It’s time for another quick Photoshop tip. The other day I was working on an HTML mockup in Photoshop and said, “Hey wouldn’t it be great if there were bullets”. My co-worker turns around and says you can make them, and it’s super easy. It’s not really like ordered or unordered lists in HTML; you still have to type in the numbers or bullets manually, but it’s as close as you’ll get.
Once you have your list created in a text box, go to the Paragraph window. Go to the Indent first line field and type in a negative value. For this example I have 11 pixel Verdana text with a -15px first indent.
From the screenshot above you can see we now have perfect bullets in our mockup.
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 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.
OFT files are Outlook Templates, also sometimes called Outlook File Templates. You can make email templates from them, but as with most Microsoft products the quality can be quite flaky if you are not careful. I have had to create many OFT files for clients and if you go back in time and code to 1996 web standards you can get them to look pretty decent.
There’s too ways to create OFT files. One is to save the email from the Save As menu and select OFT under the Save as type: drop down. This means you already have the email in your inbox, which means mailing the html with a 3rd party program.
There’s an easier way to do this which will allow you to skip the step of sending yourself the email. The OFT process could even be handed off to the business people that need the OFT.
Top menu go to,
View / Toolbars / Web.
You should now have an input field at the top that says something like outlook:Inbox
Here you can type / paste any web address and it will load the page in Outlook. Once this is done, in the menu go to,
Actions / Send Web Page by E-mail
Now you will see the page in a new mail window. If the webpage was not to complex and created using tables, it should look okay. Pure css and more complex designs will not work at all and really shouldn’t even be considered for any email deployments. I’m a strong supporter of web standards, unfortunately some major email platforms are not.
The next step is to save the email as an OFT. Go to,
Giant windows bubble (AKA Office Button) / Save As
Select OFT, name the file and save.
You should now have an OFT file. You can test this by double clicking it which will open Outlook. You can now edit the text and send to other people. OFT files can be a cheap internal alternative to full blown email deployments. I would only recommend OFT files for small internal newsletters. OFT’s may not work properly on other email clients and are proprietary.
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.
