Photoshop CS Timesaving Techniques For Dummies [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Get Organizing!

Photoshop cs gives you many options to organize your image files — you can rank and flag them, sort images, and add and move images around the File Browser.

Flagging files

If you need to quickly sort through many images (suppose you import 50 photos from a digital camera), flagging images in the File Browser is a quick way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

To flag an image, simply select the image you want to flag in the Preview pane, and then click the Flag icon at the top of the File Browser window. A small flag icon appears at the bottom-right corner of the image thumbnail in the Preview pane. You can view either flagged or unflagged image files by selecting either the Flagged Files or Unflagged Files option or both from the Show drop-down list at the top right of the File Browser window (see Figure 1-4).

Figure 1-4: Use the Show drop-down list to select whether you want to view flagged or unflagged files, or all files.

Ranking files

Another way to sort files is to rank them. Suppose you flag 20 photo files, and then just view those flagged files, which I discuss in the preceding section. You can also line the images up in a specific order. This is where ranking comes in. Ranking lets you control how to sort images in the File Browser. You can rank one image at a time or give the same rank to several selected images.

To rank images, follow these steps:

1. 
   

   Select the image or images you want to rank in the Preview pane.

   If you want to select more than one image, you can either Shift+click or Ctrl+click/z +click the files you want to select.

   
   

2. 
   

   Right-click/Ctrl+click the selected image and choose the Rank option from the shortcut menu or choose Edit>Rank from the File Browser’s menu bar.

   The Rank Files dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 1-5.

   
   

   Figure 1-5: Rank image files with the Rank Files dialog box.
   

   
   

3. 
   

   Enter numbers and/or letters in the Rank text box.

   When you sort the files, Photoshop sorts them numerically and/or alphabetically, depending upon what you enter in the Rank text box.
   

   
   

4. 
   

   Click OK.

   To view the image ranks, choose View> Show Rank from the File Browser menu.

   To sort the images in the Preview pane by rank, choose Sort>Rank.

   
   

Sorting images

The File Browser comes with more than a dozen ways you can sort image files. With the Sort menu, you can sort by filename, by image dimensions, resolution, file type, when you created the images, and much more.

To sort a folder of images displayed in the Preview pane, simply click the Sort menu at the top of the File Browser window, and then choose from one of the many options. The images sort and re-sort the way you choose.

Turning the File Browser into a lightbox

When working with 35mm slides on a lightbox, I move the slides around, rearrange them in the order that I need them in, and then place them in a plastic slide page to keep them in that order. You can do the same thing with the File Browser.

To sort images as you do with a lightbox, click the Toggle Expanded View arrows at the bottom of the File Browser, as shown in Figure 1-6. This hides the palettes at the left side of the File Browser and expands the area of the Preview pane.

Figure 1-6: The Toggle Expanded View arrows hide the palettes and enlarge the Preview pane.

You can now just drag the image thumbnails around on the virtual lightbox into the order you want to sort them. Note: When you drag an image file to a new position, the other files move over to make room, automatically snapping into position.