buy cheap adobe illustrator cs5

Written by Lourance | 18 June 2010

When using Photoshop or Illustrator on a regular basis, whether you are a beginner, intermediate or pro user, you often bump into small problems that you would associate with illogical behavior and where you wonder “Why does this happen? Why doesn’t it just do what I want it to do”. They become little annoyances if you don’t know the immediate answer to.

As soon as you know how to solve them, you see things clearer and differently. Today I though I share a solution to a few problems I encountered myself recently or in the past :

Photoshop CS4

Problem

When you move layers from one document to another in Photoshop, the angle of styles are changed to the default value of 120°.

Solution

Make sure the checkbox 'Use Global Light' is unchecked in the styles options before you start dragging the layers to another document. By default this option is always checked and so Photoshop changes the angle to the default angle is 120° if you drag the layers into a new document. If you're using another angle in your document and you leave this option checked then Photoshop will assume that the value you've entered is the global light angle for your entire document. Dragging layers with this option checked will change the angle to the value that is set in this document.

Problem

When you add a Layer Mask to a Layer that has Layer Styles applied to it, the styles are applied to the way the object is masked, but what you want is that the mask also hides the effects.

Solution

In the Layer Styles options, you can check an option 'Layer Mask Hides Effects' under the Blending Options.

Problem

Hm, maybe not such 'small' annoyance' is when you hit cmd/ctrl + option/alt + shift + S (or go to File > Safe for Web) and you get an error message 'The operation could not be completed'

Solution

I haven't found yet what causes this error because it pops up out of the blue. The only solution I've found so far, well, if you can call it that, is saving your document and relaunching Photoshop. Maybe this is just a bug I don't know?

Problem

When you duplicate layers in Photoshop the name of the layer will be changed with the word 'copy' at the end.

Solution

I don't have a 'good' one I'm afraid. At a certain version (not sure which one, CS maybe?) Adobe didn't touch the layer naming when you duplicate layers, but then in the next version they undid this change and I really wonder why. Why the hell would you want the word 'copy' (plus a number) in the layer name? Not sure about you, but I find this annoying. I always name my layers and keep things very organized. What I sometimes do now to avoid this from happening is: create a new document, drag the layers I want to duplicate in the new document and then drag the layers from this document back into my original document. Ridiculous, right? Call me obsessive, but I just can't stand the 'copy' in the naming and so I do this extra effort if if need to duplicate a bunch of layers.

Illustrator CS4

Problem

For some reason you don't see the gradient annotator anymore and you have no idea why and you don't know how to get it back.

Solution

Choose 'Show Gradient Annotator' under the 'View' menu. For a while I didn't know this was there (was looking in the wrong place, the palette options) and it drove me crazy because I didn't understand why it suddenly didn't show up anymore. I think I was just accidentally hitting cmd/option + G somehow while I probably thought I was ungrouping an object, I'm not really sure. Anyhow it's good that you can hide and show this as it can be in your way sometimes.

Problem

You're trying to join 2 anchor points but you get an error message saying that you must select 2 open end points.

Solution

It is annoying when you get this message, but the message is right: 2 open anchor point is what you need to select otherwise this won't work. If you have selected more then 2 points because there are 2 or more anchor points on top of each other, than here is what I usually do: I temporarily move this extra point out of the way by using the arrow keys, then select the 2 points I want to join and join them, and then move the other point back into its position using the arrow keys. Another option is to temporarily lock (cmd/ctrl + 2) the other anchor points or to hide (cmd/ctrl + 2) them. To unlock hit: cmd/ctrl + option/alt + 2 or to reveal hit: cmd/ctrl + option/alt + 3. Another thing, you can check the 'Don't Show Again' checkbox in the message, but I never do because I want to be informed when this happens.

Interaction between Photoshop and Illustrator

Problem

When placing a SmartObject from Illustrator into Photoshop via copy and paste, some transparent effects are gone. Transparency in gradients are opaque and some transparent modes are changed to normal (instead of multiply, overlay etc.)

Solution

The solution I found is to simply select and drag the illustration from Illustrator directly into your Photoshop document instead of copying and pasting it.

There you have it. Hope some of you had an 'aha' moment when reading this. I'm sure there a lot more of these little problems where it took you a while to get around them. Please don't hesitate to share them with us.