Change "Cancel" to "Reset" in Adobe application dialog boxes

Heres a simple one that is darn handy:

If you wish to reset settings in a dialog box, simply hold down the
Option (Alt - PC) and the Cancel button changes to Reset.

Straightening Scanned Photos

I drink a lot of coffee which makes my hands shake and I can never seem to get a perfectly straight scan. But there is an easy fix.

1. In Photohop locate an area that is supposed to be straight and choose the measure tool from the tool pallet. (Its hiding under the Eyedropper tool)

2. Click and drag along that edge of the image.

3. Choose IMAGE>ROTATE IMAGE>ARBITARY when the dialog box opens you'll notice that Photoshop thoughtfully inserted the measurement into the value box. Click ok and your image is now perfectly straight.

Bring on the double lattes!

Preview CMYK While Working in RGB

It's usually a good idea to work in Photoshop RGB and hold off converting to CMYK until absolutely necessary. But what if you want to see how your work in progress will look like printed in CMYK?

Simple
1. Go to VIEW>PROOF SETUP and choose "WORKING CMYK"
2. Then choose PROOF COLORS from the VIEW menu
That way you can still work in RGB mode but have a better idea how the image will look printed. Of course it works best if you have taken the time to set up your color management options.

But wait theres more!
In the PROOF SETUP you can also choose to preview how the individual color seperations will look.

You can also see how your image will look on a Windows or Macintosh screen which is great for web graphic designers.

If that isn't enough you can choose "Custom" from the PROOF SETUP and see how you image would look with various press profiles. Sending the image to Europe for publication? Proof it with the Euroscale Coated profile.

And finally you can use the gamut warning to limit the color picker to colors that can be reproduced in CMYK
1. Choose VIEW>GAMUT WARNING
2. Go into Photoshop's color picker and you see that some of the colors are grayed out. Those are outside CMYK's color gamut and can't be reproduced accurately.

Write your History States To Image Metadata

Ever open a Photoshop file and try to remember what steps you took to create that great effect? Well wonder no longer with this little tip.

1. In Photoshop turn on History Logging to Metadata (PREFERENCES>GENERAL>HISTORY LOG) Make sure you have "Edit Log Items" set to "Detailed"

2. Give yourself plenty of History States. This is in option in that same General Preferences dialog box. I use 250, you can have up to 1000, but the more states you have the more ram it takes up, so your mileage may vary.

Once you have that set every edit you make to an image is recorded in its Metadata. You can view the images metadata by choosing FILE>FILE INFO and choosing "History" in the File Info dialog box. It will give you a run down of all the edits you did to an image and help you to remember how you made that great image effect that you want to recreate.

Toggle Between Preview and Normal View In InDesign

Say you editing text and you wanted to momentarily switch from normal to preview mode (to hide bleeds etc) well if you hit the defalt "w" you end up typing a "w" which sucks especially if you forget you do it and it goes to press :(...so what I did was go into the Keyboard shortcuts dialog and assigned shift + command + F1 to toggle the views while I'm in text mode and now life is all peaches and cream.

Printing Discontinuous Pages in Acrobat

Say you have a multi-page PDF document and you just want to print
certain pages.

1. Open the PDF document in Acrobat
2. Click on the "Pages" tab to display the page thumbnails
3. Hold down the Command key and click on the page thumbnails that you want to print.
4. Chose FILE>PRINT
5. In the print dialog click on the "Selected Pages" radio button

Zing zang happy days!

Complimentary Color Swatches in Illustrator

Stop guessing what the complimentary colour for a given swatch is.

1. In Illustrator, duplicate the swatch you're using.
2. Double-click on it to edit it, then hold cmd (ctrl if you're on windows) and click on the colour box in the edit box.

It'll then give you the complimentary colour for the original swatch.

Thanks to Gary for that tip.

Smart Sharpen is the New Unsharp Mask

The new Smart Sharpen filter in Photoshop CS2 is well worth considering for your sharpening needs.
Check out http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/smart-sharpen-cs2-and-more.html