Most images in Photoshop need sharpening when you reduce them, or importing from a scanner or digital camera. There are two ways (which generally provide the same results) that you may find useful.
- Change the image into Lab Mode and only sharpen the Luminosity Channel is one way.
- Another way is to choose Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask, apply the settings that you want, then choose Edit>Fade Unsharp Mask, and alter the Blend Mode to Luminosity. The benefit of this method is that you can adjust the amount of the sharpening while you’re there instead of undoing and trying again.
There are, of course, other methods to accomplish the same thing, this is just an idea. If you have another way, please share it in the comments!
I found myself in need of a “To-Do List” app for OSX. Now obviously I could just use stickies, but really, it’s more trouble than it’s worth and isn’t very handy. I also tried some To-Do-List type apps, but found that they were so far overkill that I got dizzy just looking at them. Entourage is a no-go because I don’t use it. Konfabulator has a nice simple To-Do list widget, unfortunately it not only costs $25 to use, but you’re stuck running a memory hog of a program just to have the list. iCal has one, but again, it’s a lot of effort. Enter Check Off. 
When you have content placed in a frame in Adobe InDesign, you can press Command + Option + C to resize the frame to the size of its contents – text or graphics. You can also hit Command + Option + E to stretch a graphic to fill a frame. If you want to keep the graphic scale proportional, add the Shift key. Once your graphics are placed in a content frame and sized to your liking, you can center the graphic in the frame by pressing Command + Shift + E. These commands may seem obvious, because they’re in the menus and in the manual, but I’ve found that many designers and production artists are so used to Quark’s key commands that they forget to learn new ones.
To create a symbol, select the object you want to make a symbol and either drag the object to the Symbols palette or click the New Symbol button in the Symbol palette. Symbols are especially useful for designers who do their layout in Illustrator, as you can store frequently used Logos and text as a symbol for easy retrieval.
When using small text in web graphics in Photoshop, you may notice that your text looks blurry at small point sizes (usually, anything below 12 to 14 points). Running a sharpening filter over rasterized text only serves to make it look worse. To clean up the blurry text, try increasing the tracking (kerning)amount of the text using the Character palette. By increasing the tracking amount it lowers the effects of anti-aliasing, thus making the letters appear sharper/cleaner.
If you’ve ever had to send a large file via e-mail to a printer or publication at the last minute, only to realize that either your ISP, or the ISP of the person receiving the e-mail cannot send files as large as yours, you know how frustrating it can be. You could get your own domain name and post it on your site, but that seems like overkill. You could use FTP, but your run the risk of having to spend an hour on the phone explaining to some underpaid secretary how to use FTP on her 7 year old PC – not to mention you still need a site to upload it to. Enter YouSendIt. 