Tips and Tricks

We all tend to have our own collection of tips and tricks that we use in the everyday manipulation of our images. Usually, there are many ways of doing the same thing and and we develop our own methods as we go through the learning curve. I thought it would be a good idea if we could share some of these tips with each other so, on this page, I will print a collection of the more common tips and tricks in use with the Photoshop and Pictures To Exe software.

If you have a some tips of your own that you would like to share, please email the details to me and I will try to include them on this page.

 

In Photoshop, if you use plug-ins, you may well find that it slows down the loading of the program. One of the worst offenders for slowing thing down is a plug-in called 'Digimarc' that is automatically loaded when Photoshop is opened. You can prevent this from happening by inserting a tilde in front of the plug-in. Use Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder where your plug-ins are stored (this is usually Program files>Adobe>Adobe Photoshop (your version)>Plug-Ins) - find the 'Digimarc' plug-in and place a tilde sign at the very beginning of the line. The tilde is that small sign that looks like this (~) but you may have some difficulty finding it on your keyboard because different keyboards in different parts of the world, show it in differing positions. Visit this link to see what I mean: Keyboard layouts or, simply Google for Tilde on Keyboards. After you have inserted the tilde, you should find that things load much more quickly. If in the future you find a need to use the Digimarc plug-in for any reason, then just remove the tilde temporarily.

 

In Photoshop, to display your images on a clear screen, press the 'Tab Key' on your keyboard to hide the Tool Bar, Menu's and Palettes temporarily - press the Tab Key again, to bring them back.

 

In Photoshop, the default colours of the foreground and background colour picker (in the Toolbar) are black and white. You can reverse these by pressing the letter X on your keyboard. If you have changed these colours to something else, you can restore the defaults by pressing the letter D on your keyboard.

 

When setting the options for using the cropping tool in Photoshop, some folk leave the 'resolution' box blank so that the cropped image will retain the original image's resolution.
If you take this approach, you will not be able to use the 'Print Size' option with any real success because your cropped iimage will not be displayed correctly on your monitor. If you want to see your image displayed at the correct print size then always enter a figure for the resolution. For display on your computer monitor, this will normally be 72.