Safe saving in bad weather
If a sudden thunderstorm rolls into your neighborhood, wind up what you are doing, Save As, shut down, and unplug your power strip.
Note the added safety measure of a Save As rather than a Save. This way, if the power goes out while you are actually saving, your save-in-progress will be toast, but the original file will still be safely resident on your hard disk; all you will have lost is the work since your final Save As.
PhotoshopÕs safe path selection/deselection
If youÕve ever made a selection from a path using the Path palette menu, then deleted the selected pixels only to also delete your carefully drawn path, youÕll like this tip. Pick a path, then hit the Enter key. This turns the path into a marching-ants selection, and deselects the pen path itself.
Whittle down file sizes
If you are printing a scan or screenshot from your laser printer, you can save a lot of hard disk space by economizing on your file size without sacrificing quality or resolution (which doesnÕt need to be any more than 150 dpi for laser printing). Right off the bat, change the file from RGB color to grayscale. Then, save as TIFF with compression. Compression works by taking areas of identical value and redefining them in the file as Ōshorter wordsÕ without actually changing the image. If the picture has busy areas (like a grassy foreground), you wonÕt get as much compression as you will with a plainer picture, like a screenshot of a dialog box.
ThatÕs why two compressed files of the same dimension donÕt necessarily have the same file size. If you have a busy picture, you can reduce the number of grays to improve compression. You wonÕt notice the fewer grays on a laser printer, since a laser printer canÕt show all 256 levels of gray anyway.
To do this, in Photoshop, go to Image Š> Map Š> Posterize. (Other image editing programs will have a Posterize adjustment somewhere.) Experiment with different levels of gray by toggling the preview off and on. Often 16 is an acceptable value, and reduces the file by as much as half.
Better safe than sorry
If youÕre sending a file to someone else on disk, if you have the room, make a duplicate (command-D) of the file right there on the disk in case thereÕs a problem with the dreaded ŅThe file XYZ could not be copied...Ó disk error. (This type of disk error tends to turn up when a floppy is being read with a different disk drive, possibly due to minute differences in drive speed.)
If you want to hide the extra file so nobody gets confused, trash it, but donÕt empty the trash. Then if thereÕs a problem, just tell them to open the trash and retrieve the file.
Command-click window title
This is a time saving Finder tip worth repeating. Hold the Command key and click the window title to access a pop-up folder path. HereÕs how I use it to quickly access deeply nested folders. On the desktop, I put an alias of the folder containing the document IÕm currently working on. In this case, itÕs the June PMUG Dialog folder. If I need to get something from the primary PMUG folder, or something from its parent folder, or something from my Live Files folder (its grandparent folder) I can access them easily this way because they are all in a hierarchical chain. Parents, cousins, aunts, great-grandmothers, you name it.
Deeply nested folders can be a real pain to click into, but once you have a deep one aliased onto the desktop, the nesting actually works to your advantage using reverse-navigation.
Saving text in AOL
Ever get those messages that say ŅUnable to read entire file. Only the first portion of the file will be readÓ when saving mail or something else in AOL as a text file? DonÕt worry; everything is safely saved to disk. Although AOL cuts a large text file short when opening it, you can still open the entire file elsewhere.
Easy access to tool options
In Photoshop, bring up a buried or hidden tool options palette by double-clicking the tool in the tool palette.
Indexed Color vs. RGB
If your filters, airbrush, or certain other tools donÕt work on your image in Photoshop, check the Mode menu. YouÕll see that your file will be either Indexed Color or Bitmap. Change Indexed Color to RGB; Bitmap to grayscale (or RGB if you want to add color). Indexed color is made of a fixed palette, and since blending operations, such as airbrushing and most filters, work by creating new and in-between tones, you need access to the full range of colors that RGB (24-bit) or grayscale provides.
Quick and dirty guides
Use floating palettes, or even the edges of your windows and moveable dialog boxes, as temporary guide lines in Quark, PageMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. This is especially handy when you are trying to line up the baselines of columns, setting tabs, and aligning graphics in Photoshop, which doesnÕt even have guides at all.
Quick zoom
To quickly zoom into your page in Quark, hold the control key and drag a selection marquee around the area you wish to enlarge. (Drag a tiny area to go all the way to 400%). Photoshop and Illustrator: hold down command-spacebar and drag.
Precise type matching
When you have to set a patch of type to exactly match existing type done elsewhere (small type, like a new name for a business card, is especially hard to match), set aside the new copy while you first successfully match type, letter for letter, from the printed sample.
Reset the existing type from your sample using the correct font (or best guess) and style. Guess the size and confirm it by measuring the length of the line, not the height of the letter. You may have to try a few fonts or adjust letterspacing. Then print and compare until you have an exact match, including the leading (line spacing). Now that you know you have the right font, size and leading, you can set the new copy.
QuarkÕs safe AutoBackup
If you use this feature to keep the penultimately saved version of your document as a safety measure, take one more safety step just before closing your document.
Make your final save, then change your viewing size (this will allow you save again without making any physical change to the document), and save again. Now your backup is virtually identical to your final. If you make a habit of this, you wonÕt have to figure out how much work you did between the last two saves if you ever have to use this safety net.
Faster screen rewrites
If you have an imported graphic that slows screen rewriting in Quark, resize the picture box from the bottom up (use the measurements palette to redefine its height, or just drag the handle up), so it is only a few points high. When youÕre ready to design with it or print, just lengthen it again; as long as the upper left corner stays in the same place, you wonÕt have changed anything.Ź
©1995 Terry Wilson. Reprinted from PMUG Dialog, newsletter of the Princeton Macintosh Users Group.
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Terry Wilson
PMUG Dialog editor
1601 Church Rd.
Southampton, NJ 08088