The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore
(www.digitalmastery.com):

As I write this I'm lounging across three seats on a flight from Los Angeles to Denver. After presenting a one day web seminar in L.A., I'm happy to be returning home and will have two whole days to call my own before setting off for Dallas, Houston and Erie, PA for a slew of more seminars. Oh, the life of a Photoshop Hack. I'm looking forward to taking a
vacation at the beginning of May! After speaking for 13 days in less than I month, my talking mechanism will be happy to rest.

I just upped the amount of memory (RAM) in my laptop from 256 to 769MB. Boy does Photoshop love RAM! I can now run a few other programs at the same time. If you haven't checked memory prices lately, you might be in for a pleasant surprise because it's quite affordable right now. To find the lowest price on memory, point your browser to www.ramseeker.com.

Photoshop 6.0.1 has now been officially released, so you should be able to
find it at www.adobe.com. 6.0.1 is mainly a bug fix, but it also add a few tiny refinements. When using any painting or retouching tool, you can now press Enter to toggle the visibility of the Brushes palette. That's makes it much faster to switch brushes. You can also press Enter when using the Gradient tool to toggle the visibility of the present gradients palette. Not only that, but Adobe fixed a few bugs. You can now safely save a clipping path in a TIFF file so that Quark Xpress will load everything correctly. They also fixed a Scratch Disk problem. If your computer bombed before you had a chance to quit, Photoshop might leave an invisible file on your hard drive. That file could end up being many megabytes in size, but that's been fixed in 6.0.1. The updater is free for registered owners of 6.0.

I'll try to give you a heads up when ever I mention a Photoshop 6.0 specific tip because I know that some people are still using version 5.5. So, unless I specifically mention that a tip is unique to Photoshop 6, then please assume that the same tip will also work with previous versions of Photoshop.

Photoshop supports 18 different file formats, but I find I only use five of those choices. I use GIF or JPEG for web graphics, EPS or TIFF for print publishing and PSD as my working file format (before I'm done working on the image). So, why should I have all the other choices cluttering up the Save dialog box? Well, you don't have to. Just open your Photoshop folder and then go into the Plug-ins>File Formats folder. You'll find six file formats listed and you can add a tilde (~) to the beginning of any of those file names to disable that format (you can make it available again by removing the tilde). The changes you make won't appear in Photoshop until you re-launch the program though. You can do the same thing for many of the Photoshop filters that appear in the Plug-Ins folder.

You can even have multiple plug-ins folders on your drive, then if you hold
Option and Command (Macintosh), or Alt and Ctrl (Windows) when you launch Photoshop, it should ask you which plug-ins folder you'd like to use for this session in Photoshop.

Speaking of launching Photoshop, did you know that in Photoshop 6.0, you
can hold Shift, Command and Option (Macintosh), or Shift Alt and Ctrl (Windows) while it's launching and that will reset all your preferences back to their default settings?

I just finished reading a file of undocumented features in Photoshop and ran across a gem. If you use the Image>Liquify command, you can hold the Shift key when clicking the OK button to have Photoshop remember the distortion you've applied to your image. Then, if you'd like to use the same setting on another image, just open that image and then hold Shift when you choose Image>Liquify. Cool!

Here's another hidden gem. When working with text, link multiple text layers together and then hold Shift when changing a type related setting (like font, size, or type warping settings) and then those settings will be applied to all the layers that are linked. The changes might not show up until you make another layer active though.

Well, the pilot just warned us that we're 15 minutes away from the airport, so I have to put my seat back and tray table in their upright position and.... You know the routine. That means I should sign off before they pry my computer out of my lap. Talk to you next week.

-Ben Willmore