Photoshop’s Preview Option – A Top Tip

Iain — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:11:06 +0000

It might be that this is entirely obvious to everyone bar me, but I’m going to post it anyway! When you’re making adjustments using one of the pop-ups (levels: my new favourite toy ) actually use the preview option. Don’t just leave it checked, watch the changes and try and visualise the difference – de-select and re-select it. As you turn the preview off and on you’ll see the changes that you are making!

Genius.

Is Your Exif Data Missing?

Iain — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:24:10 +0000

I recently noticed a few pictures that I’d uploaded to Flickr didn’t have any Exif data(and in fact still don’t as I haven’t changed them yet). I don’t know about you, but if I see a picture that I like I often take a look at the Exif, primarily as a learning exercise. The fact that mine was missing annoyed me so I decided to investigate.

I found that the reason why was actually quite simple. It’s the “Save For Web” option within Photoshop Elements 6 that strips it out. I haven’t checked but guess that it does it to produce a smaller file size. If you use “Save As” instead you get to keep your Exif so that’s the way I’ll be creating my Jpegs from now on.

Using this method throws up a complication: image resizing. When you “Save For Web” you get the option to resize by pixels but this doesn’t happen when you “Save As” – you have to resize beforehand. However, selecting Image | Resize from the menu doesn’t appear to allow you to resize by pixels. You get a choice of percent, inches, cm, mm, points, picas or columns. Now I’m sure I could work out the percentage I need, but I don’t want to! Luckily the solution simple, if not obvious: tick the box to “Resample Image”. Bingo, you can resize by pixels.

Can anyone tell me why it should be this complicated? Or what the different resample options (bilinear/bicubic/etc) mean?

The West Ring » Tips

Photoshop’s Preview Option – A Top Tip

Is Your Exif Data Missing?