Home
photolesa.com
The creative tutorial home of image wrangler, Lesa Snider.

lesa's blog

Stuck in Salt Lake City

I now own the coolest travel brush ever. It's amazingly functional and pleasingly compact. It has half inch bristles that are stiff enough to comb through my long hair, though soft enough not to hurt, and it folds up to fit in my purse. How cool is that?! I've been on the lookout for a good travel brush for awhile now, and as you might imagine, they're hard to find.

Zapping Photoshop Preferences

Sometimes good software just goes bad. If that ever happens to your beloved Photoshop, and you begin to experience weirdness in various forms, it may be time to rebuild its preferences.

Though, instead of rooting around your hard drive to zap this file on your own you can make Photoshop do it all by itself. The trick is to hold the Command, Option, and Shift keys (PC: Control-Alt-Shift) when you first launch the program.

Big Camera vs. Little Camera

This month, I was lucky enough to carry two Canon cameras cross country to both CES in Las Vegas, and Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The new Rebel XT, the world's smallest digital SLR (as of Feb.

A little electronics show called CES

Before trotting off to Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Shawn and I thought we’d really punish ourselves by doing CES in Vegas first. What were we thinking?! Gads, by the time we left for San Francisco on Sunday we were already exhausted. Oh, and we’re getting married at Macworld too (we like to pack a lot into our trips!).

Take a screen shot of any open window

Need a screen capture of just one window? Since we no longer have the ability to print one window, like we did in OS days of old, this trick is handy for doing just that.

Press Command + Shift + 4, then tap the spacebar. The cursor will turn into a camera which you can move around to select any open window.

Thanks to Aaron Adams for this handy tip!

Tweaking Photoshop's User Interface

Just like my beloved Mac, I can customize my Photoshop experience to an unbelievable level. For example, do you find the font preview list in Photoshop to be a little small for your tastes? How about the little labels in all the floating palettes? The fix is super simple in Photoshop CS2.

Choose Photoshop > Preferences > Type and pick a size from the pop-up menu, like so:

When Photoshop Tools Misbehave

Maybe it's the way the planets are aligned, or perhaps you have a bit of foul karma coming home to roost; but, sometimes a Photoshop tool will refuse to work for no apparent reason. Could be the Eraser, could be the Airbrush, could be anthing.

Here's a little secret: when a tool refuses to work, it's usually because there's an active selection somewhere. That is, there are marching ants afoot in your document and you just don't see them. Deselect everything by pressing Command + D (PC: Control + D), then try the tool again.

Radtech's BT500 Bluetooth Mouse

I've been in the market for a good mouse for awhile. I had been using Apple's regular mouse for years, then switched to the Bluetooth version. The wireless aspect was certainly cool, though it felt really heavy for my hand. It also didn't seem to track very smoothly and every time I picked it up the batteries were dead (see? I'm not a MacMac after all).

Don't rule out the ugly objects!

Last weekend I went on a canoe trip, and had a *blast* taking pictures while being paddled all over the Harpeth River.

It was interesting to me that the best photos of the 100 or so I shot, were ones with inanimate objects, such as this one to the left.

Pages

darkness