Save time with three simple but rarely mentioned strategies which can take the pain out of filing your documents.

Save it to a temporary location

Of course the desktop is the obvious choice here, particularly because you can hit Cmd-D to use the system-wide shortcut for selecting the Desktop as the save location.

Then you can do a cleanup at the end of the session, or use the tips below to tidy-up as you go.

This make saving a two step process, but doesn’t require you to navigate throught the awkward Save As dialog.  The Save As dialog will remember the last place you saved a document, so if you always save to an accessible temporary location, the whole caper is a lot simpler.

I prefer to keep the Desktop really clean, so I keep my unprocessed files in my Temp folder, which I’ve created in Documents, and lodged in Finder’s sidebar (see below!).

Create a Sidebar Alias in Finder

This is a great method to implement anytime you’re going to be working on a project for more than half an hour!   Because the chances are you’ve already got a Finder window open showing your project’s files. You can drag any folder into the Finder sidebar and it will show up in all dialog boxes system-wide.

• Simply navigate to the desired folder, and drag its icon over the sidebar
• Watch for the Insertion bar to show, then drop the folder.  Presto!
• To remove the icon from the sidebar, simply drag it out; it will disappear with a ‘puff’.

This process creates an alias, or shortcut of the folder, meaning that the actual location of the folder remains unchanged, and removing the alias from the sidebar won’t delete any files!

Just make sure that you drop the folder when you see the insertion bar; if you drop it when you’re hovering over another folder in the sidebar, you’ll end up moving the folder.  If this happens, don’t worry, Edit > Undo (Cmd-Z) is your friend.

Drag the document directly from the application

Here are some nice ninja tricks which don’t require you to do any setup..

Little known fact for you: applications’ title bars are often clickable!  You can Cmd Click on a filename to see where it is located in the folder hierachy on your drive.  You can also drag the icon next to the filename in order to move (or copy, or create an alias/shortcut) the file.  This is true of Finder, Word and Office apps, Preview and many others, but may not be relevant for apps like Photoshop, which may change the default mac interface, and Thunderbird which are not dealing with actual files.

To make use of this gem, simply

• click and drag the icon, but don’t release the mouse button, or
• switch to a Finder window and drop the file directly into place.

There are a raft of options here: you could:

• Open a Finder window to the correct location in advance, ready to receive the file using
  • Exposé hit F9 (you may need to hold the Fn key depending on your keyboard) and drag the file onto the Finder window
  • Hit Cmd-Tab to switch to Finder.
    This is my usual tactic (my greatest peeve is that Finder does not permit you to switch between its various windows using Cmd~)
• Use the ’spring-loaded’ functionality of Finder to navigate through your file system.)
  • Hover over the each waypoint briefly and wait for that location to open, then hover over the next step.
  • Whilst dragging you can hit the spacebar to immediately open a folder.
    Sounds complicated, but in practice it can be really quick!

Mix and Match!

Well, that just touches on some component skills which you can combine to shape your own workflow.  I find that file management becomes like driving: it’s second nature in your own car, but driving someone elses system can feel like navigating a tractor!

If you’ve got a tip to add to the lost, drop me a line in the comments!  If there’s enough interest, I’ll have an excuse to do a screen cast of these techniques

You can postion and scale objects precisely using the transform toolbar, which runs along the top of the screen if it is set to visible.

To show it, you must be in transform mode (Command-T [Mac] or Control-T [PC] or Edit > Free Transform), and the options must visible (Window > Options).

Positioning an object exactly

In the first of the following screenshot,

• I’ve shifted the Ruler Origin to 20,20, then
• I’ve gone into transform mode and set the anchor point to top left (by clicking the top left box in the grid of nine boxes at the top left of the screenshot).
• You can then type the offset from the Ruler Origin into the X and Y boxes.  If you knew that you needed to shift the object 23 pixels down and 17 across, you could enter ‘relative’ mode by clicking the triangle between X and Y.

Scaling with precision

Here, I’m transforming the circle using the Width and Height controls to resize my circle.  Note that the units displayed can be changed by typing them in.  You can even have a mix on units!  Here I’m using percentage and Pixels, which is just a gimmick .  Clicking the chain icon here is useful to ensure that aspect ratio is locked, and your object doesn’t get squashed.

You can also finetune the rotation and skew of the object using the transform toolbar, but I’m sure you’ve fugured that out already!  That’s it for today; let me know if you’ve got something to add by leaving a comment!

Photoshop sometimes appears to blur objects, lines or images.  This could be due to rounding, or losing data after transforming a layer.  Read on for best practice in resizing images and creating vector shapes, and come to grips with the way Photoshop displays your document.

Rounding Errors

Rounding is a result of displaying a objects of various sizes on a screen which has a finite number of pixels.  Read about moiré patterns to come to grips with this!

It occurs when, for instance, you have two objects snapped next to eachother, and you change your zoom level and ghost lines appear between the objects.  This is normal, and nothing to worry about: just ensure that you are looking at the document at 100% zoom (Command-Alt-Zero on Mac, Control-Alt-Zero on PC).  I find that every second zoom level looks right, and I get jaggies or ghosts in between.  In the images below, identical boxes are placed next to eachother, and shown at different zoom levels.

This can be disconcerting if you are editing a vector (like text), and it looks jaggy when you zoom right in.  This can be useful to allow you to compare all of the objects in your document in the same scale, to help align them and so forth.  If you export your document with vectors intact, the text will still be rendered dynamically in all its glory in Acrobat or Preview.

Losing detail by resizing

Blurring is not good if you’ve resized an image within your document inappropriately.

Photoshop culls data when you scale the image down, and then pixelates the image when you blow it up again.  To avoid this, right click the image’s name in the Layers palette, and ‘Convert to Smart Object’ before resizing.  This will embed the image in the document, and use it as a reference each time you resize the layer, avoiding the problem I’ve described.

Here is an example: the circle on the left has been copied and moved to the right, then scaled right down with the transform tool, then returned to its orginal size.  They would be indistinguishable if I had made the copy a Smart Object before resizing it.

Producing crip Vector Objects

If you position an object at 1.5 pixels, Photoshop will anti-alias it, resulting in the sort of blur you see in the bottom of two orange boxes in the diagram below.  You can avoid this a number of ways: ensure that the object’s size is an even number of pixels, and when moving it, snap it to the underlying pixels.  When drawing a Vector Object (Rectangle Tool: U) use the options drop-down and select ‘Snap to Pixels’ to guarantee crispness!

In some situations, it is simplest to create a shape the right size first off, rather than hammering something out and trying to resize it.  In this case, simply select ‘Fixed Size’ in the options box displayed above.  Similar options are available for other tools, such as the crop tool and free transform.

That’s it for now – if you’ve got any tips to contribute, throw out a comment – I’d love to hear about it!

When designing websites, I find it useful to set the Ruler Origin to the top left of the main content column, so that the dimensions shown on the ruler relate to elements that I will code, rather than to the page background, which can vary greatly in size.  Following are some tips for using the ruler, its origin and guides.  Using grids can be handy, especially if you like to use a system such as the ‘960 Grid System‘,  which makes it simple to layout a page by defining blocks and gutters, as occurs in print.

Using the Ruler Origin

(I used to have great trouble with changing the Ruler Origin, but I suspect that was due to a bug associated with Photoshop’s ruler.)

• Click and drag the origin (see diagram) to move it.  This means that the ruler counts down to the left of its new origin
• Holding shift constrains guide movement to the currently selected ruler units.
• To change the units displayed on the ruler, and hence the snapping, simply right click it.  Clearly, pixels are most useful for web design, but for print I use millimetres.
• Holding the control key temporarily suspends snapping.
• Double clicking the ruler origin resets it to 0,0.
• Right clicking the origin sets it to the the last clicked point on the document.  You can undo this to ‘unset’ the origin, in case the last setting was particularly delicate.  Not sure why this would be useful.. but it feels tricky!

Another way of working with the ruler is outlined in the post I mentioned above:

Setting up the Grid

Note that a layer will not snap to another layer (or a guide) of that object is not visible.  Snapping behviour depends on what is defined as set to snap, and whether it is visible.

• go into Preferences > Guides, Grids & Slices, and set gridline every 10px, and 10 subdivisions (see below).  Objects will snap to subdivisions as well.
  
• setup the document with grid visible,
  
• position your guides, (optionally lock them: View > Lock Guides)
  
• then I can hide the grid, and work to the guides alone

This is the first post in the Photoshop Precision series – check them out, and leave a comment if you’ve got something to add!

For my mission critical sites, and those of my clients, I manage an Australian reseller account, which gives me greatest control over the hosting environement.

For my recreational and pro-bono sites, I use Bluehost.

Why choose Bluehost?

I have found Bluehost to be very reliable over the past few years.  Reliablility on the web comes down to how infrequently the host server ‘goes down’ or becomes unavailable.  Many hosts boast 99.9% uptime, but often this is an optimistic figure.

Bluehost satisfies all the basic requirements for the setup I advocate:

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I monitor my sites using free independant monitoring services, so I am comfortable recommending Bluehost as an entry level setup.