teehan+lax at it again - iOS 7 GUI PSD

http://www.teehanlax.com/tools/ios7/

Their PSD's have been getting better and better. Most everything is vector and very accurate. Some of the earlier PSD's had issues and obvious omissions, but teehan+lax, you're making the world a better place.

Photoshop Tutorials: Really easy HDR effect

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kolnedra/2257529395/

Fixing the Photoshop clipboard bug (copy and paste)

"For many Photoshop users, there is a horrible bug in Adobe Photoshop that causes the program to stop importing from the clipboard. You’ll be using the software for hours or even days without a problem, and all of a sudden you won’t be able to copy and paste anything into it at all, with your only option to close and re-open Photoshop."

http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/archives/2007/09/05/how-to-fix-the-photoshop-clipboard/

iPad GUI Kit: Teehan+Lax

Teehan+lax are back with a GUI kit for iPad. Yeah, I know I'm 5 months late, but I've only just begun iPad work. As always with their kits, make sure to look closely at detail and use this more as a starting point, as their iPhone kits were nice, but not perfect.

Enjoy!

http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/02/01/ipad-gui-psd/

Type 1 Fonts, Windows 7 and Photoshop

Today my computer was upgraded to Windows 7, and well, now my Type 1 (postscript) fonts don't want to work inside of Photoshop CS3. I know the format is ancient and is slowly going the way of the dodo, and even though I have OpenType and TrueType versions of Helvetica, none organize as nicely as my Type 1 fonts do. In Photoshop, all versions of my Type 1 Helvetica show up in the secondary dropdown, not as separate entries in the full font list, as happens with OpenType and TrueType (for me at least). Plus, some of us have had these fonts for years and don't feel like buying another set.

After much Googling, I discovered that Adobe products will recognize them if you place them in this directory:

c:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

If this directory doesn't exist, try creating it. The workaround kinda sucks, but for me it's worth it.

iPhone GUI 3.0 PSD

Gone are the days when I was the only mobile designer I knew. Now everyone and their mama is creating UI's for the iPhone. The guys over at teehan+lax have provided us designers with an awesome resource, a PSD file of nearly every iPhone GUI asset.

It's not perfect, but it's as close as you're gonna get. I would prefer if every element was created as a shape or layer style, some are flattened so they aren't as easily edited. And the volume control knob isn't correct. But other than those minor flaws, this kit has saved my life numerous times.

http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=1628

Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development

Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/12/setting-up-photoshop-for-web-app-and-iphone-development/

Link O' the Day: The Mysterious Save-for-Web Color Shift

http://www.viget.com/inspire/the-mysterious-save-for-web-color-shift/

Photoshop Feature Request #3

I'd like an option, somewhere under "Window", to see all of the fonts used in a PSD file listed, as well as their true filename. There are times I'm asked for "Helvetica", when I have 20 different versions, both TTF, OTF, etc., on my machine. Plus, I'm often dealing with a few hundred layers, I don't really have the time to go through them all looking for fonts I used, or fonts someone else might have used if I'm opening their PSD file.

Mobile Phones and Gradient Banding

Most of the design work I do nowadays ends up on mobile phones. Lately, the screens for these phones have more vibrant colors and pretty amazing LCD displays. But some of the phones, even new ones, have difficulty rendering gradients. A lot of the time, gradients end up banding on a phone (color steps), and your once beautiful design ends up chunky, degraded and completely artifacted.

In the past, your choices were to either adjust your gradient (either shortening the length it takes from one color to get to the next or making the colors less drastic), or remove it all together and go flat. I really don't like either of those choices, because, as a designer, it's really limiting. Or you could just leave it.

It seems as though these issues are directly tied to the color depths LCD screens can produce (24 bit compared to 16 bit that most LCD screens see). I won't get into details on why certain phones use X depth compared to Y, because it all truthiness, I don't know.

After some digging around the internet, I came across a tool called DepthDither, by Graphest. It's a free plugin for Photoshop that allows you not only to target a specific color depth (and show you on screen how it will look), it gives you three dithering methods to try fixing the banding. I have to say that the results so far in the last 6-12 months I've been using this tool have been amazing.

Original

At 12 bit (and how a lot of phones would render it)

With DepthDithering applied at 100%

Get it now while it's still free. I imagine the more mobile our world becomes, the more this tool will be in high demand.

Photoshop Feature Request #2

The File menu in Photoshop. Can we move Revert away from Save for Web and Devices? Maybe up there by close? It's too dangerous of a button to be right next to my most used function.

Photoshop Feature Request #1

In the options menu of the Character palette, there's an option called "No Break". If you use this on a word that's been hyphenated in your paragraph, it removes the added break. But what happens when you apply this "No Break" to an entire paragraph? Does it work as expected, not allowing any words contained in the paragraph to hyphenate?

Nope. Your text disappears. Completely. Just vanishes.

The problem with the one by one method of de-hyphenating words is that is takes some time, especially when de-hyphenating one word hyphenates two others.

That's my (frustrated) request of the day.

How to see PSD previews in Thumbnail View

If you ever wondered where your Photoshop previews went when in Thumbnail View on Windows, here's how to get them back. I stumbled across this fix today, and even though I can't take credit for it, I figure I'd drive some more traffic to it.

Here's where it originated:
http://board.iexbeta.com/index.php?showtopic=59007

Here's where I found a working link to the file:
http://www.whoredcanvas.net/forum/index.php?s=197adfc33f7204b7b41ec38e5852bcd5&showtopic=1108

Works good so far. Life is going to be a lot easier.

Thanks Singh400.

UPDATE:
I just downloaded both rar files and added them to one zip, available here:
http://curtiscalhoun.com/uploads/PSD_Thumbnail_Explorer.zip

Photoshop Save for Web, Hidden Save Dialog

Today I was working in Photoshop, exporting to JPEG, save for web, normal stuff. I had to go to another program, and when I came back, I couldn't get to the program. The Save for Web screen just sat there, staring at me while greyed out. Every click I made, the computer shouted out with that "you're doing it wrong" beep. I tried alt-tab, tab by itself, right-clicking the XP toolbar. I thought my only option at this point was to close Photoshop and lose my file. Only a half hour lost, but it's my half hour.

I brought up the Windows Task Manager by using Ctrl-Alt-Del, and hit "Switch to" with Photoshop selected.

Everything appeared, and the save dialog was just sitting there looking at me like nothing was wrong. Like he had been waiting on *me*.

PNG Me

Anyone who uses Flash on a regular basis, understands the awesomeness that is Photoshop's PNG24 (basically, what the rest of the world knows as PNG32, since the last 8 bits is for the alpha channel). Basically, it's a lossless format, millions of colors, with an alpha channel. The alpha channel is key in Flash, it allows you to bring in objects with shadows, glows or just have a nice smooth cutout edge. And anyone who uses Flash on a regular basis should also know that they should set their compression (per object) in Flash to "Lossless (PNG/GIF)". JPEG compression adds too much artifacting for my taste, although with my current project having a 500kb background image, I might just test those waters later.

What a lot of people don't know, is about PNG8 with an alpha channel. Photoshop gives you basically one format with PNG8. It's basically a GIF. 256 colors and a matted transparent background. Meaning, you have to know what color you're placing this on, or if you turn off matting, know that your edges are going to be very jagged. This is where I open up Fireworks.

A trick I've learned recently that I don't see around very often, is bringing your PNG24's into Fireworks and re-exporting them as PNG8 with an alpha channel. It doesn't work with everything, given that you're still limited to 256 colors, but with the right image and the right dithering selections, you can take an image that was 400kb, and get it down to 80kb. And now your shadow is made with an alpha channel, not a fake transparent matte.

Given that I'm a designer and not an engineer, I'm not going to go into how or why this works, the history behind it, what a "bit" is, etc. All I know is that I cut 600kb off my published SWF file last night, simply by reimporting some of my 24 bit PNGs in 8 bit with an alpha channel. Why Photoshop doesn't support this, especially now that Fireworks is owned by Adobe, is beyond me.