Veerle's blog

Did you come across the following situation before? This happens to me several times a day when I’m designing : you want to scale a huge picture that you just pasted in a smaller Photoshop document. The transform handles are out of reach, way off screen. What I normally do is change the ‘Reference point location’ to top left and I enter a value of 10% as width and height and then I drag the handles to achieve size I want. But there is a better, much easier and faster way, namely ‘Fit to screen’ or command/control + 0. Maybe it’s a tip a lot of you already know, or maybe not? So simple and yet I never thought of this before. Well hopefully I’m not the only one.

Ok! I know a lot of you have been waiting for this very moment. So here it is, part 2, all wrapped up in a (H.264 AKA MPEG-4 Part 10) movie for you to download and watch (14.9 MB). You have to excuse the fact that I often have to drag things back into the movie. I’m using just a small portion of my (big) screen, so the center is way out of the capture area (for example when I zoom in or name the layers).

A reader raised the question why I don’t use the Live Trace instead of tracing the sketch with the Pen tool. It’s simply because the lines of my sketch aren’t ‘clean’ enough to make it work with Live Trace. The outcome depends a lot on your orignal, as you can see here in these experiments. Not that you can’t do magic tricks with this tool, of course you can.

The Snap to Grid is a handy (Photosop) function, but have you ever been a bit frustrated because it gets in your way? OK maybe you think, no problem I just hit command + shift + semicolon to switch it on or off. OK that’s one way, and the most common way indeed.

Some of you may know that Smart Objects work with stuff placed from Illustrator but that’s not all Smart Objects has to offer in Photoshop CS. When designing a mockup you probably work with images, then later in editing you scale the image to what you think is right. How many times have you dreamed of a possibility to scale it back with any loss of quality?

We all know that you really can’t do it, the image would pixelate and soften instead. This instance was true until CS2 entered the scene. Yes it is true now you can place a photo in Photoshop and make it a “Smart Object”, just select the layer of the photo and go to the “Layer menu” and choose “group into New Smart Object”.

When you do this it is linked to the embedded high-resolution original. So now when you resize it’s still crystal clear even if you scale it a dozen times. But wait there is more, you can also rotate images or even warp them, it always pulls data from the original so that everything stays crisp. It allows me to rethink the way I work and I can do things that weren’t possible before CS2.

One more thing, if you duplicate a Smart Object and make a change to the original all duplicate layers update automatically. So go ahead and update, warp, swap, etc. all without the fear of quality loss.