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Customizing the Interface
Every program gives you access to a few core settings so you can modify the program to suit your personal needs. These settings are known far and wide as preferences. Photoshop ships with certain recommended preference settings already in force — known coast to coast as factory defaults — but just because these settings are recommended doesn't mean they're right. In fact, I disagree with quite a few of them. But why quibble when you can change the preferences according to your merest whim?You can modify preference settings in two ways. You can make environmental adjustments in Windows by using Edit Preferences General; on the Mac, that's Photoshop Preferences General. Or you can change the operation of specific tools by adjusting settings in the Options bar. Photoshop remembers environmental preferences, tool settings, and even the file format under which you saved the last image by storing this information to a file each time you exit the program.
| Photoshop | To restore Photoshop's factory default settings, delete the Adobe Photoshop CS Prefs.psp (simply Prefs on the Mac) file when the application is not running. The next time you launch Photoshop, it creates a new preferences file automatically. On the PC, you can find the preferences file in the Application Data/Adobe/ Photoshop/8.0/Adobe Photoshop CS Settings folder. Under Windows 2000 and XP, the Application Data folder is located in the Documents and Settings/User Name folder. In earlier versions of Windows, the Application Data folder is in the Windows folder. In Mac OS X, follow this path: Home folder Library Preferences Adobe Photoshop CS Settings. (Depending on your system setup, the program may choose a different storage folder.) You can also search for the preferences file by name using Sherlock on the Mac or the built-in search tool in Windows. Under Windows 2000 and XP, you must first turn on the visibility of hidden files. To do so, choose Tools Folder Options, click the View tab, and then turn on the Show Hidden Files and Folders option. |
| Tip | You also can dump the preferences file using this trick: Close the program and then relaunch it. Immediately after you launch the program, press and hold Ctrl+Shift+ Alt (z -Shift-Option on the Mac). Photoshop displays a dialog box asking for your permission to delete the preferences file. Click Yes. |
Deleting the preferences file is also a good idea if Photoshop starts acting funny. Photoshop's preferences file has always been highly susceptible to corruption, pos-sibly because the application writes to it so often. Whatever the reason, if Photoshop starts behaving erratically, trash that preferences file. You'll have to reset your preferences, but a smooth-running program is worth the few minutes of extra effort. It's a good thing that Photoshop saves actions, color settings, custom shapes, contours, and the like separately from the Prefs file. This means that you can delete your Prefs file without worrying about harming your scripts, color conversions, and other custom settings.
That's a good tip, and I include it in the name of comprehensive coverage. But personally, I don't lock my Prefs file because I periodically modify settings and I want Photoshop to remember the latest and greatest. Instead, I make a backup copy of my favorite settings. After a few weeks of working in the program and customizing it to a more or less acceptable level, copy the preferences file to a separate folder on your hard disk (someplace you'll remember!). Then if the preferences file becomes corrupt, you can replace it quickly with your backup.
The Preferences panels
Under Windows, the Preferences command appears on the Edit menu. In Mac OS X, it's found on the Photoshop menu. Choosing the command displays a long submenu of commands, but you needn't ever use them if you remember a simple keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+K (z -K on the Mac).This shortcut brings up the Preferences dialog box, which provides access to nine panels of options, representing every one of the Edit Preferences commands. Select the desired panel from the pop-up menu in the upper-left corner of the dialog box, as demonstrated in Figure 2-16. Or press the Ctrl-key (Win) or z -key (Mac) equivalent for the panel as listed in the pop-up menu. You can also click the Prev and Next buttons or press Alt+P and Alt+N, respectively (z -Option-P and z -Option-N on the Mac) to cycle from one panel to the next.
Figure 2-16: Select a panel of options from the pop-up menu, or click the Prev and Next buttons to advance from one panel to the next.
| Tip | Photoshop always displays the first panel, General, when you press Ctrl+K (Win) or z -K (Mac). If you prefer to go to the panel you were last using, press Ctrl+Alt+K (z -Option-K on the Mac). |
To accept your settings and exit the Preferences dialog box, press Enter or Return. Or press Escape to cancel your settings. Okay, so you already knew that, but here's one you might not know: Press and hold Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) to change the Cancel button to Reset. Then click the button to restore the settings that were in force before you entered the dialog box.The following sections examine the Preferences panels, in the order in which they appear in the Figure 2-16 pop-up menu. I explain how each option works, and include in parentheses what I consider the optimal setting. (The figures, however, show the default settings.) Out of context like this, Photoshop's preference settings can be a bit confusing. In later chapters, I shed some additional light on the settings you may find most useful.
General preferences
The General panel, shown in Figure 2-17, contains a miscellaneous supply of what are arguably the most important Preferences options.
Figure 2-17: The General panel provides access to the most important environmental preference settings. I agree with many, but not all, of the default settings shown here.
Color Picker (Adobe): When you click the foreground or background color control icon in the toolbox, Photoshop displays any color picker plug-ins that you may have installed plus one of two standard color pickers: the Adobe color picker or the one provided by the operating system. If you're familiar with other Windows graphics programs, the system's color picker may at first seem more familiar. But Photoshop's color picker is better suited to photographic work.
Image Interpolation (Bicubic): When you resize an image using Image Image Size or transform it using Layer Free Transform or one of the commands in the Layer Transform submenu, Photoshop has to make up — or interpolate — pixels to fill in the gaps. You can change how Photoshop calculates the interpolation by choosing one of five options from the Image Interpolation pop-up menu.If you select Nearest Neighbor (Faster), Photoshop simply copies the next-door pixel when creating a new one. This is the fastest setting (hence the label "Faster"), but it invariably results in jagged effects.The second option, Bilinear, smoothes the transitions between pixels by creating intermediate shades. Photoshop averages the color of each pixel with four neighbors — the pixel above, the one below, and the two to the left and right. Bilinear takes more time but, typically, the softened effect is worth it.Still more time intensive is the default setting, Bicubic, which averages the color of a pixel with its eight closest neighbors — one up, one down, two on the sides, and four in the corners. The Bicubic setting boosts the amount of contrast between pixels to offset the blurring effect that generally accompanies interpolation.
| Photoshop | Photoshop CS adds two new Image Interpolation settings: Bicubic Smoother and Bicubic Sharper. Based on the standard Bicubic option, these settings are further optimized for different sizing operations. Bicubic Smoother is designed to produce the smoothest possible transitions between pixels, ideal when resizing a grainy or noisy image. It is also the option of choice on those rare occasions when you decide to enlarge an image. Bicubic Sharper is designed to preserve the sharpness and detail of an image when you reduce it, eliminating the need to apply Unsharp Mask after downsampling. Although these new interpolation options can be useful, they're best used on a case-by-case basis from inside the Image Size dialog box (see Chapter 3). |
| Tip | The moral is this: Select Bicubic to turn Photoshop's interpolation capabilities on and select Nearest Neighbor to turn them off. The Bilinear setting is a poor compromise between the other options — too slow for roughing out effects and too remedial to be worth your time. |
History States (your call): This value controls how many steps you can undo using the History palette. The right value depends on the amount of RAM you're willing to devote to Photoshop. If you're working with limited memory, I suggest that you lower the value to 5 or 10. Otherwise, raise the value as you see fit, remembering that the more states the program retains, the more you strain your system.
Export Clipboard (off): When selected, this option tells Photoshop to transfer a copied image from the program's internal Clipboard to the operating system's Clipboard whenever you switch applications. This enables you to paste the image into another running program. Turn this option off if you plan to use copied images only within Photoshop and want to reduce the lag time that occurs when you switch from Photoshop to another program. Even with this option off, you can paste images copied from other programs into Photoshop.
Show Tool Tips (on): When on, this option displays little labels and keyboard shortcuts when you hover your cursor over a tool or palette option. The tool tips don't impede Photoshop's performance, so I see no reason to turn off this option.
Zoom Resizes Windows (on): Select this option to force Photoshop to resize the image window when you zoom in or out on your image by choosing a Zoom command from the View menu or by using the keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl+plus (z -plus on the Mac) and Ctrl+minus (z -minus on the Mac). This one's really a matter of personal choice_I leave the option on (as it is by default on the Mac), but you'll do no harm to yourself or the planet if you turn it off. Either way, you can temporarily choose the opposite setting by pressing Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) as you choose the Zoom command.
Auto-Update Open Documents (on): This option creates and maintains a link between an open image and the image file on disk. Any time the image on disk updates, Photoshop updates the image on screen in kind. This feature is an amazing help when you're editing images with another artist over a network. Imagine that you and a coworker each have the same server file open in separate copies of Photoshop. Your coworker makes a change and saves it. Seconds later, your copy of Photoshop automatically updates the image on your screen. Then you make a change and save it, and Photoshop relays your modifications to your coworker's screen.So what happens if you're both editing the image simultaneously? Whoever saves first gets the glory. If your coworker saves the image before you do, any changes that you haven't saved are overwritten by the other person's work.
| Tip | However, you can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat simply by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Z (z -Option-Z on the Mac), which undoes your coworker's edits and retrieves yours. Quickly save your image to lob your changes over the net. Ooh, psych! With any luck, your coworker won't understand Photoshop well enough to know that your changes can be undone just as easily. But just to be safe, better hide this book from prying eyes. |
Show Asian Text Options (off): This option determines whether the Character and Paragraph palettes include options related to working with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean type. My recommendation here assumes that you're not adding text in those languages to your images.
Beep When Done (off): You can instruct Photoshop to beep at you whenever it finishes an operation that displays a Progress window. This option may be useful if you doze off during particularly time-consuming operations. But I'm a firm believer that computers should be seen and not heard.
Dynamic Color Sliders (on): When selected, this option instructs Photoshop to preview color effects in the slider bars of the Color palette. When the option is turned off, the slider bars show the same colors regardless of your changes. Unless you're working on a slow computer, leave this option on. On a fast machine, Photoshop takes a billionth of a second longer to calculate the color effects and it's well worth it.
Save Palette Locations (on): When this option is selected, Photoshop remembers the location of the toolbox and floating palettes from one session to the next. If you turn off this check box, Photoshop restores the default palette positions the next time you restart the program.
Show Font Names in English (on): Check this box, and Photoshop displays foreign fonts in intelligible names in the Font menu in the Options bar and in the Character palette — well, assuming that English is intelligible to you, anyway.
Use Shift Key for Tool Switch (off): When two or more tools share the same slot in the toolbox, you can press the keyboard shortcut associated with the tools to cycle through the tools. This Preferences option determines whether you must press Shift along with the shortcut. I recommend that you turn this option off — one extra keystroke per function adds up over the course of a day, you know.
| Note | In this book, I assume that you have this option turned off when I present tool shortcuts. |
Use Smart Quotes (on): Sometimes known as curly quotes, smart quotes are simply more attractive, curved versions of quotation marks and apostrophes. If you're using fonts that include smart quotes, by all means turn this option on.
PhoteshopHistory Log (your call): This new option lets you save information about the list of edits and operations applied to your images. For starters, turn on the History Log check box and select a radio button to specify whether you want to save the log along with the image's metadata, in a separate text file, or both. If you select the Metadata option, you'll be able to view the log information in the History panel of the File Info dialog box (that's Ctrl+Alt+I or z -Option-I). If you select the Text File radio button, Photoshop prompts you to specify a name and location for the log file. Naturally, the Both radio button saves the log information to metadata and a text tile.Use the Edit Log Items pop-up menu to specify the type of information you'd like to save to the log. The Sessions Only option simply keeps track of every time you launch and quit Photoshop and open and close files. Choose the Concise option to log the session information plus the data that's recorded in the History palette. Choose Detailed to log detailed information about every edit performed on an image, giving you a permanent record of the steps you took to achieve the final results.
Reset All Warning Dialogs: Every now and then, Photoshop displays a warning dialog box to let you know that the course you're on may have consequences you hadn't considered. Some dialog boxes include a check box that you can select to tell Photoshop that you don't want to see the current warning any more. If you click the Reset All Warning Dialogs button in the Preferences dialog box, Photoshop clears all the "don't show this warning again" check boxes so that you once again get all available warnings. Photoshop responds to your click of the reset button by displaying a warning dialog box telling you that all warning dialog boxes will be enabled if you go forward. Don't ponder the irony too long before you click OK.
File Handling
When in the Preferences dialog box, press Ctrl+2 (Win) or z -2 (Mac) to advance to the File Handling panel. Figures 2-18 and 2-19 show the panel as it appears on the PC and the Mac, respectively.
Figure 2-18: The File Handling panel as it appears on the PC.
Figure 2-19: The File Handling panel as it appears on the Mac.
Every option in the File Handling panel affects how Photoshop saves images to disk. The following list explains how the options work and the recommended settings:
Image Previews (Ask When Saving): When Always Save is active (as by default), Photoshop saves a postage-stamp preview so that you can see what an image looks like before opening or importing it. On the Mac, you can select as many as four kinds of image previews, as follows.The Icon option creates a preview icon that you can view from the Finder desktop. In my opinion, this option is hardly worth the extra disk space it takes up, and too many custom icons can cause problems with older versions of the system software.When you select one of the Thumbnail options, Photoshop creates a postage-stamp preview that appears in the Open dialog box when you select a file. The Macintosh Thumbnail option saves the preview in a part of the file known as the resource fork, but Windows doesn't recognize resource forks. So if you ever plan on previewing the image on a PC, you should select the Windows Thumbnail option as well.The fourth option, Full Size, creates a 72-dpi preview that can be used for placement in a page-layout program.
The problem with previews is that they slightly increase the size of the file. This is fine when doing print work — a thumbnail isn't going to add that much — but when creating Web graphics, every byte counts. That's why I prefer to select Ask When Saving from the Image Previews pop-up menu. This option makes the preview options available in the Save dialog box so that you can specify whether you want previews on a case-by-case basis when you save your images.
Append File Extension (Ask When Saving): Available only on the Mac, this option adds a three-character extension to the end of a file name to make your Mac images compatible with Windows and DOS programs. For example, a layered composition saved in the Photoshop format gets a .psd extension. I like to set this option to Ask When Saving; that way, I can decide whether or not to include a PC-style extension from inside the Save dialog box on a file-by-file basis.
| Tip | Actually, you can set the Append File Extension option to Never and still access extensions when saving images. Just press the Option key when selecting a file format and Photoshop automatically slaps on an extension. I describe this process in more detail in Chapter 3. |
TipFile Extension (Use Lower Case)/Use Lower Case (on): Called File Extension on the PC and Use Lower Case on the Mac, this option decides whether the three-character extension at the end of a file name is uppercase or lowercase. Lowercase is the better choice because it ensures compatibility with other platforms, particularly UNIX, the primary operating system for Web servers. (UNIX is case-sensitive, so a file called Image.psd is different than Image.PSD. Lowercase extensions eliminate confusion.)
PhoteshopIgnore EXIF sRGB tag (off)/Ignore EXIF profile tag (off): Okay, this is a controversial one, but I'm coming down on the side of the default. Virtually every modern digital camera embeds information about when and how a photo was captured (date, f-stop, flash setting, and so on) in the image file. Part of this so-called EXIF data (short for Exchangeable Image File) is a color profile, which is meant to convey the source of the photo so Photoshop knows how to handle its colors. It's a great idea, but there's a big problem. Most vendors make no attempt to profile their specific cameras, instead defaulting to sRGB (the color profile of last resort for just about every printer and scanner sold today). Meanwhile, rumor has it there's so little quality control that the profile is nearly meaningless. But here's my take on it: nearly meaningless is better than nothing. Better to have a vague sense of where your images come from than no sense at all. So me, I leave this check box off.
Ask Before Saving Layered TIFF Files (on):Chapter 3. These are useful options, so I say leave this turned on.
PhoteshopEnable Large Document Format (.psb) (off): Photoshop CS supports images of any file size or pixel dimension with a new file format called Large Document Format (PSB). You can open PSB files regardless of the status of this check box, but if you want to save to the PSB format, this option must be enabled. If you regularly work with images that weigh in at 2GB or more, turn on this option. Otherwise, feel free to leave it off. (For more information on the PSB format, consult Chapter 3.)
Maximize PSD File Compatibility (Never): This option is pure evil. If you never change another preference setting, you should set this one to Never. I know, I know, if it was so awful, Adobe wouldn't have it set to Ask by default. But believe me, this option should be named Double My File Sizes Because I'm an Absolute Fool, and even Adobe's designers will tell you that you probably want to go ahead and turn it off.Okay, so here's the long tragic story: The option ensures backward compatibility between Photoshop CS and programs that support the Photoshop file format but don't recognize layers. It's a nice idea, but it comes at too steep a price. To ensure compatibility, Photoshop has to insert an additional flattened version of a layered image into every native Photoshop file. As you can imagine, this takes up a considerable amount of disk space, doubling the file size in the most extreme situations.So set this option to Never. And when you want cross-application compatibility, save an extra TIFF version of your file (as explained in Chapter 3).
| Note | Actually, there is one instance when you might find this option useful. It permits older versions of After Effects or Illustrator to open files that contain layer effects that were added to Photoshop after those products shipped. |
Enable Version Cue Workgroup File Management (off): This option invokes a spin-off of WebDAV technology, which is a means for multiple users to share and modify documents over a network. Although not currently widely implemented, Adobe and others hope to see WebDAV (or just "DAV," as it's sometimes called) grow into a standard means of collaboration. And I'm not just talking about interoffice networks here; in the DAV world of the future, artists can collaborate with each other remotely from points around the globe.My guess is, most of you won't need this option, and those of you who do will be forced into it by some maniacal IT manager. For those in such a position, here's how it works. Turning this check box on inserts a Version Cue icon in the Open dialog box. Clicking the Version Cue icon enables you to check out files and work on collaborative efforts. If, after clicking the Version Cue icon, you need to work on a local file, simply click the Local Files icon in the Open dialog box.
Recent file list contains (10) files (your call): This option determines how many file names appear when you choose the Open Recent command, which displays a list of the images that you worked on most recently. You can simply click an image name to open the image. The default number of file names is ten, but you can raise it to 30. Raising the value doesn't use resources that would otherwise be useful to Photoshop, so enter whatever value makes you happy.
Display & Cursors
Press Ctrl+3 (z -3 on the Mac) to sidle up to the Display & Cursors options, which appear in Figure 2-20. These options affect the way colors and cursors appear on screen. Here's how the options work, along with recommended settings:
Figure 2-20: The Display & Cursors options control the way images and cursors look on screen. Shown here are the default settings, but I turn on Use Diffusion Dither.
Color Channels in Color (off): An individual color channel contains just 8 bits of data per pixel, which makes it equivalent to a grayscale image. Photoshop provides you with the option of colorizing the channel according to the primary color it represents. For example, when this option is turned on, the red color channel looks like a grayscale image viewed through red acetate. Most experts agree the effect isn't helpful, though, and it does more to obscure your image than make it easier for you to see what's happening. Leave this check box turned off and read Chapter 4 for more information.
Use Diffusion Dither (on): Here's an option for you folks still working on 8-bit screens that display no more than 256 colors at a time. To simulate the 16-million-color spectrum on a 256-color screen, Photoshop automatically jumbles colored pixels using a technique called dithering. This option controls the pattern of dithered pixels. Photoshop offers a naturalistic "diffusion" dither that looks nice on screen. But because the diffusion dither follows no specific pattern, you sometimes see distinct edges between selected and deselected portions of your image after applying a filter or some other effect. You can elimi- nate these edges and resort to a more geometric dither pattern by turning off this check box.
| Tip | Turning off the Use Diffusion Dither check box is a drastic (not to mention ugly) solution, though. The better way to eliminate the occasional visual disharmony is to force Photoshop to redraw the entire image. You can press Ctrl+Alt+0 (z -Option-0 on the Mac) or perform some other zoom function. |
Use Pixel Doubling (off): When you're editing huge images on a less-than-robust computer, this option can help speed up operations but not by much. When you select the option, Photoshop displays selected areas using a low-resolution proxy. This option goes into effect with selections and while moving layers.
Painting Cursors (Brush Size): When you use a paint or edit tool, Photoshop can display one of three cursors. The Standard cursor looks like a paintbrush, an airbrush, a finger, or whatever tool you are using. These cursors are great if you have problems keeping track of what tool you selected, but otherwise they border on childish.The Precise and Brush Size options are more functional. The Precise option displays a cross-shaped cursor — called a crosshair — regardless of which tool is active. The crosshair is great because it prevents the cursor from blocking your view as you edit. Meanwhile, the Brush Size option shows the actual size and shape of the active brush in the Brushes palette. The Brush Size option is the default setting in Photoshop CS, and that's a good thing. Most artists prefer this final setting to the others because it comes the closest to showing the cursor the way it really is.
| Tip | When Standard or Brush Size is selected, you can access the crosshair cursor by pressing the Caps Lock key. When Precise is selected from the Painting Cursors options, pressing Caps Lock displays the brush size. |
Other Cursors (Standard): Again, you can select Standard to get the regular cursors or Precise to get crosshairs. I prefer to leave this option set to Standard because you can easily access the crosshair cursor by pressing Caps Lock. The Precise option locks you into the crosshair whether or not you like it.
Transparency & Gamut
Press Ctrl+4 (z -4 on the Mac) to switch to the Transparency & Gamut panel shown in Figure 2-21. The options in this panel change how Photoshop displays two conceptual items — transparent space behind layers and RGB colors that can't be expressed in CMYK printing.
Figure 2-21: The options in this panel affect how Photoshop represents transparency and out-of-gamut colors. For the most part, you just want to select colors that you don't often see in your images.
The options are arranged into two groups — Transparency Settings and Gamut Warning — as explained in the following sections.
Transparency Settings
Just as the Earth spins around in empty space, a Photoshop image rests on a layer of absolute transparency. By default, Photoshop represents this transparency as a gray checkerboard pattern. (What better way to demonstrate nothingness? I might have preferred a few lines from a Jean-Paul Sartre play, but no matter.) You may get a brief glimpse of this checkerboard when you first open an image or switch to Photoshop from another application.When you view a layer independently of others, Photoshop fills the see-through portions of the layer with the checkerboard. So having the checkerboard stand out from the layer itself is essential. You can customize the size of the checkers and the color of the squares using the Grid Size and Grid Colors pop-up menus. You can also click the color swatches to define your own colors.
| Tip | To lift colors from the image window, move your cursor outside the Preferences dialog box to get the eyedropper. Click a color to change the color of the white checkers; Alt-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) to change the gray ones. |
If you own a TrueVision NuVista+ board or some other 32-bit device that enables chroma keying, you can select the Use Video Alpha check box to view a television signal in the transparent area behind a layer. Unless you work in video production, you needn't worry about this option.
Gamut Warning
If Photoshop can display a color on screen but can't accurately print the color, the color is said to be out of gamut. You can choose View Gamut Warning to coat all out-of-gamut colors with gray. I'm not a big fan of this command — View Proof Colors (Ctrl+Y or z -Y) is much more useful — but if you use View Gamut Warning, you don't have to accept gray as the out-of-gamut coating. Change the color by clicking the Gamut Warning Color swatch and lower the Opacity value to request a translucent coating.
Units & Rulers
The Units & Rulers panel is the fifth panel in the Preferences dialog box; hence, you reach the panel by pressing Ctrl+5 (z -5 on the Mac). Shown in Figure 2-22, this panel offers options that enable you to change the predominant system of measurement used throughout the program.
Figure 2-22: Go to the Units & Rulers panel to change the column and pica settings and set the unit of measurement. I prefer to use Pixels as opposed to Inches.
Rulers
You can set the unit of measurement with the Units option in the Preferences dialog box. But there's an easier way: Just right-click (Control-click on the Mac) anywhere on the ruler to display a pop-up menu of unit options and then click the unit you want to use. You can display the same pop-up menu by clicking the plus sign in the lower-left corner of the Info palette.When you're first learning Photoshop, going with inches or picas is tempting, but experienced Photoshop artists use pixels. Because you can change the resolution of an image at any time, the only constant is pixels. An image measures a fixed number of pixels high by a fixed number of pixels wide — you can print those pixels as large or as small as you want. (To learn more about resolution, read Chapter 3.)
Type
Photoshop enables you to set the unit of measure used for the type tool independently of the ruler units. You can work in points, pixels, and millimeters; select your unit of choice from the Type pop-up menu. Check out Chapter 15 for more news about type in Photoshop.
Column Size
The Column Size options enable you to size images according to columns in a newsletter or magazine. Enter the width of your columns and the size of the gutter in the Width and Gutter option boxes. Then use File New or Image Image Size to specify the number of columns assigned to the width of the image. I explain these commands in more detail in Chapter 3.
New Document Preset Resolutions
One nifty feature, first introduced in Photoshop 7, is the listing of preset sizes you get when you create a new document by choosing File New. These convenient presets come in common sizes for creating Web banners (46860) and for working with digital video (720540). The New Document Preset Resolutions preferences let you set a default resolution for these presets for both print and screen. This can be especially helpful for setting different print resolution if you commonly work at something other than the default of 300 pixels per inch. Adjusting the Print Resolution preference changes the number of pixels in the document when you choose the Letter preset, for example. For general purposes though, the defaults are just fine here.
Point/Pica Size
The last option in the Units & Rulers panel, Point/Pica Size, may be the most obscure of all Photoshop options. First you need to know that exactly 12 points are in a pica, and about 6.06 picas are in an inch.
Because picas are almost evenly divisible into inches, the folks who came up with the PostScript printing language decided to bag the difference and define a pica as exactly 1/6 inch. This makes a point exactly 1/72 inch.But a few purists didn't take to it. They found their new electronic documents weren't quite matching their old paste-up documents and, well, I guess life pretty much lost its meaning. So Adobe had to go back and add the Traditional (72.27 points/inch) option to keep everyone happy.I prefer the nontraditional PostScript definition of points. This way, a pixel on screen translates to a point on paper when you print an image at 72 ppi (the standard screen resolution). Call me a soulless technodweeb, but computer imaging makes more sense when you can measure points and pixels without resorting to a calculator. The old ways are dead; long live the 1/72-inch point!
Guides, Grid & Slices
Someone at Adobe said, "Let the preference settings continue." And, lo, we have Guides, Grid & Slices, which can be accessed by all who press Ctrl+6 (z -6 on the Mac) and viewed by all who cast an eye on Figure 2-23. This panel lets you modify the colors of the guides and specify the size of the grid.
Figure 2-23: Use these options to adjust the size of the grid and change the way the ruler guides, grid, and slices appear on screen.
| Tip | You can display the Preferences dialog box and go directly to the Guides, Grid & Slices panel by double-clicking a guide with the move tool or Ctrl-double-clicking (z -double-clicking on the Mac) with another tool. (To create a guide, drag from the horizontal or vertical ruler into the image.) |
I explain these options in more detail in Chapter 12 but, for the moment, here are some brief descriptions.
Guides
Select a color for horizontal and vertical ruler guides from the Color pop-up menu. To lift a color from the image, move your cursor outside the Preferences dialog box and click in the image window with the eyedropper. You can also view guides as solid lines or dashes by selecting an option from the Style pop-up menu.
Grid
Choose a color for the grid from the Color menu, or Alt-click (Option-click on the Mac) in the image window to lift a color from the image. Then decide how the grid lines look by selecting a Style option. The Dots setting is the least intrusive.The Gridline Every value determines the increments for the visible grid marks on screen. But the Subdivisions value sets the real grid. For example, if you request a grid mark every one inch with four subdivisions, Photoshop snaps selections and layers in 1/4-inch increments (one inch divided by four).
Slices
Like setting the color for guides and the grid, the Slices preference lets you choose a color for the lines that illustrate exactly where you've sliced up your image for posting on the Web. You can turn on and off the visibility of the slice numbers here as well.
Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks
Press Ctrl+7 (Win) or z -7 (Mac) to advance to the panel shown in Figure 2-24. Each time you launch Photoshop, the program searches for plug-in modules and identifies one or more scratch disks. You have to tell Photoshop where to find the plug-ins and where the temporary scratch files should go.
Figure 2-24: Tell Photoshop where to find plug-ins and where to put scratch files using these options.
Additional Plug-Ins Folder
By default, the plug-ins are located in a folder called Plug-Ins, which resides in the same folder as the Photoshop application. But you can tell Photoshop to also look for plug-ins in some other folder_a handy option if you install all your third-party plug-ins to some central location outside the Photoshop folders. To specify the second plug-ins location, select the check box and then click Choose to select the folder.
Legacy Photoshop Serial Number
As you might have noticed when you installed it, Photoshop CS continues the new era in Adobe serial numbers first introduced with Photoshop 7. No longer are they a mixture of numbers and letters; it's all just numbers and dashes now. Some third-party plug-ins, however, serialize themselves to the old-style Photoshop serial number format. So if you're upgrading to Photoshop CS and you have an old serial number from Photoshop 6 or earlier, you can enter it here.
Scratch Disks
By default, Photoshop assumes you have only one hard disk, so it stores its temporary virtual memory documents — called scratch files — on the same disk that contains your system software. If you have more than one drive available, though, you might want to tell Photoshop to look elsewhere. In fact, Photoshop can use up to four drives.
For example, one of my Windows computers is equipped with two internal hard drives:
A 60GB drive, C:, contains the system and most of the workaday documents I create.
The other drive is a 40GB device partitioned into two 20GB segments. These are formatted as the D: and E: drives. D: contains all my applications, and E: remains largely empty except for a few large miscellaneous files — QuickTime movies, digital camera snapshots, weird plug-ins — that I haven't gotten around to backing up yet.
E: has the most free space, so I set it as the First scratch disk. On the off chance that my images get so huge that Photoshop fills up E: and has to look elsewhere for scratch space, I select D: from the Second pop-up menu and my main system drive, C:, from the Third. That's the end of my drives, so Fourth remains set to None.
| Caution | Adobe advises against using removable media — such as SyQuest, MO, and Zip drives — as a scratch disk. Removable media is typically less reliable and slower than a permanent drive. (A Jaz cartridge is more stable than Zip or the others, but still not as reliable as a fixed hard drive.) Using a removable drive on an occasional basis isn't the end of the world, but if you use it regularly, you may end up crashing more often, in which case you'll probably want to add a new hard drive. |
Changes affect the next session
As the note at the bottom of the Plug-ins & Scratch Disks panel warns, the settings in this panel don't take effect until the next time you launch Photoshop. This means you must quit Photoshop and restart the program.There's nothing more frustrating than knowing that the options in this dialog box are set incorrectly before you've even started Photoshop. It means you have to launch Photoshop, change the settings, quit Photoshop, and launch the program again. What a waste of time!
Memory & Image Cache
Photoshop sports a caching scheme that speeds operations at reduced view sizes. You can adjust this feature by pressing Ctrl+8 (Win) or z -8 (Mac) in the Preferences dialog box to display the Memory & Image Cache panel shown in Figure 2-25.
Figure 2-25: Photoshop's caching capabilities speed the processing of very large images. This is also where you specify how much memory goes to Photoshop.
Cache Levels
Photoshop has been criticized for its lack of a "pyramid-style" file format capable of storing an image several times over at progressively smaller and smaller image sizes, called downsamplings. Photoshop's alternative is image caching. Rather than saving the downsamplings to disk, Photoshop generates the reduced images in RAM. By default, the Cache Levels value is set to 4, the medium value. This means Photoshop can cache up to four downsamplings — at 100, 50, 25, and 12.5 percent — which permits the program to apply operations more quickly at reduced view sizes. For example, if you choose a color correction command at the 50-percent view size, it previews much faster than normal because Photoshop has to modify a quarter as many pixels on screen.However, Photoshop must cache downsamplings in RAM, which takes away memory that could be used to hold the image. If you have lots of RAM (say, 256MB or more) and you frequently work on large images (20MB or larger), you'll probably want to raise the value to the maximum, 8. The lost memory is worth the speed boost. If you have little RAM (say, 192MB or less) and you usually work on small images or Web graphics (4MB or smaller), you may want to reduce the Cache Levels value to 1 or 2. When files are small, RAM is better allocated to storing images rather than caching them.
Use Cache for Histograms in Levels
The Use Cache for Histograms in Levels check box tells Photoshop whether to generate the histograms that appear in the Levels and Threshold dialog boxes based on the cached sampling or the original image. As I explain in Chapter 17, a histogram is a bar graph of the colors in an image. When you choose a command such as Image Adjustments Levels, Photoshop must spend a few seconds graphing the colors. If you turn on the Use Cache for Histograms in Levels check box, Photoshop graphs the colors in the reduced screen view, which takes less time but is also less accurate. Turn off the check box for slower, more accurate histograms.Generally speaking, I say turn the option on. A histogram is merely a visual indicator and most folks are unable to judge the difference between a downsampled histo-gram and a fully accurate one.Again, if you're working in very large images and have the Cache Levels value maxed out at 8, you should probably turn on this check box. But if you have to reduce the Cache Levels value, leave the check box turned off. Histograms are the first thing that can go.
| Note | This option is not responsible for the histogram irregularities that popped up in Photoshop 4. The fact that the Threshold dialog box sometimes lifted its histogram from only the active layer was a bug, not a function of Use Cache for Histograms in Levels. Even so, this option has received a lot of flack it did not deserve. My opinion is that, on balance, this is a positive feature that should be turned on. |
Memory Usage
Mac OS X and Windows 95, NT 4, and later offer dynamic memory allocation, which means that each application gets the memory it needs as it needs it. But Photoshop is something of a memory pig and has a habit of using every spare bit of RAM it can get its hands on. Left to its own devices, it might gobble up all the RAM and bleed over into the operating system's virtual memory space, which is less efficient than Photoshop's own scratch disk scheme.The Memory Usage option helps you place some limits on Photoshop's ravenous appetite. The option lists the amount of RAM available to all applications after the operating system loads into memory. You can then decide how much of that memory should go to Photoshop. If you like to run lots of applications at the same time — your word processor, Web browser, spreadsheet program, drawing program, and Photoshop, for example — set the Maximum Used by Photoshop value to 50 percent or lower. But if Photoshop is the only program running — and if you have less than 192MB of RAM — raise the value to 70 to 80 percent.
| Caution | I recommend against taking the Maximum Used by Photoshop value any higher than 80 percent, particularly on a low-capacity machine (192MB or less). Doing so permits Photoshop to fill up RAM that the operating system might need, which makes for a less stable working environment. As I've said before, if Photoshop is going too slow for you and hitting the scratch disk too often, buy more RAM — don't play dangerous games with the little RAM you do have. |
File Browser
| Photoshop | As part of a broad range of enhancements to the File Browser, Photoshop CS now lets you specify preferences using the new File Browser panel. Press Ctrl+9 (Win) or z -9 (Mac) to proceed to the panel, pictured in Chapter 3. To learn how the File Browser preferences settings work, read on: |
Figure 2-26: Visit this panel to specify several settings that govern the performance of the File Browser.
Do Not Process Files Larger than (200MB): This option determines the maximum size of a file that can be processed in the File Browser. The default setting of 200MB should be more than adequate for most folks. If you typically work with larger images, you may want to set the value higher. But keep in mind that larger files can significantly slow down the performance of the browser.
Display Most Recently Used Folders in Location Popup (10): This option lets you specify the number of recently accessed folders displayed at the bottom of the File Browser's folder path pop-up menu. The default setting of 10 folders is generally enough for everyday use. If you regularly work with a larger number of folders, however, feel free to set this option higher.
Custom Thumbnail Size (your call): This option sets the size at which the thumbnail image previews appear in the File Browser window when you choose Custom Thumbnail Size from the browser's View menu. There's nothing wrong with the default setting of 256 pixels, but feel free to crank it up if you have a large monitor.
Allow Background Processing (on): When selected, this check box tells the File Browser to generate its cache information, such as previews and metadata, in the background while you work. It's great because it means you don't have to sit there and stare at the browser window to get it to do anything. The only downside, and the reason it's turned off by default, is that it can slow down the performance of the rest of Photoshop. I say turn it on and judge for yourself whether it becomes a problem.
High Quality Previews (on): When enabled, this option instructs Photoshop to generate high-resolution previews of images in the File Browser's Preview panel. That's a good thing, so unless your computer is in dire need of more RAM, I suggest you leave this option on, as it is by default.
Render Vector Files (on): Turn on this option to instruct Photoshop to display thumbnail previews of vector art files in the File Browser. Although this slows the File Browser down a little, it can be a real timesaver when you're searching through folders that contain Illustrator files or other vector-based artwork.
Parse XMP Metadata from Non-Image Files (off): This option lets you view and edit metadata for non-image files, such as Adobe Illustrator artwork or PDF documents. If that's a capability you'd like to have, by all means turn on this option. Otherwise, leave it off.
Keep Sidecar Files with Master Files (on): Photoshop CS appends metadata to just about every kind of image file. But what does it do about file formats that it can't save, such as native Camera Raw files captured by various digital camera models? The solution is sidecar files, little files full of metadata that Photoshop can read along with an image file. By default, the sidecar files stay close to their master image files. This makes it easier to track the files and keep them together. In this case, the default way is the best way, so leave this option on.
