Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements

Photoshop is the 800-pound gorilla of the graphics world. It’s a complicated, hard-core program best left to trained professionals wearing protective garb. Elements, meanwhile, is a “lite” version of Photoshop, providing about 80 percent of the big program’s features for about 15 percent of the cost. These hints apply to both programs.

Zooming with a Scroll-Wheel Mouse

Here we go again with the scroll-wheel mouse: if you press Option as you turn the little wheel, you magnify or reduce your Photoshop document, zooming in (by scrolling down) or out (by scrolling up).

Tip

The program is set to zoom in large, jerky increments (you jump from 66.7 percent to 100 percent to 200 percent, and so on). But by pressing Option and Shift, you can do the zoom thing in much finer, smoother increments.

Speeding Up Batch Conversions

Photoshop’s File → Automate → Batch command lets you apply resizing and formatting changes to a large number of files at once, while you sit back and leaf through a magazine.

To accelerate your batch conversions, send Photoshop to the background. That’s because when it’s not the frontmost program, Photoshop doesn’t bother to redraw the screen as it opens and modifies every file in the batch. The result is much faster processing.

Force Adobe Help Files to Open in Another Browser

Adobe’s help files are factory-set to open in Internet Explorer, one of the oldest and least powerful of the Mac OS X browsers (Section 12.2). If you’d rather have the ...