This started out as an article on simply ‘how to set file associations’ but when I tried to associate .jpg files with Photoshop it refused to work, (they stayed associated with the MAC Preview application).
Solution
1. Right click a file of the type you want to associate, (or cmd click if you don’t have right click enabled).
2. With the right click menu still on the screen press and hold the ‘options’ key. If like me your new to MAC that’s the key indicated below. At this point ‘Opens With’ changes to ‘Always Opens With’. Select the application that will be the new default application for that file type.
Unable to Associate a File Type / File Extension with Photoshop
This worked for me;
1. Right click (or cmd click) the file in question > Get Info.
4. Locate the ‘Opens with’ section and change it to the desired app (in this case Photoshop) > Change All.
5. Continue.
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For the site I do a lot of screen shots / screen dumps for illustration purposes its good to be able to highlight thinks by being able to draw a box around them. Usually I do this with mspaint, but I finally got tired of doing half the tasks in mspaint and the rest in Photoshop, so I worked out how to do it properly.
Solution
1. Assuming you have you graphic already open, create a new Layer.
2. Click the Rectangle Marquee Tool > Then click and drag where you want the box to be.
3. Click Edit > Stroke.
4. You can select the width in pixels of the line and the colour > OK.
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I wrote a walkthough on drawing box’s earlier, the second thing I tend to do, is put arrows on my diagrams to point things out.
Solution
1. OK, so I’ve got my graphic, and I know something about it thats not obvious at first glance.
2. So I’ll open it with Photoshop and put an arrow on it. Firstly Select the “Line tool”.
3. On the toolbar at the top select the drop down arrow next to the free form tool > And tick the Arrowheads “End” box. Note: for a larger line/arrow width, change the weight from 1px (pixel).
Note: This mas moved in Photoshop CS6.
4. Click and drag on the graphic where you want the arrow to start and stop.
Yes that’s correct this girls nose and mouth are on upside down, did you spot that originally?
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I have to do this quite a lot, I take a lot of screen-shots for the site, and have to resize them down, (usually to 550 pixels) so that, they fit with the layout. In addition I scale the larger screenshots down to 900 pixels for the images I Hyperlink to. This means I spend a long time in Photoshop messing about with image sizes. The smaller of the two images you see on the site nearly always has the same name, but has an ‘s’ on the end.
So If I can batch resize and batch rename these files I will save myself a LOT of time.
Solution
In Photoshop ,you can record an ‘action” of you resizing an image then ‘Batch process’ that action on a lot of images, but I find that ‘clunky’ and sometimes it simply will not do what I want it to do! So I use Adobe Bridge instead.
Batch Resize Images in Photoshop
1. Open Photoshop and select File > Browse in Bridge.
2. Browse to the location/folder containing your images and select them > Tools > Image Processor.
3. Select a folder to save the altered images to (Note: Even if you select the same location it creates a folder in that location and puts the changed images in that new folder – don’t panic). set the width to your required size, (the height will resize on an image-per-image basis). To start press ‘Run’.
Batch Resize and Rename Images in Photoshop
1. Now I want to create my ‘Thumbnails”, as before open the Image Processor.
2. This time I want my images 550 px wide (Note: For a thumbnail that’s pretty big! But that’s what I use on this site). ‘Run” with those settings.
3. Now MAKE SURE you have your modified images selected, and select Tools > Batch Rename.
4. The first time you see this screen it’s not very intuitive. You can delete and add options as required, keep changing them until the preview shows what you want, and select ‘Rename’.
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I am in the process of moving all my stuff to a new laptop, I installed CS6 and was doing some work when every time I used the cropping tool my images simply went black.
Also, for no reason images I was working on would flicker black as well?
Solution
Turns out it’s just a problem with the graphics drivers on this particular machine and the way Photoshop interacts with the graphics processor. The first step should fix the problem for you, if not carry out the second step.
Step 1
File > Preferences > Performance > Advanced Settings > Change the Drawing mode to ‘Basic’ > OK > OK. Now test again, if the problem is resolved skip the next step.
