Thursday, June 10, 2010

Photoshop CS5's new HUD Color Picker, and a neat helper app that enables auto-saving

Photoshop CS5's new HUD Color Picker, and a neat helper app that enables auto-saving

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Adobe Photoshop CS5 has a new feature that digital artists have been demanding for years: it's called the HUD Color Picker and I'm sure it's making Photoshoppers dizzy with excitement. That is if they even know it exists -- you see, the HUD (heads-up display) is buried under a truly atrocious shortcut: Shift+Alt+Right Click. Still, if you have Photoshop CS5, try it -- you can see it in the picture above -- it's pretty cool!

Now, to make things easier, there's an app called 'apssistant' (Adobe Photoshop aSSistant, get it?) It's open-source, and be warned: the English documentation is not great (it's written by a talented Chinese artist). Not only does this neat helper app re-bind the awful HUD shortcut to the ergonomic backtick ( ` ), but it adds another neat function: auto saving! With a couple of clicks you can set apssistant to auto-save every X minutes, or simply prompt you to save with a high-visibility dialog box.

Due to the English-Chinese language gap, the app's interface is a bit messy and hard to understand, but turning auto-saving on is easy enough. Still, here's what I've learnt, from a bit of experimentation:
  • You can use apssistant to pop up the normal Foreground Color Picker in earlier versions of Photoshop -- you can also simply set up a keyboard shortcut inside Photoshop (Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts>Tools), but the app makes it a lot easier.
  • 'Sticky' color picking -- by default, you change the foreground color by hovering over it with your mouse. 'Sticky' makes it so you must click to select the new color -- a lot safer!
  • I have no idea what 'Change Step Forward / Backward shortcut' does -- if anyone can work it out, let me know. Maybe it's quite cool...!

Photoshop CS5's new HUD Color Picker, and a neat helper app that enables auto-saving originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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