Friday, April 11, 2008

Thank the little baby jesus, it's a miracle.

Help files. while wordy and not always clear, are a thing of beauty. I learned three new things today regarding Adobe products and it is a nice way to end the week.

Last month, I received a file that had been :cleaned up a bit for you" abd thought that would be a good thing. When I imported the file into my magazine, I also imported about 60 style sheets that were, ummm, excess baggage. Totally unwarranted. Anything but "cleaned up".

They really aren't a total hinderance, but when I am formatting text, they were a huge pain in the ass because my style sheet palette would scroll to the bottom and I was working with the top 6 (of the now 60 or so) style sheets. Some internet weirdness also prevented me from deleting them properly.

So this month, before I import anything new, I was determined to have a clean palette. The Help file! Yes! It took about 5 minutes total. Delight.

This was all in InDesign. My success took a left turn in my brain and distracted me with finding a way to make contact sheets in Photoshop. Surely a program designed for professional use would be able to make contact sheets, but I have been looking for months and not found it(key: think submenu). Today I was determined that if I couldn't find it, I could at the very least figure out a way to make my own contact sheet.

The Help file! Yes!

I immediately came across a way to make set sheets which gives you a choice of 1 8x10, 2 5x7s, 9 wallets, etc. It also lets you take the wallets and switch in different pics. I was delighted.

In an effort to recreate what I had just done, in a flash, it caught my eye. In the same submenu as the set sheets, there it was...contact blahx3

woohoo.................

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ahhh the wonderful learning curve!

weese said...

wits amazing how many people never think to use the help system.
bravo.