PTotD

Tip #59. I seem to be in a performance loop. Bridge uses up a lot of your computer’s resources, too. If you have been digging through your stash for something that will be ‘just right’ you have also been building a large cache of images that’s taking up drive space. When you close Bridge, it might want to pause before it closes and optimize the cache. Never stop it from doing that. In fact, you might want to force it to do that by going to Edit | Preferences and selecting the Cache page. There, you can tell Bridge to optimize or purge the cache. You can limit the overall size of the cache by limiting the number of items to store in it. The range is from 10,000 to 500,000 items, so the cache can handle a lot of items if it has to. You might find that making your cache size too small means you are always waiting for images to become visible after you open a folder. I don’t mind waiting, so I keep the cache small.

PTotD

Tip #58. If you are one of those folks who likes to do a little work in Photoshop, switch to E-mail, pop open Word to read a document you just downloaded from a website, and listen to music all at the same time, you might be having trouble with Photoshop taking forever to do anything. Close any application that you don’t need to have open. If you must check your G-mail or pop in on Facebook, then make sure you close your browser when you are done. Use a radio or a CD player. Don’t you have an iPod you haven’t used in ages? Putting on headphones means you don’t have to answer the phone when they call trying to sell you lawn care service and Photoshop will run faster.

Moving to a Medium Tablet

As soon as the budget allows, I'm getting a larger tablet. I use an Intuos 4 small and it simply does not work with the things that I want to do. There is a relationship (that can be changed) between the tablet and the screen. I can set the tablet so it only works for a portion of my screen. That only works for specific jobs. I use a dual monitor setup. Making the tablet active on a portion of one monitor leaves me with a lot of screen inactive.

There are also features on the Medium that are not available for the small. There are more buttons. The buttons have an LCD screen next to each button, so I can tell what functions I've assigned to each button. Right now, I don't use the buttons because I never remember which button is which. I have enough to remember already.

I've been experimenting with different settings for my pen. There are two buttons on the side of the standard pen, and I only regularly use the lower one. I can also set the eraser to perform a specific function when I tap it on the tablet, which I have not done yet. I'm thinking about setting it for a double-click.

The Intuos manual is extremely well written. The folks there know right brained folks and left brained folks and have created a manual that both types would be happy with. There is a lot of detail, explained in plain English. If you don't read the manual, you won't understand the features and won't get the full benefit of the tablet.

PTotD

Tip # 57. Another option to save space is to save as .tiff, not .psd. Tiff files are much smaller and you’ll still have layers available.

PTotD

Tip #56. Many .psd files are huge. Like many times the size of a .jpg, and is that ten times larger, or a thousand, or that wonky 1,024 that never divides evenly? Like you didn’t think you were going to fill up that external hard drive already, but you have. What to do? Flatten when you can. You don’t have to flatten the entire image. You can merge several layers into a single layer and reduce the total number of layers. A frame with doo-dads on it can become a single layer instead of a frame layer and separate layers for each doo-dad. If you added a layer and then turned off the visibility, but didn’t delete the layer, go back and delete that layer. But if you can flatten the entire image, you might want to. An image with 10 layers dropped down to 26% of what it was before I flattened it. And for crying out loud, you don’t have to save everything with the quality at 12!

PTotD

Tip # 55. Be patient. Sometimes, the task you think should be simple, isn’t. Your processor is busy crunching numbers trying to figure out how to adjust all of those pixels and it’s going to take some time before it does the math and comes up with the answers. That Dry Brush Artistic Filter that will make your photo look like a painting is going to take some time before it is complete and you can see what it looks like. Relax. Let Photoshop do the job it was designed to do. If you have to wait for Photoshop to do something that really is simple, like fill an area with color, you might want to look for a newer and more capable computer with a better processor and more RAM.

PTotD

Tip #54. If you aren’t interested in learning a bunch of lower and upper case letters, try an option-click or right-click with your cursor on the tool, to see all of the possible tool options and select the one you want. Why do I know this? Sometimes, my hand wobbles and it is difficult to click exactly on that itsy-bitsy triangle. Sometimes, I’m just in too much of a hurry to be picky about those darned triangles. A right-click is much more user friendly.