Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [65]
Removing the checkerboard
If you go to the preferences shown here you can select different grid sizes and colors, but you can also select ‘None’. When this is selected the transparent areas are displayed as solid white.
Units & Rulers
You can use the Units & Rulers preferences section to set the ruler measurements (inches or centimeters, etc.) and the units used. Note that as well as using the preferences options shown here, the measurement units can also be changed via the Info panel submenu or by right mouse-clicking on a ruler to open the contextual menu (you can also double-click the ruler bar as a shortcut for opening the preference window shown in Figure 2.27).
Figure 2.27 The ruler units can be set in pixels, inches, cm, mm, points, picas or as a percentage. The percentage setting is ideal for recording actions that you wish to apply proportionally at any image size.
The ‘New Document Preset Resolution’ options allow you to decide what the default pixel resolution should be for print output or screen display work whenever you select a preset from the File New Document dialog (Figure 2.28). The Screen Resolution has typically always been 72 ppi. But there is no real significance to the resolution that is set here if an image is only destined to appear in a Web page design. Web browser programs are only concerned with the physical number of pixels an image has and the resolution setting actually has no relevance. The Print Resolution setting is more useful as this does have an important bearing on what size an image will eventually print.
Figure 2.28 The New Document Preset Resolution settings will have a bearing on the resolution used when selecting a new document preset from the File New Document dialog. In this example, if I were to select the U.S. Paper, International Paper or Photo preset, the file resolution would be set to whatever the Print Resolution is in the Units & Rulers preferences.
Guides, Grid & Slices
These preferences let you choose the colors for the Guides, Smart Guides and Grid (Figure 2.29). Both Grid and Guides can be displayed as solid or dashed lines, with the added option of dotted lines for the Grid. The number of Grid subdivisions can be adjusted to suit whatever project you are working on and the Slices options include a Line Color style and whether the Slice Numbers are displayed or not.
Figure 2.29 The Guides, Grid & Slices preferences.
Ensuring preferences are saved
Once you have configured your preferences and got everything set up just the way you want, it is a good idea to Quit and restart Photoshop. This then forces Photoshop to save these preferences as it updates the preference file.
Figure 2.30.
The View Show menu options include Layer Edges. When this is selected the currently selected layer or layers will be indicated with a rectangular color edge border. The Smart Guides option is useful as a visual aid for aligning layer elements. The Smart Guides (shown here in pink) will flash on and off to indicate when a layer element is aligned to other layers in the image.
Plug-ins
The Plug-ins folder will automatically be recognized by Photoshop so long as it resides in the same application folder. Figure 2.31 shows how you can also choose an Additional Plug-ins Folder that may be located in another application folder such as Adobe Bridge so that these plug-ins can in effect be shared with Photoshop. To do this click on the Choose… button to locate the additional plug-ins folder.
Figure 2.31 The Plug-ins preferences.
Accessing older plug-ins
For various reasons, a number of plug-ins and extensions have been removed from the standard Photoshop