Posts Tagged ‘photoshop’

Clear Photoshop’s Swatch Palette

The Photoshop swatch palette

Everybody wants a rainbow, apparently.

Whether you’re trying to save a specific set of colors for later use, or simply want a palette with only your colors on it, you’ll likely have encountered a problem that has been plaguing Photoshop for as long as I remember, and still hasn’t been addressed in CS5 (or CS5.5, that I know of): how do you clear the swatch palette?

The only things you can do from Photoshop’s own menus are:

  1. reset the swatch palette to the default colors
  2. replace the palette with a new swatch palette by selecting “Replace Swatches.”

Anyway, there are two ways to clear the swatch palette completely. Actually, there are three, but one of those is to manually right-click each swatch and select Delete swatch.” If you’ve got way too much time on your hands, this would be the way to go. For the rest of us that would rather get on with our lives, there are two better methods of clearing out the palette.

The first method is to do it manually, only with the help of a keyboard shortcut. While holding your mouse cursor over the swatch palette, hold down Alt ( Option on Mac). Your cursor should change to a scissors icon (). Click any color in the swatch palette to delete it. You’ll have to do this over a hundred times to clear out the palette, but if you’re a furious clicker like me, you can have this done in under 10 seconds (I play Starcraft, so…yeah).

The Alt/ Option clicking works fairly well, but is still somewhat labor intensive. If you want to clear it even faster, you can download this (mostly empty) swatch file. It includes only one color, black, so you can simply delete this single swatch and begin filling the palette with your own colors.

Download the file below:

single_swatch.aco (50 bytes)

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Quick Tip: “Permissions” Issue with Adobe Extension Manager

If you receive an error while installing an extension to the CS5 (or CS4) suite like “You do not have appropriate permissions” to install the extension, do the following:

  1. Close Adobe Extension Manager
  2. Through the Windows programs menu, find Adobe Extension Manager and right-click it
  3. Select “Run as Administrator”
  4. Install your extension by double-clicking the .zxp file
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Adobe Creative Suite 5.5: Worth the Upgrade?

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5: Make Adobe Money Edition

Note the "CS5.5" tag, because it's the exact same box as CS5.

Adobe has recently released version 5.5 of its Creative Suite packages. Having recently upgraded to CS5 from a mixed CS3/CS4 environment, I had to ask myself if it’s worth both the trouble and expense to upgrade at this point.

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Adobe Photoshop CS Under Windows 7

I installed Photoshop CS on my home machine because Photoshop CS4 runs like a dog, even on my quad-core machine beast. I do still use the rest of the CS4 applications, because their enhancements are actually worth using. But, that’s a whole different story

Anyway, if for some reason you’re using Photoshop CS in Windows 7, you might find your layer dragging going quite slowly, and things generally not working at full speed.

To fix this, go to your Photoshop shortcut and right-click it. Select Properties, then the Compatibility tab. Check the box marked “Disable desktop composition” and press OK. When you start Photoshop, Windows will go into “Basic” color mode, which looks like crap, but your Photoshop will now run smooth as silk.

Old-school.

On a side note, I also had to do this for 3ds max 9. I don’t remember the exact issue, but it also required old-school access to the screen drawing.

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Adobe CS4 Issues and Mini-Review

Adobe has decided to make more of a commitment to customer support. They are teaming up with a global service provider, so I assume that means outsourced phone support. The best place to take your change requests is the Adobe Feature Request form.

This is a really, really long post. It’s long both because the Adobe Creative Suite 4 is vast and encompasses many software packages, but also because I found a great deal of things to complain about. While complaining is nothing new for me, finding this many problems with a mature software product is.

In this post, first I will detail the problems I encountered using the CS4 products, some action items for Adobe, state a few positives, and an overall conclusion. I do not intend to review all of the new features (which are many).

Note that this post is about the Windows version. I believe many of these issues are not present on a Mac system, but I can’t make any assumptions, because I do not own a Mac, nor have I used CS4 on a Mac.

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