Creating Custom Tools Panels in Illustrator CC
I’ve gotten used to the Tools panel (or Toolbox) in Illustrator as it has been for years. Although we can go from single- to double-column for convenience on smaller screens, I hardly ever think about it otherwise. But one feature in Illustrator CC which is both...
Dealing with Dust Using History in Photoshop
There’s another trick for dealing with dust in Photoshop (to sort of continue from the last blog post), which takes a little setup but is even more subtle. It involves the History Brush tool, and the History panel. The advantage is that the corrections are very...
How to Deal with Dust in Photoshop Images
In the age of digital photography, dust would seem to be a thing of the past. Perhaps. But who knows how many pre-digital pictures still exist, un-digitized, and in need of cleaning? With this in mind, I’d like to show you how. Before we had digital...
The Layers Panel in Illustrator–Tips and Tricks
In my last post, I mentioned that the Layers panel serves a more vital function in Photoshop than it does in Illustrator. No offense to Illustrator, of course! But there is a reason I said this. In Illustrator, unless the user makes it happen, objects cannot...
Using the Layers Panel in Photoshop–Tips and Tricks
The Layers panel is one of the most important members of the team. A lot of what goes on in Photoshop is related at least partly to which layer(s) you’ve selected. Or want to select to do stuff in. So paying attention to this, and knowing...
Using Paths to Make a Selection in Photoshop
An unexpected ally in making selections in Photoshop is the Paths panel. Selecting a precise piece of an image can be tedious, even for a veteran user; understanding the selection tools does not provide instant expertise, and some images have such irregular content that it’s a...
Using the Baseline Grid with InDesign
One of the more subtle things we can do with an InDesign document to make it look more professional—i.e. polished, consistent, easier to read—is to use the Baseline Grid. This relates to how the text lays out and vertically lines up on the pages of the...
How to Use Layer Styles in Photoshop
The use of Layer Styles (also known as Layer Effects) in Photoshop is fairly easy, but can add some pretty snazzy results. One of the most visually catchy is the Drop Shadow, which can make it look as if an object is in front of the...
Kerning and Tracking Adjustments in InDesign
A while back, I posted an item about text layout in InDesign. There’s another aspect of it I wanted to mention which might be of some further interest, namely kerning. This is usually the fitting-closer-together of pairs of letters whose shapes make it aesthetically possible to...
How to Use the Selection Tools in Illustrator
Occasionally, new users of Illustrator have trouble understanding the selection tools; there are three, and each does something different. So knowing which to use for what is important. It’s not that hard to get the hang, with a little practice. The main Selection tool, usually referred...
Data Types, Properties, and Relationships in Access
A fundamental aspect of Access databases is the setup of relationships between tables. It’s usually the nature of business databases to have them. So the actual creation of the relationship isn’t hard to do. But there are a couple of not-so-obvious things the user needs to...
Creating Alpha Channels in Photoshop
Making selections in Photoshop is fairly easy, but a large, complicated selection can take some time. And if it’s an area that needs repeated tweaks, such as for color balancing or lightness, it’s helpful if one doesn’t have to keep going back and reselecting thirty or...
Using Multiple Sections in Crystal Reports
When “laying out" data in Crystal Reports, we usually think of written information. Graphics such as charts do enter into reports, but we don’t always use photographs or other non-data images, especially in the Details section where the data will go. If, for example, we wanted...
Creating the Speedometer Gauge in QlikView
QlikView, one of the big BI (business intelligence) programs you can get today, has a number of graphical ways to display data, which it calls charts. Among these, one of the coolest (sorry, but it is) would have to be the Gauge chart. And of the...
The Resource Usage View in Project
When planning a project, one of the problems we run into fairly commonly is overallocation of resources. It's not impossible to fix, but it sometimes helps to know exactly where the overallocation is. The Resource Usage view is one place we can see it fairly easily....
How to Use Bitmap Mode in Photoshop
Of all the image modes in Photoshop, perhaps the least used today is Bitmap mode. It’s the “true” black-and-white mode, unlike Grayscale, which is what a “black-and-white” photograph really is. And Bitmap actually has a couple of advantages, though making proper use of the mode does...
The Anchor Point Tool in Illustrator
When working in Illustrator, drawing with the Pen tool (producing Bezier curves) is a mainstay of many documents. (And in a couple other graphics programs, too.) But sometimes the tools that go with the Pen take a little time to get comfortable with. And the one...
Feathering a Selection in Photoshop
One of the must-have skills in Photoshop is the ability to make precise selections, since we indicate which parts of the picture we want to work with this way, and there are a number of techniques to do it. But equally important is the ability to...
Clone Stamping in Photoshop
The use of the Clone Stamp tool, in itself, is not hard to understand. It allows the user to “borrow” or copy a piece of picture from one spot to “clone” or paste elsewhere. But some people use it like a paintbrush. They clone big swaths...
Slicers in Excel PivotTables
When Excel 2007 was introduced, the PivotTable Field List included a “Filter” area, where one could drop a field to use as a filter (for example, year, brand name, size, etc. from a block of sales data). If the user filtered for one year, or one...