Use these keys to quickly select items in any Windows dialog. Press Alt+Down Arrow to open a dropdown list and then use the Up Arrow and Down Arrow to navigate to an item to select. Use the Space Bar to select or deselect options in the dialog box or, if an item has a letter underlined in its description press Alt + that letter – for example for File, press Alt + F.
Labels: dialog box navigation, how to, key shortcuts, Microsoft Office, navigate, tip, trevor office, trevor payne
Categories:office, trevor tip
In any Windows program, Office included you can move through dialog boxes quickly without using your mouse if you press the Tab key on your keyboard. Tab moves you from one selectable item to the next. To move in reverse press Shift + Tab. If you press Ctrl + Tab you can move to the next tab in a tabbed dialog and press Ctrl + Shift + Tab to go back one tab.
Labels: dialog box, how to, Microsoft Office, navigate dialog, tip, trevor office, trevor payne, Word
Categories:office, trevor tip
Improve your photography by undertaking self assignments. In this video I’ll describe how to undertake a self assignment, some topics for it, and how to assess your progress.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to talk about photographic self-assignments. What is a self-assignment. Self-assignments are short self-assigned photo projects that you shoot just for the sake of shooting. And typically they shouldn’t require you to go out and buy anything special or to go anywhere special to do them. They are the sort of thing you could go and do immediately after you’ve finished watching this video — grab your camera and you’re ready to start.
It’s a good idea to do self-assignments regularly and when you are not under pressure to capture anything at all worthwhile so you’d never undertake one when you are the main photographer at a wedding for example. Self-assignments are generally quite short so you can spend as little as a few minutes at a time on them — but of course they can consume a lot more time if you have it available.
Self-assignments technically have a topic — you’re not just out to shoot, you’re out to shoot a something or to practice something — you’re not aiming to shoot ‘keepers’ so much as you are aiming to learn something. Self-assignment should take you out of your comfort zone and help you see things or experiment with techniques and your kit.
When you’re preparing for a self- assignment, firstly you need to allocate the time to work on your self-assignment. Often you can find it by repurposing time you already spend doing something such as walking to the bus station — make this the time that you work on your self-assignment. Or you could park a few blocks from your office and walk there, walk at lunchtime or walk when you get home at night and, as you walk, you can photograph for your self-assignment. If you don’t get out a lot then photograph inside your house or your backyard or spend the time waiting at an airport or train station catching shots for your current self-assignment.
You will also need to take a camera with you — everywhere. It doesn’t have to be your good camera but it’s good if it is. It might seem strange to carry your camera with you all the time but the more you do so, the less uncomfortable you will feel and you’ll really notice it when you don’t have your camera handy.
Plan your self-assignment — You’ll need a topic or a focus for your shooting. It should be something that challenges you and forces you to learn something new or to look at the world a little differently. Some topics which you might want to pursue are: saturated colors, circles, paint marks, streetlights, the color blue, doors, shadows, repetition, food, street art, reflections, or alphabet which is a great one for the airport. Don’t expect to always nail the project on day 1 — so if you’re shooting something like circles — it’s worth going over the same territory a couple of days in a row — notice how many more circles you see on day 2 than you did on day 1. Your assignment might also be related to a piece of your kit — perhaps you have an unused or little used lens in your case — unused because you really don’t know how to use it — and because you can’t trust yourself to use it for important situations the cycle becomes self-repeating so you never use it.
Set yourself a self-assignment to shoot with the lens for a couple of weeks. By the end of the two weeks you’ll know a lot more about the lens and how to use it. If you’re someone who always uses the Auto mode on your camera now is a good time to start using Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority mode and start learning what creative possibilities they might offer. Determine the topic or focus of your self-assignment and a timeframe to work in. Once you’re done with the first assignment you’ll ready to start on the next but don’t be surprised if you continue to shoot these self-assignment themes in other situations.
When you are working on a self- assignment, download the images as often as you can and view the results. Assess how you’ve gone in your project. How easy was it for you to ‘see’ things that matched your topic. Assess the technical aspect of your shots — are they in focus, is the depth of field used appropriate for the subject matter — how would you improve the shot next time and what will you do differently tomorrow? If you’re working on a self-assignment to learn how to use a piece of kit, ask yourself what have you learned about it. What worked and what did not work. Analyse the results in front of you to determine what you’ll try that will be different tomorrow or the next day. What you’ll gain Self-assignments are creative learning projects so approach them with a sense of wonder and enthusiasm for your topic — reward yourself when you see something you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t been doing your self-assignment.
Self-assignments can help you see the world different and they’re guaranteed to make you a better photographer. If you are a creative person who wishes they could photograph more but have to juggle photography with other commitments then self-assignments provide a creative outlet that can be fit into even a few minutes of your spare time.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more photography tips and tricks.
Labels: assessment, assignment, Photography, self, topics, video
Categories:photography, video
1 Unlock the Background
You will already know the Background of any photo is locked and you can’t do anything much with it until you unlock it. The quickest way to unlock a background layer is from inside the Layers palette. Drag the lock icon to its right and drop it in the Trash and the Background layer will be automatically converted to a regular layer.
2 One click add a Layer
To create a new layer above the current layer click the Add New Layer icon at the foot of the Layer palette.
To add a new layer directly below the current layer Ctrl or Command Click on that icon. Both options add a layer but without displaying the Layer dialog.
3 Merge Everything to One Layer but Keep the Layers too
To merge all the current layers in the document to a single layer and at the same time to keep all the layers intact below it, click the topmost layer of the document and press Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E (Command + Option + Shift + E on the Mac). In case you are curious – it’s called Stamp Visible.
4 Select the Content on the Current Layer
To select everything on the current layer Ctrl + Click on the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette.
5 Copy a Layer to Another Document
To copy a layer from one document to another drag the layer from the Layers palette in one document and drop it into the other document. If you hold Shift as you drag the layer will be centered in the middle of the second document.
6 Quick Layer Moves
To quickly move a layer up the layer stack press Command + ] and to move it down, press Command + [.
7 Instant Delete a Layer
To instantly delete a layer, click the layer and press Delete.
Bonus Layer tip
To fill a layer or a selection with the foreground color press Alt + Backspace (Option + Delete on the Mac). Use Control + Backspace (Command + Delete on the Mac to fill the layer or selection with the Background color.
So, over to you now… what are your favorite Layer tips and tricks?
Labels: content, copy, create, delete, fill, layer, merge, move, Photoshop, select, tip, unlock
Categories:photoshop
One relatively unknown benefit of Smart Objects in Photoshop is the ability to use it to apply multiple strokes to an image. You can’t do this with Layer Styles on their own but you can do it with Smart Objects.
Here’s how to do this.
First add a Stroke Layer Style to your layer.
You can’t add a second stroke but you can convert the object to be a Smart Object. To do this, right click and choose Convert to Smart Object.
Now click the Smart Object layer and go ahead and add a new stroke to it. It all remains fully editable and you get multiple strokes – or multiple “anything” you want in Photoshop.
Labels: layer styles, multiple, Photoshop, Smart Object, strokes
Categories:photoshop
Photo by: John De Boer
To make your Rulers display along the left and top of an image Ctrl + R on a PC or Command + R on a Mac. To make the Rulers disappear, simply press the keystroke shortcut again. Bonus tip – this works in Illustrator too.
Labels: Adobe, display rulers, how to, Photoshop, rulers, tip, trevor adobe, trevor payne
Categories:photoshop, trevor tip
Learn how to make paisley shapes in Illustrator using Graphic Styles. I demonstrate graphic styles such as scallop edges stroke style, dotted stroke and a stroke that shows dots that vary in size from big to small.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today we’re going to be using Adobe Illustrator and we’re going to be making paisleys with graphic styles. Before we go ahead and actually create our paisley shape let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for.
This is a paisley that I’ve created using graphic styles and we’re going to create these graphic styles so that we can create it ourselves in future. You can see that there’s a scalloped border around the edge and you’re going to learn how to make this scallop border. You’ll also see how to make these blue dots which are another graphic style and then how to make these pink dots so that they change in size. So each of these is a graphic style and it’s just applied to the shape really, really easily. So it’s a very simple process to create this once you create the graphic styles. And they themselves are pretty simple too.
So let’s just close this down for now and we’re going to work on this document here. For ease we’re going to start with a rectangle because it’s just a whole lot easier than drawing paisleys right now. So let’s do a rectangle. And the first graphic style we’re going to create is that scalloped edge. So we’re going to start by selecting a stroke color to use. And I want my scalloped edge to be a sort of pale blue so I’m going to select that as my stroke color. And I want the fill color for this to be a sort of darker blue so I’m going for a darker blue here. Now the stroke is going to need to be fairly wide so I can see my dots so let’s make that 20.
And here we have the beginnings of our scallop edge but it’s just not looking a lot like a scallop border right now. What we need to do is to go into the appearance panel. So you would select Window and Appearance to get to it. Now we’re going to change the stroke so that we actually have dots. So I’m going to click Stroke here. And what I want to do is I want to make sure that the Cap is round and I want to use a dash line and I want this option here that aligns dashes to corners and paths. And I want to make my dash zero and then my gap something less than the weight of the lines. So here 16 is a pretty good fit here and that’s going to give me my scallop border.
Well it’s giving me a two side scallop right now, but that’s easily fixed. You see this appearance panel works very much like a layers panel and so the appearance that’s at the very top is the one that way we’re seeing over the top of everything. And right now that’s the stroke. If we put the fill over the top of everything then the fill would fill up to the edges of this rectangular shape and we’d be left with a scallop border not on the inside of the shape. So all I need to do is to target the fill here and just drag it up above the stroke. And you can see when I drag it above what I’m seeing is this scallop border. So now that we’ve created the first of our graphic styles we’re just going to save it. And I’m just going to click here for new graphic style and it’s now saved.
Now we can go ahead and create the second one which was those blue dots. We can continue to work on the shape here. That’s just fine. Because we’ve already saved the graphic style we won’t be losing if we make changes here. The first change I want to do is I want to remove the fill entirely. So this will be an empty rectangle with just a border. I’m going to select a different color for the stroke and this time I’m going for an even darker blue than we’ve been working on. So let’s go for this dark blue here. And let’s go for stroke and we want to change the values here. I want the weight to be 16. So this is going to be a slightly thinner set of blue dots which would be appropriate if we’re trying to make a shape that’s going to be reducing in size every time we add a graphic style to it. But I want the gap to be bigger because I want things to be circles and I want them to be dots separated from each other not overriding each other. And I do that by changing the gap value. So I’m going to make that 25. And you can see that that’s giving me my circles. So there’s our second graphic style. Let’s just save that.
And let’s go ahead and make the third one. The fill again is nothing, but this time I’m going to choose pink as my shape and we want to make pink dots that vary in size. And that’s just a little bit different to what we’ve been doing previously. Now the weight needs to be a bit smaller because it’s going to be further into the center of this paisley shape. So I’m going to reduce the weight down to 12 points. Because the weight is 12 points I’m going to decrease the gap. So I’m going to make that 16 so the dots are a little closer together. And now we have to make sure that our dots are going to reduce in size. So I’m going to make sure that I have my shape selected. Again, let’s go to stroke and let’s have a look at how we make them reduce in size. At the moment the profile is uniform so all these dots are the same uniform shape. If I change it to width profile one what I get is small to large and that’s what’s giving us these different shape dots. So there’s our third graphic style and we’re just going to save that.
Now if I was to trash this document I’m going to lose those graphic styles so let’s go ahead and let’s make our paisley in this document. So I’m just going to delete the rectangle shape. And we’ll go ahead and make a paisley but use the pen tool to do that. So I’m going to click and drag to start my shape. I’m just going to make it using 3 points so click and drag at the top of the circle. And you can see that we’re still using that last graphic style so it’s happening in place as we draw. It’s not the one we want but we’ll put up with it for now. What I do want is this original style so I’m just going to click on it to apply it to that shape. And here is our paisley shape with the first style on it.
Now all we need to do is to make the same shape but a little bit smaller. So I’m going to select the move tool here and I’m going to choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place. And that should give me a second version of the shape. Let’s just make this a bit bigger here so we can see where we’re working. I’m just going to size this down. And right now I’m going to size it down in proportion so I’m holding the Shift key as I resize it. I’m just going to drop it into place here. And this time instead of this scallop border I want to use the blue dots. So I’m just going to tap on the blue dot graphic style and you can see that we’ve got the scallop with its second layer. And again, I’m going to select that layer, choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste in Place, Paste in Back, placed anywhere, really it doesn’t matter. I’m going to just move it out of the way here. I’m going to Shift and resize it so it’s a smaller size, apply my pink dots to it and just move it back into place. Actually I think I want it a bit smaller still because I have an idea for an intermediary step.
Okay let’s just go and get the blue one. We’re here. I’ve got it selected. I’m going to Edit, Copy and Edit, Paste it. And this time I’m going to add just a very plain stroke. So I’m going to get a green and I’m going to make it a weight of about 10 points. And let’s just go to the stroke options here and let’s just turn off this dash line because I want it to be a plain line. Now I’m thinking that’s a bit wide for this purpose. So let’s just make it that and let’s put that into place. It’s not small enough yet. I think I can resize this in place a little bit. So there’s our paisley shape. And we can do this over and over again using graphic styles. We will have to save these graphic styles though if we want to use them in other documents. So from this right click menu we can choose Save Graphic Style Library and we could save that as a set of graphic styles that we could use again in future.
But you’ve seen here how to create a scallop border, how to create a graphic style that is just dots and how to create a graphic style that is a series of different size dots and then how to apply them to increasingly smaller size shapes so you can create a paisley that looks like this very quickly and very easily. And of course these graphic styles can be applied to any shape so you could do it to circles or stars or whatever it is that you want to draw.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and please subscribe to the channel if you’d like to hear about new videos because we do distribute them twice a week. You can find more of my tutorials and links to other work on projectwoman.com and please like this video by clicking the like button if you liked it. And I always look forward to hearing your comments.
Labels: edge, graphic style, Illustrator, paisley, scallop, video
From now to December is a time for celebration and whether you celebrate Christmas, Kwaanza or Hanukkah, chances are that your house will be filled with fun and laughter and a decoration or two at least.
This fun time of the year is ripe for photographing opportunities and Christmas itself is one of the most popular topics for photography. To ensure you have plenty of photos of family and friends to keep for posterity, over the next few weeks I’ll be posting my best tips for capturing seasonal images.
My shopping list for seasonal photos starts with the months leading up to Christmas and includes taking photos for the Christmas cards.
This is a great time to get started, gather everyone together, find a great place to shoot and get to work. It helps if everyone is coordinated clothing-wise – it doesn’t have to be white shirts and dark trousers (and is probably best not to be), but it is best to avoid shirts with advertising and obvious graphics. So go plain rather than fancy and make sure everyone’s colors if they aren’t the same at least work together as a group. If you want to do so, grab some Christmas hats to illustrate the season.
These photos should be fun so approach the task with plenty of time to enjoy the process. Have toys to entertain small kids and water and snacks for everyone.
A good place to photograph is where you have an uncluttered or at least a pleasing background and somewhere to sit that is out of full sun. Photographing early morning or early evening is good if you can do so because the light is better.
Think about the aspect ratio of your cards – do you need portrait or landscape orientation images – and then shoot to this ratio because it is cumbersome to have to change the image dimensions later on.
If you’re shooting young children then increase the ISO a bit so you can shoot faster, this will give you a good chance of capturing an image without blur and in focus. Keep shooting and take more images than you think you need, if you have young children, chances are that their eyes will be closed, they will be looking away or you won’t get them all looking good at once without some perseverance.
Shoot some single shots too – it is fun to be able to include some loose images of the kids in cards going overseas or to relatives interstate.
Finish the shoot and the final edits in plenty of time to have your cards printed and ready to write and send well before Christmas.
Labels: aspect ratio, celebration, christmas, hanukkah, how to photograph, kwanza, take better photos, take good photos
Categories:photography
Photo by: StillSearc via sxc.hu
Want to get a complete view of the document you are working on? To fit the entire document to the current window size, double-click the Hand tool. You can also press Ctrl + 0(zero) on a PC or Command + 0 (zero) on a Mac.
Labels: fit to window, hand tool, how to, Illustrator, tip, trevor adobe, trevor payne
Categories:photoshop, trevor tip
To select an entire row or column in an Excel worksheet, click the column letter or the row number. To select multiple columns or multiple rows click and drag over the column letters or row numbers to select. To select the entire worksheet, click the empty box at the intersection of the Rows and Columns in the top left of the worksheet.
Labels: cells, Excel, help, how to, Microsoft, select, spreadsheet, tip, trevor office, trevor payne
Categories:office, trevor tip
