• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1867 0

a mouse (when this option is selected, holding down the key makes the zoom operate quicker). Instead of selecting this option you can also hold down the key to temporarily access the zoom wheel behavior. When the ‘Zoom Clicked Point to Center’ option is checked, the image zooms in centered around the point where you click; the best way to understand the distinction between having this option on or off is to see what happens when you click to zoom in on the corner of a photo. When checked, the corner point of the photo will keep recentering as you zoom in. I discussed the ‘Flick panning’ option earlier in Chapter 1, on page 57. This again is dependent on OpenGL being enabled for this option to take effect. ‘Place or Drag Raster Images as Smart Objects’ is new to Photoshop CS5 and does what it says. It allows you to drag a Photoshop compatible file directly from the Finder/Explorer or from Bridge to place it as a new layer in an open document.

Resize Image During Place

When the ‘Resize Image During Place’ preference item is checked, if you use File Place… to place a photo in a document that is smaller than the placed image, the placed file is placed in a bounding box scaled to the dimensions of the target image. This can help speed up your workflow when pasting lots of documents, especially now that Photoshop CS5 allows you to drag and drop Photoshop compatible files to place them in an image.

A history log is useful if you wish to keep track of everything that has been done to an image and the History Log options let you save the history log directly in the image file metadata, to a saved text file stored in a pre-configured folder location, or both. The edit log items can be recorded in three modes: ‘Sessions’ records which files are opened and closed and when. The ‘Concise’ mode records an abbreviated list of which tools or commands were applied (also recording times). Both these modes can provide basic feedback that could be useful in a studio environment to monitor the time spent on a particular project and to help calculate billing. The ‘Detailed’ mode records everything, such as the coordinates used to make a crop. This mode can be useful, for example, in forensic work.

You will often come across warning dialogs in Photoshop that contain a ‘Don't Warn Me Again’ checkbox. If you have at some stage clicked in these boxes to prevent a warning dialog appearing again you can undo this by clicking on the ‘Reset All Warning Dialogs’ button in the General preferences.

Interface preferences

If you refer to the screen view modes shown on page 60, you will see examples of two of the three main screen modes that are available in Photoshop. The outer canvas areas can be customized by selecting alternative colors via the Interface preferences (Figure 2.14). You can also adjust the border, which can be shown as a drop shadow, thin black line, or with the border style set to ‘None’. There is also another way you can set the canvas color, which has been around for a while (see sidebar: Canvas color and the paint bucket). The useful thing to know here is you can use these interface preference items as a way to quickly reset the default canvas and borders.

Figure 2.14 Interface preferences.

Canvas color and the paint bucket

An alterative way to alter the color of the outer canvas area is to select the paint bucket tool, choose a new foreground color and hold down the key as you click with the paint bucket in the canvas area. This replaces the existing canvas with the current foreground color.

The ‘Show Channels in Color’ option is a somewhat redundant feature as it does not really help you visualize the channels any better. If anything it is a distraction and best left unchecked.

Customizing the UI Font Size

LCD computer displays are getting bigger all the time and are only really designed to operate at their best when using the finest resolution setting. This can be great for viewing photographs, but the downside is that the application menu items are getting smaller and smaller. The ‘UI (user interface)