Ever have difficulty getting a guide to line up with a tick mark on the ruler while working in Photoshop? Or see that it appears to line up, only to find out when you zoom in that it really doesn’t? Fortunately there’s an easy way to do what you want. Hold the Shift key down while you drag a guide to exactly the tick mark you wish. The guide will “snap” to each tick mark on the ruler.
Snap Photoshop palettes to screen edge
Snap your Photoshop CS & CS2 palettes to the nearest screen edge by Shift-dragging them or Shift-clicking on their titlebars. This seems like a silly tip, but it drives me nuts to see palettes that aren’t perfectly aligned!
InDesign font selection shortcut
Getting control of the Font menu can be a daunting task if you have a lot of fonts activated. Adobe has made their apps somewhat easy in that they group fonts by family, but it can still be a long list to scroll through. When you’re working in Adobe InDesign, you can click in the font field in either the Character palette or Control bar and type a letter of the font you’re looking for, which will automatically select the first font using that letter. So if you type the letter “T” you will most likely end up at a font named Tahoma. Once you have the first font by that letter in the menu, you can click the font popup menu and select the actual font you want. Another way is to simply start typing the font you are looking for and InDesign will select the font as you type.
Intro to Adobe Illustrator’s Gradient Mesh tool
Ever wonder what you could do with that Gradient Mesh tool in Adobe Illustrator? It’s one of the most powerful, and yet underused tools in the program.
Here’s a great little tutorial to get you started: Magical Butterfly’s Mesh Tutorial.
Selecting objects on an InDesign layer
Did you know that you can select all the objects on a specific layer on the active page by Option-clicking the layer’s name in the Layer palette?
Disposable email addresses to combat Spam
In an effort to combat SPAM, I came across a disposable e-mail address site. SpamBob offers a free email address that you can use for registering with Web sites that you don’t really want to give out your real address to. While these Web sites offer what appears to be valuable services in the war against spam, I urge you to take caution when using them. Some sites may or may not be a front for spammers to begin with.
Free TV/Movie fonts at TypeNow
TypeNow offers fonts from your favorite TV shows, movies, music bands, video games, brand products and more. Remember, these font designs are **probably** trademarked, and should only be used for personal projects.
Selection options in Photoshop
You have a lot of options in working with your selections in Photoshop. Try holding the Spacebar down before you let go of a selection you are making. It will allow you to re-position your selection. Now, make a selction, go to the Select>Transform Selection menu item. Now hold down the Command key and grab the control points and move them around a bit. Starting to see the convenience of this tip yet?
Selecting burried objects in Adobe InDesign
To select objects hidden behind other objects or simply below a larger object, Command + Click until the object you want is selected. Each click selects the object below the previous top object. When you reach the object you want, you can move the object by dragging it while the mouse button is still held down, or drag it from the object’s center point. This is a handy tip, but I’ve found it easier, and more beneficial to make heavy use of Layers. I put text on one layer, borders on another, photos on yet another… it makes it MUCH easier to change things later if I need to.
Free-up RAM for InDesign
Following up on the previous tip on how to free up RAM in Photoshop, if you work in Adobe InDesign all day like I do, you may notice that it gets very sluggish after a few hours. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor if you simply quit InDesign every once in a while and re-launch it. InDesign will fly along at full speed once you do. The problem is that InDesign suffers from some sort of “memory leak” and it slowly but surely keeps things stored in RAM that it should have purged by itself. Over time, this leads to a slow down that is especially noticeable when scrolling pages with images, scaling images, etc… Quit and relaunch and the RAM gets set free!