For those of you who might have missed it, just about a week ago I was the guest blogger over at Scott Kelby’s blog. My post was on the topic of creative exploration and the creative exercises I do to generate ideas. In addition to the post, I produced a video tutorial exclusively for the [...]

Ever have this happen? You draw a selection with the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) and the corners of your selection are rounded, rather than nice and straight? This happens to a lot of people, especially if they’ve been drinking. If you haven’t been drinking but you’re suffering from rounded-corner selections, look up in the Options [...]

If you’ve ever tried to expand a rectangular selection by more than five or six pixels, you know what happens. The crisp, sharp-edged corners that you start off with become rounded. Here’s the fix: Don’t use the Expand command (found under the Select menu, under Modify). First, make your selection and press Command-T (PC: Control-T) [...]

When we first tested .mac, it had a lot of problems. Our email ACID test did not render very well at all, and we ranked support overall as ‘Improvement Recommended’. This was slightly suprising given then excellent rendering abilities of the Mac desktop Mail client.

So after the release of the new Mobile Me, and after the associated outages and glitches, we were very keen to run the test again. The good news is that the results were dramatically improved. Nearly all of the previous problems had been corrected, and the email rendered almost perfectly.

Background colours and images are correct, positioning of elements works well, and even list images show up. The one oddity is what you can see in the thumbnail; headings. We found that while our H1 tag rendered perfectly, H2, H3 and below would not accept styling from a stylesheet in the head.

There’s no obvious explanation for why that would be the case, but during our testing and fiddling we were not able to get it to work at all. Lower level headings remained stubbornly unaffected by margins, background colors, padding and more.

Perhaps someone from the Mobile Me team can explain? Overall though, the rendering is hugely improved, and has earned an ‘Excellent’ rating. This is another great example of how webmail clients don’t need to render poorly.

Thanks to everyone who emailed us about Mobile Me, including Georg Stadler and Stefan Kremer who both sent in screengrabs.

View the full report for Mobile Me.

Lost your Background layer? It happens. It’s heartbreaking, but it happens. If you suddenly find yourself staring at a Layers palette and there’s no Background layer (chances are you accidentally converted your Background layer into a regular layer), here’s how to get a Background layer again: Click on the Create a New Layer icon, then [...]

Using a mixture of filters and blending modes, Corey takes a stock photo and transforms it into an old, classic 1950’s pin-up poster. createObject('swf','videos/swfplayer.swf?video=pinup-girl.flv&pre=pread.flv&post=postad.flv','width','500','height','417','scale','exactfit','quality','high','allowScriptAccess','sameDomain','bgcolor','#ffffff'); Corey Barker is Executive Producer of PlanetPhotoshop.com and is an Education and Curriculum Developer for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. Corey has also made numerous appearances on the highly rated podcast, [...]

Problem: The image looked great in Photoshop, but now that you’ve converted it to CMYK, saved the file as a TIFF, and placed it into QuarkXPress, InDesign, PageMaker, etc., the image looks awful—way oversaturated and totally whacked. Reason: The preview of CMYK TIFFs just looks like that, so don’t freak out—if it looked right in [...]

Not sure if you have enough RAM? Just ask Photoshop. Believe it or not, it can tell you. Here’s how: Open a document that’s indicative of the type of image you normally work on. Work on the image, doing typical stuff, for about 10 minutes. Along the bottom left-hand corner of your document window, just [...]