Adobe Photoshop 7.0

When you Control-click (Macintosh) or click with the right mouse button (Windows), Photoshop displays a context-sensitive menu that changes depending on what tool you have selected in the Tool palette. We find the menu for the various painting tools pretty useless (though if you had to do a lot of painting, it might be helpful). But the menus you get when you Control-click (or right-mouse-button-click) with the Move tool and the selection tools are great.

The context-sensitive menu for the Move tool lets you choose a layer to work on. If you have four layers in an image, and three of them overlap in one particular area, you can Control-click (or right-mouse-button-click) on that area and Photoshop asks you which of the three layers you want to jump to. (Note that you can always get the Move tool’s context-sensitive menu by Command-Control-clicking or, on Windows, clicking the right mouse button with the Control key held down.) The context-sensitive menu for the Marquee tool contains a veritable mish-mosh of features, including Delete Layer, Duplicate Layer, Load Selection, Reselect, and Color Range (we have no idea why they picked these and left other features out). Many of these features don’t have keyboard shortcuts, so this menu is the fastest way to perform them.

The key to understanding this percentage stuff is to remember two things. First, at 100-percent view (otherwise known as Actual Pixels), each image pixel is represented by a single screen pixel. This view has nothing to do with how big the image will appear in print (or even on the Web, because different monitors have different resolutions). Second, at any percentage other than 100, you’re probably not seeing a fully accurate view of your image.

At 400 percent, the image is magnified four times. At 50 percent, it’s reduced by half, so you’re only seeing half the pixels in the image because you’re zoomed farther out and Photoshop has to downsample the image on the fly. When you’re viewing at an integral multiple of 100 (meaning 25, 50, 200, 400 percent, and so on), Photoshop displays image pixels evenly. At 200 percent, four screen pixels (two horizontal, two vertical) equal one image pixel; at 50 percent, four image pixels equal one screen pixel, and so on.

However, when you’re at any “odd” percentage, the program has to jimmy the display in order to make things work. Photoshop can’t cut a screen pixel or an image pixel in half, so instead it fakes the effect using anti-aliasing. The moral of the story is always return to Actual Size (100 percent) view to peruse your image, particularly if you’re trying to evaluate the effects of Unsharp Masking. By the way, while it’s tempting to select Print Size from theView menu (in order to see how large the image will be on paper), this setting is only accurate on 72 pixels-per-inch monitors—in other words, on those old 13-inch Apple monitors and hardly anything else. We just ignore it.

Screen space is at almost as great a premium as memory these days—every little bit helps. We like to work in full-screen mode with Photoshop  instead of wasting space on title bars, scroll bars, and the like. You can switch to either of two full-screen modes in the Tool palette, or by pressing F. The first time you press F (or when you click on the middle icon on the palette), the image window takes over the screen (up to the menu bar) and the background becomes 50-percent gray. The second time, the menu bar disappears, too, and the background becomes black. (See “Make the Palettes Go Away,” later in this chapter, for an important related tip.)

Those of you familiar with Photoshop 6 will be pleased with most of the interface changes in version 7, though some might throw you off a little at first. Fortunately, Adobe has left Photoshop’s color management features alone this time around. If you really understood Photoshop’s Color Settings and Proof Setup dialog box in version 6, then you’re set with version 7. However, if you still have misgivings about Photoshop’s somewhat mysterious color engine, we strongly urge you to take the time to work through Chapter 5, Color Settings. Without a thorough understanding of the Color Settings dialog box, you’ll be lost before too long (and you may not even know how lost you are).

Here are a few important changes in version 7 (again, we’re not listing every new feature in Photoshop 7 here, just the ones you’d better know about before jumping into the rest of the book).

New tools. There are two new tools in Photoshop 7. The most important one is the Healing Brush tool, which acts like the Clone tool but is much better at preserving the underlying grain of your images. The Patch tool (which is “under” the Healing Brush tool in the Tool palette) is a combination of the Healing Brush tool and the Lasso tool. These tools are lifesavers when it comes to retouching or cleaning up images. We discuss them both in Chapter 14, Essential Image Techniques.

One tool, the Airbrush tool, has disappeared from the Tool palette. Instead, the Airbrush tool has become part of the regular painting tools. When you select any of the painting tools (Brush, History Brush, Eraser, Clone tool, and so on), you can turn on the Airbrush button in the Options bar. When this option is on, that tool acts like an airbrush—that is, when the Flow control (also in the Options bar) is set to something lower than 100 percent, the longer you hold the active brush in one area of the image, the more “paint” is laid down.

OS X native. As we mentioned in the last chapter, the Macintosh version of Photoshop 7 has been carbonized for Mac OS X, which means it can run as a native application and take advantage of protected, dynamic memory, the new Aqua interface, and other Mac OS X features. However, there is one reason why you might not want to run Photoshop 7 in native mode. Old plug-ins won’t work (or even show up) until they have been rewritten to run natively under OS X. If you’re running Mac OS X and you need to use old plug-ins, you can select the Photoshop application on the desktop, choose Get Info from the File menu, and turn on the “Open in the Classic environment” checkbox to make Photoshop launch in Classic mode. But you’ll lose most of the benefits of OS X, and if you try to allocate more than 400 MB of RAM to Photoshop, it will crash, so it’s only a stopgap solution.

File Browser. One of the coolest features in Photoshop Elements (Photoshop’s younger consumer-grade sibling) is the File Browser, which is like the Open dialog box on steroids. Fortunately, the File Browser has now finally come to Photoshop. This great tool usually lives as a palette in the palette well (in the Options bar), and lets you browse through all the images on your disk, see information about each file (a thumbnail, image resolution data, and so on), and then open. It’ll even let you rotate images before opening them. We cover the File Browser in more depth later in this chapter.

Workspaces. For years we’ve asked for a quick way to hide all the palettes except the info palette. This time, the Photoshop team gave us much more than we asked for. Photoshop 7 lets you save tool presets and palette arrangements (“workspaces”) so that you can quickly switch among them. For example, you might save a 30-pixel soft-edged brush for your high-resolution images and a 5-pixel hard-edged brush for your low-resolution images; you can switch between them quickly from the Tool Presets palette or the Tool Presets popup menu in the Options bar. You can save different palette arrangements as workspaces, and recall them quickly from the Workspace submenu in the Window menu. We’ll explore these features in more depth later in this chapter.

Scripting. You won’t hear much from Adobe’s marketing department about one of the most awesome features in Photoshop 7: the ability to script Photoshop. It’s not that the marketing folks don’t want you to know about it; it’s just that most of them don’t know why it’s so amazing. Scripting lets you automate Photoshop from behind the scenes. For instance, you could set up a database program (like FileMaker Pro) to automate Photoshop using information in your database. You could create a workflow that automates both Photoshop and QuarkXPress (or InDesign, which is also scriptable) to create an entire catalog in minutes.

You can write scripts for Photoshop on the Macintosh using AppleScript or Javascript, and on the Windows platform using Javascript or Visual Basic. We discuss this more in Chapter 14, Essential Image Techniques.

Brush palette. After removing the Brush palette entirely in Photoshop 6, Adobe has reinstated it in version 7. However, this time, the Brush palette has become three times as big and five times as powerful. We’ll cover this new palette later in this chapter.

Photoshop 7 has all kinds of other new features, too, from a funky new look in the Tool palette (including rollover effects when you move the cursor over a tool), to the ability to tile or cascade your document windows, to the ability for the Eyedropper tool to pick up a color from anywhere on the screen, even outside of Photoshop. We cover these features throughout the book.

Return of Preferences. If you make a change in one of the many Preferences dialog boxes and then—after pressing OK—you decide to change to some other preference, you can return to the same dialog box by pressing Command-Option-K.

Propagating your Preferences. Any time you make a change to one of the Preferences dialog boxes, Photoshop remembers your alteration, and when you quit, saves it in the “Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Prefs” file. (In Mac OS 9.x, this is in the System Folder>Preferences>Adobe Photoshop 7 folder. In Mac OS X, it’s in User>YourName>Library>Preferences> Adobe Photoshop 7 Settings. On Windows systems, it’s in the Windows> Application Data>Adobe>Photoshop>7.0>Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Settings directory.) If anything happens to that file, all your changes are gone. Because of this, we recommend keeping a backup of that file, or even the whole settings directory (people often back up their images without realizing they should back up this sort of data file, too).

Certain kinds of crashes (mostly caused by software other than Photoshop) can corrupt Photoshop’s Preferences file. If Photoshop starts acting strange on us, our first step is always to replace the Preferences file with a clean copy (if no copy of the Preferences file is available, then Photoshop will build a new one for you).

Note that if you administer a number of different computers that are running Photoshop, you may want to standardize the preferences on all machines. The answer: copy the Photoshop Prefs file to each computer. Finally, note that Photoshop doesn’t save changes to the preferences until you Quit. If Photoshop crashes, the changes don’t get saved.

Export Clipboard. When the Export Clipboard checkbox is on, Photoshop converts whatever is on the clipboard into a PICT or WMF format when you leave Photoshop. This is helpful—indeed, necessary—if you want to paste a selection into some other program. But if you’ve got a megabyte or two or 10 megabytes on the clipboard, that conversion is going to take some time. In situations when you’re running low on RAM, it may even crash your machine, though this is now rare. We recommend leaving Export Clipboard off until you really need it.

Dynamic Color Sliders. This one is pretty subtle. When Dynamic Color Sliders in the Picker is turned on, the bars for the sliders on the Picker palette change color as you drag. The target color changes as you drag, whether it’s turned on or not—it just affects the sliders themselves. We tend to leave this one turned on.

Save Palette Locations. This does what it says—it remembers which palettes were open, which were closed, and where they were located on the screen the last time you quit. But if you change your monitor resolution, the palettes return to their default locations. We leave this turned on.

Use System Shortcut Keys. In Mac OS X, Apple appropriated two keyboard shortcuts that were crucial for Photoshop users: Command-H and Command-M. Photoshop users know these as “Hide Selection” and “Curves dialog box.” The Mac OS X folks use these shortcuts for “Hide Application” and “Minimize Application.” Fortunately, the folks at Adobe give us an option. By default, the old Photoshop keystrokes win. However, if you turn on the Use System Shortcut Keys option, Photoshop defers to the OS X features.

But wait, there’s more: If you hold down the Control key, you get the opposite result. That is, when Use System Shortcut Keys is turned off, you can press Command-Control-H to get Hide Application, and so on.

Image Previews. When you save a document in Photoshop, the program can save little thumbnails of your image as file icons. These thumbnails can be helpful, or they can simply be a drag to your productivity. We always set Image Previews to Ask When Saving, so we get a choice for each file (see “Preview Options” in Chapter 15, Storing Images).

Ask Before Saving Layered TIFF Files. Most people don’t realize that TIFF files can include Photoshop layers. We discuss this in detail in Chapter 15, Storing Images, but we should point out one thing here: When the Ask Before Saving Layered TIFF Files option is turned on in Preferences (it is by default), Photoshop will always alert you when you try to save a file that was a flat (non-layered) TIFF but now has layers. For example, if you open a TIFF image and add some type, the text shows up on a type layer. Now if you press Command-S to save the file, Photoshop displays the TIFF Options dialog box, in which you can either flatten the layers or keep them.

If you find yourself staring at this dialog box too much, and you keep thinking to yourself, “If I wanted to flatten the image, I would have done it myself,” then go ahead and turn this option of in the Preferences dialog box. Then Photoshop won’t bother you anymore. Personally, we like this option and we leave it turned on.

Always Maximize Compatibility for Adobe Photoshop (PSD) Files. We used to think that the Always Maximize Compatibility for Photoshop (PSD) Files feature (previously known as “Maximize Backwards Compatibility in Photoshop Format,” “Include Composited Image with Layered Files,” or “2.5 Format Compatibility”) was completely brain-dead. Now we think it’s only “mostly useless.” Basically, when this checkbox is turned on, Photoshop saves a flattened version of your layered image along with the layered version. The result: if you give the file to someone who is using Photoshop 2.5 (we don’t know anyone who does), they can open it. Of course, if they do anything to the file and resave it, then all your layers are deleted. Not very helpful.

The main problem is that this feature (which is on by default) makes your image sizes larger on disk (sometimes several times larger) than they would otherwise be.

We’ve always said: turn this off and leave it off. However, there are two very good exceptions. First, leave it turned on if you’re using some other program that claims to open native Photoshop files, like Macromedia FreeHand, but which requires this flattened version to work. A second reason to leave it on is that future versions of Photoshop may interpret blending modes slightly differently than they do today. Adobe won’t say what might change (or even if there will be changes), but if they do change something, and that change affects the look of your file, then you would at least be able to recover the flattened version if there is one. That said, we would still rather leave this option turned off, and just keep an archived, flattened version of color-critical images. We discuss this in more detail in Chapter 15, Storing Images.

Diffusion Dither. If, for some bizarre reason, your monitor is set to 8-bit color (we hardly ever work with Photoshop in less than “Thousands” of colors), Photoshop has to do even more work at displaying its plethora of colors on your screen. This is usually done with dithering of some sort. You can choose the method: when Use Diffusion Dither is turned on in the Display & Cursors Preferences dialog box, Photoshop generates colors using a “random” pixel placement. Otherwise, it uses a standard pattern. Neither of these methods is all that attractive, though Diffusion Dither often produces a nicer look when zoomed in closer than 1:1.

Brush Size. When you painted or edited pixels in pre-3.0 versions of Photoshop, the program would display the cursor only as a Brush icon (or Clone Stamp icon, or whatever you were using). Because it was often difficult to tell which pixel the tool would affect, Photoshop implemented the handy crosshairs feature—when Caps Lock is down, the cursor switches to a crosshair icon displaying precisely which pixel Photoshop is “looking at.” But most brushes affect more than one pixel at a time, so now when you set Painting Cursors to Brush Size (in the Display & Cursors Preferences dialog box), Photoshop shows you exactly how large the brush is while you’re painting or editing. After working with this for a while, you’ll wonder how you could ever go back. You can still get the crosshairs with the Caps Lock key.