PSIG News: February 2005 e-News
February 15, 2005

February Meeting

The February PSIG meeting will be held on Thursday the 17th, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at Voorhees High School in room 245. At the meeting, there will be a demonstration on the Enhancer plug-in from AKVIS. We will also take a look at some options for image stitching. Additionally, there will be a question-and-answer session and we will continue to look at some of Scott Kelby’s “Down and Dirty Photoshop Tricks” training movies. Members are encouraged to bring their images, prints, and questions for discussion during the meeting.

Photoshop World Comes to Las Vegas

Photoshop World is “3 days of non-stop Photoshop training that will inform, inspire, and amaze you” and this year it is being held from March 8-10 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Visit the official website for full information.

Tips and Tricks

Cleaner Type For The Web

If you’ve been faced with having to create small type on the Web (usually 12 points or below), you know the smaller you go, the blurrier your type gets. That’s because of the anti-aliasing that’s automatically applied to the type, which works fine at larger sizes but tends to run together at smaller sizes, making your type look fuzzy. You can adjust the amount of aliasing from the Options Bar, but here’s a tip that many Web designers feel works even better: Once you get below 12 points, start adding positive tracking to your type (anywhere between 20 to 50 points) in the Character palette. This increases the amount of space between letters and, therefore, decreases the amount of blurriness. Increasing the space between your letters this way minimizes the effects of anti-aliasing and makes your type cleaner and more readable at smaller sizes.

Layer Palette Navigation Speed Tips

Here are some shortcuts that will speed up your navigation in the Layers plaette: To jump to the bottom layer in the palette, press Shift-Option-Left Bracket ([). To jump to the top layer of the stack, press Shift-Option-Right Bracket (]). To move your current layer down one layer at a time, press Command-Left Bracket. To move it up one layer at a time, press Command-Right Bracket. To switch to the layer beneath your current layer, press Option-Left Bracket. To switch to the layer above your current layer, press Option-Right Bracket.

Locking A PDF Presentation

When using Photoshop to create a PDF Presentation slide show (under the File Browser’s “Automate” menu) one of your concerns may be that the recipient will just print your photos out to a photo-quality printer. Photoshop offers some security similar to the full version of Acrobat that will help you combat this. When saving your PDF Presentation, under Output Options, choose Presentation, and hit Save. It will ask you to name your PDF presentation, so name it and click Save; at which time a PDF Options dialog will appear. Click on the PDF Security checkbox, then click on the Security Settings button. In the PDF Security dialog, click on the checkbox for “Password Required to Change Permission and Passwords” and enter (and memorize) a password. Then under Compatibility, turn on the checkboxes for “No Printing, No Changing the Document, and No Content Copying or Extraction, Disable Accessibility.” Click OK and it will ask for your password one more time. Now, when you e-mail the PDF Presentation, printing will be grayed out, and even if the recipient has the full version of Acrobat, they will not be able to copy and paste your photos into something else for printing.