Monthly Archives: March 2014

Shortcut: Cycling through windows/tabs in Photoshop

Miscellaneous

Julieanne Kost reminded me of options that surprisingly few people know:

Use either of these shortcuts to cycle through open, tabbed documents in Photoshop:

  • Command + ~ (tilde) (Mac) | Control + ~ (tilda) (Win)
  • Command + Tab (this is the same shortcut for both platforms).

Adding the Shift key to either shortcut will reverse direction.

When we changed the meaning of Cmd-~ and Cmd-1 in CS4 to be more platform- and app-consistent, longtime Photoshop users flipped out, and I didn’t blame them. As I wrote then,

By and large, keyboard shortcut changes suck.  Mature tools are like musical instruments, and you don’t go moving the piano keys or cello strings without a great need to do so.  It’s painful.  We know.

I still think those were the right changes, and if you prefer the older way, you can just choose Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts, then enable “Use Legacy Channel Shortcuts.”

“If You Build It” — A story of transformation through design

Design

Okay, “design” can get a bit full of itself…

SavingTheWorld

…and yet asking questions, questioning the answers, and adding elbow grease can do a great deal. If You Build It looks like a compelling story:

From the director of WORDPLAY and I.O.U.S.A. comes a captivating look at a radically innovative approach to education. IF YOU BUILD IT follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller to rural Bertie County, the poorest in North Carolina, where they work with local high school students to help transform both their community and their lives. Living on credit and grant money and fighting a change-resistant school board, Pilloton and Miller lead their students through a year-long, full-scale design and build project that does much more than just teach basic construction skills: it shows ten teenagers the power of design-thinking to re-invent not just their town but their own sense of what’s possible.

Directed by Patrick Creadon and produced by Christine O’Malley and Neal Baer, IF YOU BUILD IT offers a compelling and hopeful vision for a new kind of classroom in which students learn the tools to design their own futures.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Sgt. Goldbug, Lego edition

Photography

Years ago, being a crappy boyfriend, I bought Margot a bag of old-school rubber GI Joe heads from Seattle’s Archie McPhee. I took to photographing one of these dudes everywhere I went—e.g. out in Death Valley:

The Sarge

Noting his tendency to pop up a la the ubiquitous Goldbug in Richard Scarry stories, we granted him the rank of Sgt. Goldbug. I’m reminded of this seeing photographer Andrew Whyte’s much superior series featuring a Lego minifig:

MinifigCrab

Of the project he says,

“I love to document everyday things and build them into mini-series,” Whyte says. “But quite often there’s nothing cohesive about what I shoot from one day to the next. As soon as my kids discovered the camera accessory at the Lego store, which fits in the hand of a mini-figure, I worked out a way to start placing the character in my day-to-day shots and he became a cohesive element. For the whole year, I really never left home without the figure.”

Check out the article to see the gallery. [Via Laura Williams Argilla]

Multi-lens systems coming to phones

Mobile, Photography

Interesting news from Engadget about a new system that promises depth sensing, better zoom, and more:

The big trick here is Corephotonics‘ use of two lenses with two different focal lengths. One lens is wide-angle, while the other is at 3x zoom. This means you can switch lenses to magnify more distant subjects without resorting to digital zoom. In the test set-up shown in the video above, which compared the dual-lens system side-by-side with a traditional smartphone camera (with both modules pointed at a test card around a foot away), the Corephotonics system outputted a clear 13-megapixel image regardless of whether it was at 1x or 3x zoom.