copy layer into a mask of another layer

Paste a layer(A) into a layer(B) mask. In 4 easy steps:
1. select the layer A and copy it to clipboard (Cmd/Ctrl+a, Cmd/Ctrl+c)
2. go to the layer B, make it active and click the Layer Mask
3. go to your Channels Panel, there is your mask in the bottom, set it active and visible, paste the clipboard content (Cmd/Ctrl+v)
4. make the mask channel invisible again and the RGB channel (top) active


From: http://pehaa.com/2009/02/photoshop-paste-a-layer-to-a-mask/

adjustment layer to only affect layer below it

alt+apple (control) + G
and it auto clicks to the layer below the adjustment layer.

Photoshop Text Box resizing

http://www.theblog.ca/photoshop-textbox

Peter on his blog wrote (as was my experience): "Trying to tweak every conceivable Photoshop option and using ctrl+click, shift+right-click, scream-at-computer-click, etc. got me nowhere. So thanks for nothing to Google and thanks for nothing to my brain.

Yeah, I could have just created a new text box, but that would have meant giving in. So, after an hour I sent the file to Derek (smart guy) and complained. He replied: “I don’t have the problem — I can resize the text box and the font size isn’t changed.”

What!?!? Is this a joke!?!? I went back to Photoshop and… ah… for some reason a light finally turned on: I should have simply resized while using the Text Tool; all along, I was trying to use the arrow to resize the text box."

Simple, yet essential.

Photoshop Layer shortcuts

Make all layers visible (yes, I searched and searched for this one, because if you use alt click on more than one layer, layers within a folder won't become visible again.

Right click on eyeball/ then show/hide all layers


Found this here, which might just be the best collection of Photoshop shortcuts I have found. Ok, my logic is flawed, but I couldn't find the above shortcut anywhere else...

http://jkost.com/pdf/photoshop/cs3/PSTips&Tech.pdf

Preparing Photoshop files for hand-off

http://www.noupe.com/photoshop/preparing-photoshop-files-for-web-developers.html

a great article. Comments are helpful too. I agree with the bit about keeping more layers rather than flattening everything thus allowing the developer to slice as they will and to make edits as necessary.

And this is a nice list of things that a designer can hand to the developer to make their life easier (from one of the comments):

I follow almost all of the tips listed. Some additional ones I add are:
1. Always include a flattened version as a support/reference files in case of any shifting
2. High level call out for dynamic content and areas that are fluid/flexible
3.Pixel specs – similar to old school print specs – a file with:
- hex color call outs
- font stack, type size, line height, hex colors, style, – weight, letter spacing etc
- border widths, hex colors
- container heights/widths
- padding
Some may wonder why so detailed – if I can provide that to my dev he/she can produce the CSS in half the time. The other reason is it leaves little doubt for color shifting since I’ve spec’d it out.

color profiles for webdesign

http://www.rumblingskies.com/blog/?p=46#more-46

When pasting, you are prompted to assign a profile: use working rgb: iec61966=2.1

Convert to profle engine: Adobe ACE
and relative color metric

check "use black point compensation"
check "use dither"

Set color profiles to sRGB.
If your monitor profile matches, click of "convert to sRGB" in the "Save for Web and Devices" dialog
working with sRGB is recommended by the smashing ebook "mastering photoshop for web", but then you will need to work with a soft proof
view->proof setup, then change the setting to Monitor RGB
then make sure that view-proof color is checked.
This is identical to how the image will appear in the browser
then it doesn't matter if "convert to sRGB" is on or off but make sure that "embed color profile" is off.

Video dimensions Chart

import from CS4 text to CS5 workflow

workflow to preserve classic text:

1. create slides in il.
2. paste into cs4 (as many as you can at once) I once got 7. Sometimes one or two. Put them all into one slide if using TC's system
3. save them and reopen in cs5
(aside: in audacity, remove all long tails and split audio at the slide breaks.)
4. put slides together so that audio breaks where it should stop.
5. copy each slide and synch the images to the slide.
6. Watch through and start putting the animation in.

illustrator shortcuts to integrate (for swatch colors

X Toggle between Fill & Stroke
Shift-X Swap Fill & Stroke
D Default Fill & Stroke (white fill/black stroke)
< Fill or Stroke w/Color
> Fill or Stroke w/Gradient
/ Fill or Stroke w/None

ai to fla steps worflow

1. create each scene as a symbol
2. save ai.
3. import ai into as2 fla
4. move all symbols into as3 ai
5. copy objects from each symbol into the scene
thus you save a lot of import steps
and text comes in as classic mode and formatted nicely.

Bringing text into Flash from illy painlesslessly

1. you saw the post on pdf to ai
2. Now, create symbols, based on previous post (downsaving as illy 10)
3. Import into a AS2 fla file (this enables all text to come in as classic and avoiding the tlf formatting mess)
4. move symbols into your AS3 doc.


Now all I need is an artboard to symbols script

converting ai to fla

http://clussman.com/quick-tip-importing-art-from-illustrator-to-a-flash-library/

Quick Tip: Importing Art from Illustrator to a Flash Library

Flash has the ability to import native Adobe Illustrator (AI) files but there are a few quirks to be aware of.

First, it imports every layer, including every sub-layer, as a separate symbol. That means every single component of your artwork will end up as a separate symbol. Completely unworkable. To get around this, anything that you want to be a single symbol in Flash needs to be converted into a symbol in your Illustrator file. Here’s the trick though: after converting it to a symbol, delete the original artwork and then drag your symbol to the artboard. That symbol will exist on one layer with no sub-layers.

Second, Flash will tell you that it can import native Adobe Illustrator files up to version 10 but it will happily try (and fail) to import your CS3 file. Do as it says and not as it does. Save your artwork to version 10 before importing.

You can’t import an Illustrator symbol library directly into Flash, at least not in CS3.

Steps
Create your artwork in Adobe Illustrator.
Select the elements you want grouped as a symbol in Flash.
Drag those elements to your Illustrator symbol library.
Repeat until you’ve created all your symbols.
Select all. Delete all. (Clear your artboard.)
Drag each symbol back to the artboard.
Save as an Illustrator 10 file.
In Flash, choose File => Import to Library.
Select your Illustrator file and you should be done.
A note about color: if you’re experiencing the classic Adobe color shift, open up your Illustrator artwork and manually assign it your monitor profile (Edit => Assign Profile…). Re-save your artwork and re-import it to your Flash library and the color shift should be gone.

Tags: Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, Miscellaneous, Quick Tips

ai to fla

make symbols in ai.
import ai to library in fla

is fxg better?

from pdf to ai

Use MS Office 2004 mac
"save as pdf" High Quality Print
Use pages to pdf

pdf - illy - ind - fla

1. use pdf 2 pages to bring into illy
2. copy and paste each page from illy in to ind (much faster than the other way
3. export from ind to fla
4. take each keyframe and convert to a symbol. place symbol on to preworked timeline.

text is not editile. - drawing objects.

A great approach to creative work.

http://the99percent.com/tips/6956/Getting-Creative-Things-Done-How-To-Fit-Hard-Thinking-Into-a-Busy-Schedule

Getting Creative Things Done: How To Fit Hard Thinking Into a Busy Schedule

by Cal Newport

It started a few weeks ago. I had to write an academic research statement: a high stakes, ambiguous, beast of a creative project. For the first week, I kept telling myself, "this is my most important priority," and hacked away at the project whenever I got a chance. I continuously felt guilty about not spending enough time writing. One night, toward the end of the week, I holed up in my office until 9 pm, desperate to get things done.
The result was near useless. I had 15 pages of rambling text (a research statement should be 3-5 pages, at most), and still had more to cover. The message was confused and drowning in adjectives.

This situation is common for to-do list creatives – workers who have the juggle creative work – like writing or devising strategy – with logistical work – like prompt email replies and meetings. I'm a to-do list creative: as a theoretical computer scientist, I must switch between solving mathematical proofs – one of the most purely creative endeavors – and the logistics of reviewing papers and meeting with grant managers. To keep things interesting, I also sometimes write.

Here's our quandary: To-do list creatives advance in their careers based on the quality of their creative output. Our logistical responsibilities, however, fight against this goal. Most to-do list creatives cannot drop everything to spend days lost in monk-like focus. But the result of instead squeezing creative work into distracted bursts, driven by deadline pressure, is mediocrity. (Exhibit A: the first draft of my research statement).

Fortunately, however, there is hope...

Driven by the demands of academia, which requires the regular publication of high-quality creative work to maintain your job, I developed a system. As an homage to David Allen, I call it “Getting Creative Things Done” (or, GCTD), and it has helped me publish academic papers at a fast rate while also writing three books and managing a popular blog, all the while dispatching the never-ending, non-creative tasks required by my position.

Most to-do list creatives cannot drop everything to spend days lost in monk-like focus.


Excited about starting the faculty job search process, for example, I had ignored my system when I first dived into writing my research statement. After the debacle of that first week, however, I stepped back, took a deep breath, and let GCTD work its magic. Three days later, I had a beautiful draft complete.

In this article, I want to explain this system. I'll start by summarizing what's required to produce high-quality creative work, then describe how the GCTD system integrates these demands into a normal schedule.

What Is Needed for Good Creative Work?

In his oft-cited essay, “Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule,” Paul Graham highlights the unique demands of creative work (the type of work produced by a “maker,” in Graham's lexicon).

The maker's schedule, he explains, is defined by long, open stretches of uninterrupted work. For a maker, “a single meeting can blow a whole afternoon.” Graham describes his own schedule, from his time working in a software start-up, as starting after dinner and lasting until 3am, explaining: “At night no one could interrupt me.”

In Graham's construction, I identified two justifications for the importance of long stretches of uninterrupted work:
Shifting Mental Modes: When the mind knows it has no interruptions looming, it can shift into the flow state required to produce high-quality output.
Providing Freedom to Explore: Real creative work is non-linear, often requiring long, unexpected detours to uncover the contours of the problem at hand. Long stretches of time provide the freedom needed to feel comfortable indulging in these detours.
As mentioned, the problem faced by to-do list creatives is that we cannot afford to integrate Graham's long stretches of uninterrupted work into our schedules. (Though we might want to dedicate a full day to one project, our bosses might disagree.) With this in mind, the GCTD system attempts to replicate the two benefits of uninterrupted work, as described above, in a more realistic, logistics-respecting workday structure.

Getting Creative Things Done: The System

The GCTD system works as follows:
At the beginning of each week, decide on the one (or, at most, two) big creative projects that will receive your attention over the next five days. Ignore the temptation to make a small amount of progress on a large amount of projects. Creative work is hard. If you want high-quality output, you have to focus your energy.
Block out time for these projects on your calendar. The increments should at least 1 hour long, and preferably 2 to 3. When you block these hours out depends on your schedule for the week. What’s important, however, is that you treat these blocks like you would any other important appointment: the time is inviolable, and you must work around these blocks when scheduling meetings or other work.
Set rules for your creative blocks. The rules should describe what is NOT allowed during creative work. For example, I have a strict ban on email during creative blocks.
Focus on process, not goals. The final piece is arguably the most important: don't set goals for your creative blocks. Creative work is not a task to be checked off a next actions list. If you decide that you need to complete a particular project by the end of a block, for example, you're likely to either be frustrated by your lack of progress or rush out something mediocre. Instead, focus on process. Decide how, exactly, you are going to approach the work. This focuses your energy. High-quality results will follow naturally from this focused work.
I want to provide some examples of GCTD in action. Here's a screen shot of my calendar from a recent week:



The appointments highlighted in red are my GCTD blocks. Notice, this is a busy week; I have lots of other meetings already on my calendar, many of which came up as the week progressed. The GCTD system kept my creative blocks intact, forcing me to schedule my other obligations around this pre-defined work.

My small tasks, by contrast, were accomplished in the open spaces that remain on the calendar. (A bonus of the GCTD approach is that by defining my creative time in advance, I can tackle small tasks without feeling guilty about not working on something more important.)

When it comes to process, my strategy differed depending on the work. For tackling my research statement, for example, my process had me complete and polish each short section before moving on to the next section. This meant: thinking carefully about what I wanted to say, writing it well, then adding the citations and editing before moving on. I discovered that, for this style of writing, this process harnessed my mental energy better than blazing ahead fast and heading back to fix things up later.

When working on proofs, by contrast, I use another process. I dedicate the final 30 minutes of these creative blocks to carefully summarizing my thinking on the problem in a $45 lab notebook I bought expressly for this purpose. (The expense of the notebook signals to me the importance of the information recorded in it.) Carefully summarizing my thoughts forces me to organize my thinking. It also helps me remain focused during the earlier parts of the block, sifting through the mental pieces that form a proof, and sidestepping the urge to wander.

Why the System Works

Here’s how the GCTD system replicates the benefits of Graham’s long uninterrupted stretches of time with a smaller schedule footprint:

First, the inviolable nature of the scheduled creative blocks, combined with the strict rules for avoiding interruption during these blocks, enables a quick shift of mental mode. The act of defending these pre-scheduled times from other meetings and tasks helps your mind take them seriously. You will quickly habituate to this system: when a creative block comes up, your mind will know what to do.

Second, the focus on process (not goals), supports mental detours. When you face a block of time dedicated to finishing a milestone, your mind avoids detours as they might delay your progress. When you instead focus on process, your mind is free to follow the path most important to eventually producing high-quality output.

The focus on process (not goals), supports mental detours.


When working on a proof, for example, it is not uncommon for me to dedicate 10-15 hours of creative energy to grappling with a strategy that's ultimately abandoned. This exploration can be crucial for building an intuitive understanding of the problem. My process, which focuses on clarity in thought, allows for these detours. If I instead demanded measurable progress – e.g. "produce five lemma statements a day!" – I would soon become stuck.

In addition, the GCTD system is sustainable due to its flexibility. It harnesses the appointment/calendar system that’s already a respected part of the work process for most knowledge workers. There’s no need to retrain your bosses or employees to cooperate with your system (a dubious task) – they already know what it means, for example, when you say: “I have something from 2-4pm that afternoon, can we try earlier?”

Conclusion

At first glance, the GCTD system seems obvious. “Block out time on my calendar for big projects,” you might think. “I've tried that.”

Creative work, however, is a subtle affair. If your mind is not in the exact right state, it’s difficult to produce high-quality results. Because of this, details matter. This is what’s important about GCTD, not the general idea of blocking out time, but the carefully-calibrated details that accompany it: the blocks are treated like real appointments and are dedicated to only one (or, at most, two) projects in a week; absolutely zero interruptions are allowed during the blocks; and the focus is on process, not goals.

These little things add up to a system that consistently produces the types of ambitious results that, as Graham puts it, are “at the limits of your capacity.” The type of results that can make you a star.

--

Better shape drawing.

http://colorburned.com/2010/02/adobe-fireworks-the-better-tool-for-creating-basic-shapes.html

Great at drawing shapes much easier than in Illustrator: Especially for partial donuts, spirals are nicer, icons are good.
Remember to copy as vectors.

Worth practicing and copying along.

Great links - Essential photoshop plugins, FW and color

http://www.mehdiplugins.com/english/wavylab.htm

check out Noise shampoo!

http://fireworks.abeall.com/extensions/autoshapes/
Nice collection of plugins - arc tool and grids like golden mean are very useful. Need to find AI versions.



I like this color palette tool
http://www.colourlovers.com/copaso/ColorPaletteSoftware

Script Shortcuts in Illustrator Mac

So.. use Script Action palette to call my_script:

1- Make folder

2- Make layer Script Action and attribute a shortcut Key (F2 for example).

3- In Script Action menu (at top right corner) use Insert Command

4- write in dialogbox my_script (if your press the search button, it should be found, ** for me, first time illustrator crash, but after i have called/running manually my_script and remake this step and it's Ok**)

5 - Close/End Script Action



to try, push F2

flipping through layers shortcut in photoshop

Scroll Through The Layers

To scroll through the layers in the Layers palette, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and use the left and right bracket keys ( [ and ] ). The right bracket key scrolls upward through the layers, and the left bracket key scrolls down.

Just need to learn how to do this in Illustrator and Flash

source and more layer shortcuts...
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/layer-shortcuts/