The Extra-Strength Tips for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

You guys haven't gotten any ImageReady tips from me in over six months, so this installment will be dedicated to those of you who create web graphics. But don't worry, even if you only do print work, you'll find interesting things you can do to amaze and delight your friends and enemies! Just in case you don't know, Photoshop comes bundled with ImageReady, and all you have to do to switch between the two is to click on the bottom-most icon at the bottom of Photoshop's tool palette.

First the fun stuff, because I'm feeling frisky. With Image Ready open, choose About ImageReady from either the ImageReady, File or Help menu depending on what flavor of operating system you're using. You should get the standard 'about box'. Click anywhere within that screen to make it disappear and then take a look at the top of your tool palette. Try holding Option (Mac), or Alt (Win) and clicking on the big icon that stretches all the way across the top of the tool palette and what do you see? That's right, it's a rubber ducky! And now that you've done that, choose About ImageReady one more time to get a little surprise. Now, before you click to make it go away, try holding Command (Mac), or Ctrl (Win) and clicking anywhere within the blue area... what do ya get? More rubber duckies!! (add shift when clicking to clean all the ducks) And just when you thought that this ridiculousness had reached its high point, create a new empty document with a transparent background and then type D U C K E R B O A R D (without the spaces and lowercase... well, then why did you type it that way Ben!). You can type it a second time to get things back to normal.

Ok, now that we've got some of silliness out of the way, I feel like being productive, so here comes some real tips:

If you use the four tabs that show up at the top of each document a lot (Original, Optimized, 2-up & 4-up), then you might want to try typing Command-Y (Mac), or Ctrl-Y (Win) instead of clicking tabs. Each time you type that shortcut, it will cycle to the next tab. Want to have a second window full of optimized images (2 up, 4 up , etc.), then just drag the tab that is active to an open part of your screen and bingo! You've got a new window.

Are you used to choosing Image>Duplicate to create an identical document? Well, why not hold Option (Mac), or Alt (Win) and drag the Original tab from the top of your image into an empty part of your screen. That's all ya gotta do to get a dupe.

If you're still using web safe colors (I'm not, but then again I'm lazy), then try this one on for size: Click your foreground color, pick any color and then look for the Color Cube icon in the upper right of the color picker. Clicking on that icon will give you a web safe color. But did you know that you can click, hold down the mouse button and then drag around that cube icon (in an imaginary circle surrounding the cube) to get a total of eight different web safe colors that are similar to the color you started with?

Ok, after all that excitement, I'm getting a little tired and think it's time for my hourly nap. Before I snooze out, here's one last ImageReady tip: When you've got an animation created and you'd like to check out all the individual frames one at a time, try holding Option (Mac), or Alt (Win) (making sure you're not in the Move tool) and then and using the left and right arrow keys to cycle through the animation one frame at a time. You can add shift to go to the first or last frame. And if you really want to be glued to your keyboard, try typing Shift-Spacebar to play or pause the animation.

Oh, and thanks to those of you who took the time to fill out my survey last week. If you didn't get a chance to, you can still visit www.digitalmastery.com/survey to give it a whirl.

-Ben Willmore