Ben's Extra-Strength Photoshop Tips for the clients and friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com).

Hi,

I've just returned from doing a gig for the Royal Photographic Society in Rugby, England (my first foray across the Atlantic) and happy to say I found those Photoshopping Brits to be most welcoming. I've touched down for a couple of days and wanted to get you a few tips while my feet are still on the ground. If you're in the Northern California area, be sure to read the P.S. part of this message-I'm heading to San Francisco in December and will be doing something that you might like to be a part of. So, enough of my travel diary, let's get to the good stuff. This time we're going to explore some special techniques for opening and saving your images.

If you're in a hurry when launching Photoshop, you can hold the Command key (Mac), or Ctrl key (Windows) to have the New Document dialog box pop-up after launch. You can also hold the Option key (Mac), or Alt key (Windows) to bring up the Open dialog box upon launch. I'm not usually in that much of a hurry, but it's always nice to know about all those hidden keyboard commands that are next to impossible to find in the manual.

Sometimes I get working on a project where each Photoshop document I create needs to be exactly the same size (baseball cards for example). The problem is that the File>New dialog box bases its width, height, resolution and mode settings on whatever I copied last (the contents on the clipboard really). Well, as long as the last document you created is your target size, then you can hold the Option key (Mac), or Alt key (Windows) when choosing File>New to have it ignore what you copied last and instead just use the same settings you used the last time you created a new document. I usually just type Option-Command-N (Mac), or Alt-Ctrl-N (Windows) because it's much faster than using the File menu.

This bit is just for Mac users. I've just switched to Mac OSX on my main computer and in making that transition, I've run into one great frustration: When I double-click on a file in OS9, it almost always knew what program created the image and would therefore open it in the program that I wanted it to. OSX on the other hand, usually thinks a little more generically about file types. It will often open my files in Preview instead of Photoshop. I fix that by clicking once on the file, typing Command-I to Get Info on it, and then look at the Open With setting. That's where I can specify the program I'd like OSX to use when I double-click on the file. After changing this setting, you can click on the Change All button to force OSX to open all files that are in that format (TIFF for example) to open with the program you specify.

Ok Windows folks, you can come back now. Every once and a while someone will send me a CD that contains a 350MB+ Photoshop document on it. Well, if I have my usual suite of applications open (e-mail, web, contacts, calendar, etc.), then Photoshop takes forever to open the file because it's low on RAM. When that's the case, I hold Option and Shift (Mac), or Alt and Shift (Windows) while opening the file. That causes Photoshop to prompt me, asking if I'd like to only open the flattened version of the image (known as the composite image) instead of loading all the layers. Since the flattened version is often 1/10th the size of the full file, it usually opens quickly. Then only later when I really have time to deal with the image will I open the full layered version.

If you're like me, once you have a file open, it's easy to forget where it is stored on your hard drive. You can quickly find out by holding Command (Mac) and clicking on the file name at the top of the image. I don't think you have to hold any key on Windows, but I'm not sure.

When I have dozens of images open in Photoshop, I'll often type Option-command-W (Mac), or Alt-Ctrl-W (Windows) to close all of them at once. Then, if Photoshop asks if I want to save the changes I've made on a file, I'll type the first letter of the button I'd like to use, which is the same as pressing it (S=Save, D=Don't Save, etc.).

On occasion, I accidentally type Command-S (Mac) or Ctrl-S (Windows). It usually happens when I meant to type Command-A (Mac), or Ctrl-A (Windows) to select the entire document. If I really didn't want to do that, then I'll open the Window>History palette and click on a previous step (one where the image looked the way I really wanted it to when it was saved) and then I'll type Command-S (Mac), or Ctrl-S (Windows) again to save that version of the image. In the end, it's like undoing the accidental save since I was able to get back to a previous version and resave it. The only problem is that this doesn't work when my stupid finger bumps both the S and W keys, which both saves the image and closes it! Oh well, at least that doesn't happen too often.

Since this tip is getting a bit long-winded, I think I'll end it here before I accidentally close this word document before saving the changes. But before you go... if you're near the San Francisco area, don't forget to read the PS to this message.

-Ben