for some people, but in case it’s not, here’s a neat tip. When I do borders or keylines, I usually like to make the layer on the very top.
The easy way to make a keyline is to draw a box with the rectangle tool, make sure it’s a shape layer, this makes editing it later easy. Right click the layer you just created, select Blending Options, then select Stroke. This should be pretty easy. I usually stroke on the inside; the default is outside but this will not give you sharp corners.
Okay, now you have your keyline; go back to the Layers window go to the Fill slider and bring it down to 0%. Opacity and Fill are very similar with one important difference. Opacity affects the entire layer, while Fill only affects the fill of the layer. This means our Blending Options will remain unaffected.
So why not just create a box with stroke and put it on the bottom layer? Well this works for some layouts, but what if you want patterns or shapes that overlap the box, but do not overlap the keyline as shown in the image below. This is where this technique comes in handy. The only real downside is when you use the Direct Selection Tool you end up selecting your top layer, so you may need to turn this layer on and off.
I posted the original five “You Suck at Photoshop” YouTube videos because I really wanted to spread the word, these videos are fantastically hilarious. Anyway, the guy known as Donnie Hoyle is up to it again with three new videos.
I really can’t get enough of these, if you haven’t heard of them yet, check out my original post on “You Suck at Photoshop“. You can also keep an eye out for more on the MyDamnChannel YouTube page.
I run into a lot of little obstacles in Photoshop from week to week and I thought I would share some of my Photoshop tips and workarounds from time to time.
Layer masks are a really important part of Photoshop. If you are an avid Photoshop user you probably use them all the time. There is however one pesky little problem with layer masks and that is how they work with Smart Objects. Unlike every other kind of layer in Photoshop, you cannot link a mask to a smart object. This means that when you nudge or move a smart object layer, the mask does not move with it.
Now there are cases where this is the desired behaviour, and that’s what link/unlink is for, but for some strange reason there are is no linking capability for Smart Objects. Not very smart, try having 10 masked Smart Objects in a web layout and moving everything around. You have to nudge the Smart Object, and then nudge each mask.
How do you get around this? Very simple, put your smart object into a layer group, and add the mask to the group. Yes it does add more complexity to your layers pallet, but now you can easily move around your Smart Objects and layer masks at the same time making your life much easier.
I don’t normally post YouTube videos, but I just couldn’t resist with these ones. They consist of five hilarious tutorials and I recommend watching them in order. If you are a Photoshop user you will definitely get a kick out of these, and probably even if you are not. The guy is also quite good with Photoshop, so you might actually learn something too. I think this is YouTube creativity at its best.
For those of you who don’t know, del.icio.us is a great online bookmarking site. Anyone can create an account and save all their bookmarks. Then you can access them anywhere. You can also tag all your bookmarks with key words so you can easily sort through them. Say you want tutorials and you have two hundred links, well if you have been tagging properly you should just be able to click the tutorials tag and see all your tutorial bookmarks. You can also share these bookmarks with anyone you want, here are mine.
Today I came across a link to Adobe’s official del.icio.us site, and wow, it’s huge. At the time of this writing there were over 1100 links and all extremely well organized. What a great idea this is. The next time I run into an Adobe related problem, or just need to research something, this will be my first stop. There are bookmarks for all of their products; everything from Adobe’s design applications to ActionScript can be found here.
Several months back I had to switch from a Mac to a PC. I am pretty much OS agnostic and really feel both Windows and OSX have their strengths and weaknesses. I also think Linux is great, but the lack of Adobe products is a show stopper for me.
That said, after the switch, the one thing I really missed from the Mac was the ability to see file thumbnails in the Finder for almost every file type. I recently started using the Adobe Bridge as my new Windows Explorer / Finder at work and it works like a charm. Even on the Mac sometimes files would not preview, but with the Bridge pretty much every Adobe file type previews. This can save a lot of time when looking for the right file in a sea of mockups and layout files. I think the Adobe Bridge is one of those underappreciated little apps, so if you need to see your files before opening them, give it a try. There is a little slider at the bottom that allows you to change the size of your previews too, which is really helpful and I usually make them quite large.
The Bridge goes much deeper than this, and has many other features which I have not explored yet. Some capabilities are filtering, sideshows, content management with version cue, and total integration with the Creative Suite. I plan on digging deeper into this great application, but for now the basic ability to see everything I want to see is more than enough reason to use it as a standalone file browser.
Learn more about the Adobe Bridge, here’s a short video of what it’s really capable of.
My blog entry titled “Adobe Photoshop CS3 and no Image Ready? No animated GIF’s either?” has quickly become my most popular post to date. Many questions have led me to elaborate on how to create GIF’s in Photoshop CS3 on a PC and probably on a Mac. Why probably on a Mac? Well, since the Mac save and open dialog boxes do not allow you to use your own filters like *.* it is harder to work around the lack of an import animated gif feature. You could try importing it as a known file type like MOV, and then resaving it as a GIF, but I think this might make your timeline look odd and I haven’t researched this enough because I do not have access to a Mac at home. That said, I have tried it at work, and the timeline looked like a MOV timeline, not the GIF timeline, but I’m sure with a bit of fooling around you can get it to work. Feel free to post your solutions and elaborations in the comments section of this post. That said, the following on how to create an animated gif should pose no problems on a Mac or PC.
Basically a lot of the Image Ready features were copied into Photoshop CS3. If you go to the “Window” menu you will see the “Animation” window option. This will bring up the animation window. Fig. 1.
For a test create four layers in your layers window with the numbers 1 through 4 or whatever you like. Once you are done, go to the Animation window and click the fly out arrow. This is the little down arrow. See Fig. 1.
Now you should see a menu with several options. Select the option that says “Make Frames From Layers” You can see your layers are now frames in the animation window. See Fig. 2. You can still edit your layers the way you normally would. You can also tweak the timings in the “Animation” window.
Now there are better programs for animating GIF’s, but for those of us who don’t create animated GIF’s everyday this is a workaround which I use. That said Adobe may remove support for animated GIF’s all together in future releases, or maybe they will add an import animated GIF option. Hopefully the later, but I have a sneaky feeling as one poster said in my past entry on this topic that if Adobe wanted us to buy Fireworks to create animated GIF’s then the lack of support in Photoshop may be no mistake on their part. You can also always use Flash to create Animated GIF’s also, but a lot of people used Image Ready, and I hope they continue to support this feature in Photoshop. For quick and dirty GIF animation tweaks it was a great tool.
Well, my copy of Illustrator running on Windows Vista would not save for the past few days. At first I assumed it was a corrupted or funky file problem specific to the one file and found a work around file for Photoshop. A few days later I needed to use Illustrator to copy a vector into Photopshop and convert to a smart object. Every time I cut and pasted Illustrator would hang and then eventually crash and nothing would be pasted into Photoshop. Okay, so I decide I’ll save the Illustrator file and then place it in Photoshop via File / Place. Still no joy, the second I went to save, it crashed. Just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy I created a blank canvas, typed something on it and go to save it, again Illustrator crashes with the message “Adobe Illustrator CS3 has stopped working”. Wonderful, so helpful, and the “Check online for a solution” wasn’t even working for me, but to this date even when it has worked in other programs it rarely provides a useful solution.
Time for some Google power. After doing a few searches I realize that this is not an isolated issue, and could be one of many problems. One post on a forum stands out though. Illustrator CS3, at least on Vista, requires that your Print Spooler be running. Well, this is another issue I have not solved yet. I have a randomly crashing Print Spooler. Anyway, I start up the print spooler and sure enough, Illustrator now saves. Why the print spooler is even needed I don’t know, but I think it would be helpful if when this happens illustrator could recognize it’s not running and say “Hey, your Print Spooler is not running, Illustrator requires it to be on, please start it up”, or something along those lines.
Here’s how you can check your print spooler.
Go to your start menu. In the search box type services. Your services dialog will open. Scroll down to Print Spooler. If it is running already then this might not be your problem, but try restarting it just in case. By the results of my Google search there are many other reasons why Illustrator might not be saving, but hopefully this helps some people out.
We recently installed Adobe CS3 at work. Everything was looking great until one of us needed Image Ready. Where is it? Turns out it is no longer part of Photoshop. The good news is that most of it is incorporated into Photoshop. Problem solved, we then proceeded to open an animated GIF, only to be told that it would only open the first frame. Wow, we can make animated GIF’s in Photoshop, but we can no longer open them. I immediately started digging for some answers only to find at first, many frustrated users. At the time I looked, Adobe’s official solution was to buy Fireworks, really no solution at all, considering that Photoshop via Image Ready has had this functionality for years. After some more digging on the Adobe forums I found what I was looking for.
Go to File / Import / Video Frames to Layers…
You will get a dialog that shows MOV, AVI, MPG, and MPEG files. So what use is this to you? Well, it is posted on the Adobe forums that this is an oversight by them. If you type in *.* in the File name: field this will show you all files. You can now open animated GIF’s and they will display in the animation window and layers pallet.
Hopefully Adobe will fix this in a future patch. All they need to add is the .GIF filter to there import dialog. I had actually tried this before searching, but of course did not see GIF as an option.
(update) See my newest entry on how to create animated GIF’s in Photoshop CS3 “Adobe Photoshop CS3 and no Image Ready? Animated GIF’s Part II”
