lesa's blog

Welcome to the first in a series of Top 6 lists I'll be making for each book in which I tech edit, snap screen shots, or serve as full production editor (sometimes all three at once!).

I recently maxed out my PowerBook with 2 GB of RAM. My buddy Dave Cross turned me onto a neat little trick to make Photoshop take advantage of the newfound RAM surplus: enabling the Bigger Tiles plug-in.

This plug-in causes Photoshop to process image data in larger chunks, thereby reducing overall time necessary for many important deeds. Whee! You only want to do this if you have over 1 GB of physical RAM installed.

Ever wonder why you don’t see new graphics you’ve created in your GoLive site window? Well, if you’ve spent some time creating them in Photoshop, Elements, or what have you, and saved those images into the proper folder locally on your hard drive, you may need to trek up to the Update menu and choose Refresh All. This tells GoLive to scan all the folders of your site locally to see if there have been changes (additions).

NOTE: On GoLive CS1, use the View menu or the following keyboard shortcuts: Option-Command-V (Mac) or Alt-Control-V (PC).

Want to give Adobe Elements more power for absolutely free? No problem! There are bunches of people out there who have written Actions that give Elements a few more of Photoshop's powers.

Do a Google search for Adobe Elements Extras and you'll find a host of sites offering free downloads. For instance:

To upgrade, or not to upgrade... that is the question. It feels like Adobe is firing upgrades at us faster and faster all the time, and for some it's a major decision on whether to spend the extra money on the latest version, or hold off till the next one. Hopefully this little top 10 list can help you make an informed decision.

It's happened to me; chances are, it's happened to you. During a fit of spirited creating in Photoshop you spot the perfect color, at the perfect saturation somewhere else on your desktop. It could be in your web browser, something in your desktop picture... anything. The problem is, unless that color lives on another document you have open within Photoshop, it can be a rather impossible to grab with the Color Picker.

My apologies for not uploading any new content last week. My Dad was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer, so I immediately flew home to East Texas where my Mom and I spent the week in the hospital with him. The bright side is that he's actually feeling better than he has in a few months since treatment has begun.

Perched high atop this list is my .Mac account. I get so much out of this $99 per year that it's just unreal! Web-based email saves my rear when I lose the "I-can-receive-email-but-I-can't-freaking-send-email" battle with a hotel. File transfer via iDisk works great for sharing those big, honking files that are sure to choke most email accounts.

Hard Disk Health

The first line of defense for hardware health, in my opinion, is Cocktail. This little piece of shareware is great for routine maintenance (especially for those of us who forget to *not* let their computer go to sleep, allowing Panther to run diagnostics on its own!). I sleep better knowing this is on my hard drive at all times.

Backpacks

First and foremost, you've got to be able to carry stuff with you and that means a backpack. Currently, there are two models I can recommend for different reasons: