PSIG News: March 2004 e-News
March 17, 2004

March Meeting Information

The March meeting will be held on Thursday the 18th, from 6:30 to 8:30pm at Voorhees High School in room 245. March's program will continue to look at the new features of Photoshop 8. In addition, we will also look at automating tasks with actions and explore some advanced methods for getting a good black-and-white image.

Return of the Layer Styles

Show off your (Layer) Style! February's program introduced and explored Photoshop's Layer Styles. Members are encouraged to bring their Layer Style explorations and results to the meeting for discussion and troubleshooting.

Scratching Your Head About the Scratch Disk?

Photoshop uses a virtual memory technology known as a "scratch disk" when there is not enough RAM to perform an operation. A scratch disk can be any drive or a partition with free space. Most users do not have to change the default settings, but if you work with large enough images you may have to address this situation sooner or later.

Your primary scratch disk should be your fastest hard disk, and should have plenty of defragmented space available. The following guidelines (from Photoshop's "Help") can help you assign scratch disks:

• For best performance, scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.
• Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one used for virtual memory.
• Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network.
• Scratch disks should be conventional (non-removable) media.
• Raid disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
• Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented regularly.

To change the scratch disk assignment: Choose Edit > Preferences > Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks. Choose the desired disks from the menus. You can assign up to four scratch disks of any size your file system supports. Click OK, then restart Photoshop or for the change to take effect.

Tips and Tricks

RGB Flesh Tones – Getting the Red Out

If you have done your basic color correction in an RGB image but the flesh tones still seems to red, here's a tip to fix it fast. First, select the flesh tones and add a slight feather (a 1-pixel feather for low-res images; 3-5 pixels for high-res images should work.) Go under the Image menu, under Adjustments, and choose Hue/Saturation. From the Edit pop-up menu, choose Reds. Now lower the Saturation slider until your skin tones look more natural, and click OK.

April Meeting

The April meeting will be held on Thursday April 15th, 2004.