Kens Photoshop Blog

Hey hey, more Autohotkey goodness for CS3 users, brush resize on the fly, CS4 style!
First download a free copy of Autohotkey

This new tabs business in CS4 is driving me insane, horrible interface disicion.
Tabs suck unless you’r some old lady working on pictures of your cat. If you frequently need to have multiple images open, references, matte creation, compositing etc.. you open new images all the time and drag contents from one into other windows.

Ever wanted to create hotkeys in photoshop but you couldn’t because photoshop didn’t allow that hotkey combination? Or wanted to use the TAB key for something else?
There’s a free program that allows you to use keys such as TAB, numlock, scrolllock, printscreen or the break key and map it to something usefull. That program is [...]

Tired of the hardcoded shortcut keys in photoshop? Want to change the TAB key into something else? And what the hell is up with not being able to bind stuff to single letter shortcuts?
No matter. Go download the program Autohotkeys, it’s free and awesome.
Autohotkey allows you to trap keys before a program gets control and [...]

This has been driving me up the wall since many versions of photoshop.
You have a layer selected, now you create a new layer and do something to it and undo that. Photoshop will undo what you did AND SELECT THE PREVIOUS LAYER
Draw…
Nah no good, undo.
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I [...]

When I show people something in photoshop, the thing they are most amazed by is not whatever technique I show them. It’s that I don’t use a keyboard to control photoshop, I use my wacom pen to issue mouse gestures almost exclusively, only touching the keyboard for the most obscure and rarely used commands.
Peaked your [...]

Hmm never thought I’d say this, but I don’t like the latest versions of Photoshop, CS4.
Lets start out positive and list the few things I do like:
Rotate canvas. This has been on my wishlist for ages.
Spring loaded tools. The ability to switch to another tool while holding the tool shortcut down, and then when you [...]

Many images on the net, especially photos will not display as intended using the photos color profile (If any) in non-color managed browsers.
Firefox 3 has support for color management, but it’s turned off by default and the only way to turn it on is to use about:config

Smart collections is an awesome feature of Lightroom that I use the heck out of to help me stay organized. There are so many things you can do with smart collections so if you haven’t digged into them yet you are missing out bigtime.

I do a lot of organizing into folders in Lightroom because I sometimes need to view images outside of Lightroom so having a nice hierachy is an advantage.
If you want to do the same but are wondering how here’s how to change foldernames and add folders and subfolders in Lightroom:

By default Lightroom will show you images in subfolders even when you have selected the top folder in a hierachy. This wreaks havoc if you like me, like to import a bunch of photos from a flashcard, then organize them into subfolders. I do this because I sometimes want to browse images outside Lightroom, then [...]

Here’s another couple things I find irritating as I get more and more into using Lightroom:
The film strip.
It’s great for navigating in the various modules, but why the hell does it not understand selections properly? Try to select a couple photos and hit delete, it will only ask if you want to delete the first [...]

Let’s get one thing straight. Lightroom does NOT backup your photos when you do the scheduled backups, only the Lightroom database, thumbnails, develop changes and so on. You have to backup your photos yourself.
The easiest way to backup your photos in Adobe Lightroom is to use the Export function.

The new Lightroom 2.0 is a wonderfull Photo Manager but there’s just a few things that breaks the deal for me.
The real showstopper is how slow it is. I don’t buy into Adobe fanboys story about it being so complex and just accept it. I have acdsee pro 2.5 and it blows the pants of [...]