In the images above, you can see that the image on the right looks appalling in comparison with that on the left.
The two images are the same size but the one on the left was scaled down from a large size in Photoshop and the one on the right was scaled down by downsizing it in Dreamweaver.
The results are a great example of why you should never downsize an image in a web editor instead of a graphics program! The resized version on the right is downright nasty in comparison to the one on the left.
If you need to scale down your images – these were reduced from 2,376 x 2,376 pixels in size to 300 x 300 – then it’s vital that you use a proper tool to do so.
Photoshop has an image resize tool which you can get to by choosing Image > Image Size. Type the width and height of the finished image and then from the Resample image dropdown list select Bicubic Sharper (Best for Reduction). If you compare the results with different settings, you’ll see that the Bicubic Sharper typically gives the best result for downsizing images.
When you use this option the resulting images look as good downsized as they do on the screen in front of you.
Downsize them, save them and then import them into Dreamweaver and use them at that size. You will love your images a lot better when you do this.
If you have a preset, for example a preset that applies an auto tone correction to an image in Adobe Camera Raw then you can apply this to an image in Bridge without needing to open Camera Raw.
Right click the image in Bridge, choose Develop Settings and then select the preset from the list.
Any preset can be applied automatically simply by selecting it. If you need to undo it, choose Develop Settings > Clear Settings. This will remove the settings from the image.
This strips out any ACR changes that you’ve made to the image.
A bonus of this feature is that the fix can be applied to jpg as well as raw images direct from Bridge.
If you’re like me, you use the Send To feature of Windows Explorer quite frequently. Simply right click on a file in Windows Explorer and you have a Send To option. Click this and you’re able to send files to a list of sources.
While some of these options are built-in such as Compressed (Zip Folder), Desktop, and Mail Recipient, there are times when you’d like to add your own preferred location to this list.
For me, I like to assemble my files for emailing into a folder called Outgoing Files. I need that in my Send To list so that it’s accessible any time I need to send a file to it rather than having to copy and paste the file from one folder to another.
The problem with Send To is that it’s easy to use but difficult to add items to the Send To list itself.
Of course, you could go and find the folder and dump things in it but wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if adding files to the Send To list were as easy as sending files to somewhere using it? I think it would be!
Enter a small free and opensource application called SendToSendTo. You can find it here: sendtosendto download
Download and install the application then restart your computer.
When you do this, locate a folder or file, right click and choose Send To. You’ll find that now you have an entry at the very top of the list called Add Here. Right click it and choose Send To > Add Here and you can then add that folder to the send to list by simply clicking Create.
What SendToSendTo does is to automatically add the folder that you point to into the Send To list.
One of the things that you’ll love about SendToSendTo is that it’s simple to install and use and it makes something that should have been easy to use all along work the way it should not as Microsoft designed it – enough said!
You may already know that typing =rand(1,2) on a new line in Word types one paragraph of two sentences in Word. The text is this random Word help style text:
“On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks.”
But did you know there are other types of text you can type? Try =lorem(2,3) and press enter to get two paragraphs of three sentences each of the Lorem ipsum dummy text.
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.
Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus.”
If you type =rand.old(2,4) and press enter you get the older Word dummy text – the Quick Brown fox..
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
So now you have plenty of random text options – of them all the Lorem one is the most handy for when you really need large portions of dummy text in a document.
If you capture in jpg you may believe that you cannot take advantage of the Camera Raw processing features built into Photoshop Elements. This is because, by default, when you open a jpg image in Photoshop Elements it will open automatically in Elements bypassing the Camera Raw tool.
Only when you open a raw or dng file does will the Camera Raw tool appear allowing you to use its features to edit your image.
You can, however, get Photoshop Elements to open any image including a jpg image as a Camera Raw file. To do this, choose File > Open As and locate the jpg image to work with. From the Open As dropdown list, select Camera Raw as the option and click Open.
This treats the jpg image as a Camera Raw image so you have access to the superior processing tools available in Camera Raw for processing the image.
When you’ve finished with Camera Raw, click Open Image to move the image to Photoshop Elements with the Camera Raw adjustments in place. If you don’t want to go into Photoshop Elements then just click Done to save the fixed version of the image.
When doing detailed work, such as sharpening or color correction, on an image it’s important to see how your changes affect the whole image. You can do this by having the same image appear in two separate windows. All you need to do is select an image, go to Window > Arrange, and there will be a New Window for <image name> option at the bottom of the drop down menu. Click to select it and you now have the same image in two windows that you can size and edit separately.
I’ve been working with Google Chrome a lot lately because it makes good sense as a Browser. I have my assistant to thank for this as, without his continual poking and prodding to explore Chrome I probably would not have got there as quickly as I did.
One of the nice things about Chrome is its integration with Google+. However it’s not Google+ that I plan talking about here but rather I want to show you how to add a website as an app to Chrome.
If you click the New Tab icon in Chrome and then click Apps at the foot of the page you’ll see that there are some apps already in the list such as YouTube, Gmail and so on. What I am going to show you is how to add your own choice of websites as apps and to do it quickly and easily.
You may already know that you can create an app from a Most Visited page. Click Most Visited at the foot of the New tab and anything that’s in that list can be easily created as an App by just dragging and dropping it onto the Apps icon. This automatically makes the page an App.
The problem is that if something isn’t a Most Visited page it’s a little cumbersome to make it an App. The solution is to click the New Tab icon and display the Apps page. Size your browser down so that you can see everything clearly.
Now click the New Tab icon again and this time browse to the page that you want to add as an App. Once you’ve visited that page drag the tab for that page somewhere else on the screen so that you have two browser windows – one showing the Apps area and the other one with your web page open in it.
Now locate the icon immediately to the left of the page URL that you want to add as an app. As you hold your mouse over it, it will show View Site Information as a tooltip.
Drag and drop this into the Apps area in your Chrome browser. It will automatically be added as a new App. You can then drag and drop that App or any others to rearrange them to suit.
An app can also be created as a Desktop, Taskbar or Start Menu shortcut. To do this right click the web page in the Apps area and choose Create Shortcut. You’ll get a series of shortcut options including Desktop, Start Menu and Pin to Taskbar. Select the checkboxes for those that you want to create and click Create.
There’s a lot of misinformation on the web regarding adding websites to the Chrome apps collection. A lot of sites suggest you repeatedly remove Most Visited pages until you get to the page that you want to add. This solution which involves simply dragging and dropping a URL into the page is far quicker and makes a lot more sense.
You can learn a lot about black and white photography using your favourite photo editing program as most have tools for converting from colour to black and white.
Avoid the adjustments that do the work for you such as by choosing Image > Mode > Grayscale as you won’t be able to make any creative changes to the image.
Instead, in Photoshop Elements, choose Enhance > Convert to Black and White and experiment with the sliders and options. There are different options down the left of the screen to select from and you can then adjust the red, green and blue sliders to fine tune the result.
In Photoshop, choose Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Black & White and adjust the sliders for the colors – this lets you control how the colours are converted to either black or white. In this way you can separate colors like Green and Red for example making them significantly different to what they would look if you do a regular conversion.
In Lightroom and in Adobe Camera Raw you can convert to black and white and then adjust the color sliders to create a good looking black and white image.
We hand draw a lot of images that you can buy and use as borders for your photos. These scanned sketches need to be cleaned up before selling them as there is often some residual mess from the scanning process.
Some of this might be dust on the scanner glass and occasionally we get small ink dots on the paper.
To remove these flaws from the scans once the scans have been made, we use Image > Adjustments > Levels and drag inwards at both ends of the slider to make the blacks blacker and the lights lighter. Sometimes a midtones adjustment is made to darken the blacks too. This fix gets rid of any small discolorations on the paper.
Then obvious problems can be fixed by painting over them with a white brush.
One other way to clean up when you got black line art on white paper is to make a selection of the white content. Start by making the background layer a regular layer by double clicking on it in the Layers palette. Set the Tolerance for the Magic Wand to ten or fifteen and click on the white areas to select all the white content. Then delete by pressing Delete.
Now click the Add a Layer Style icon at the foot of the Layer palette. Choose Stroke and create a stroke that is red in color and quite big – just how big depends on the image – here mine is 40 pixels in size.
What this stroke does is to identify where the spots are on your image. Everywhere there’s a red dot on the image there is a stray tiny black or colored dot on the image itself – right in the middle of the red dot. It is this dot that is surrounded by your coloured stroke and the colour just makes it easier to find and fix it.
Grab a small hard edge eraser and start erasing the problem areas. All you need to do is to click in the middle of a dot and the problem will disappear. Make sure not to get too close to the lines if yours are uneven as there will be some natural bumps in hand-drawn images but you don’t want too much.
When you’re done and everything is nice and clean drag and drop the stroke layer into the trashcan.
Then you can put fill the areas you want to fill back with white by setting white as the foreground color and use the paint bucket to fill the empty spaces with white. Alternately add a white filled layer below your image and merge the two layers together.
If you like this frame, it and others are for sale for less than a buck for 10 here.
