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Many people let a little secret pass them by
every time they use their Photoshop software. Maybe it just
takes time to warm up to the Info palette, but it's a great
tool.
Up in the upper-right of your window, there is a palette. There
is usually a couple of things in it. One is the Navigator
palette. This one lets you zoom in and out with a slider bar and
check out the entire image at once. The other palette is the
quiet little Info palette. He just hangs out, waiting for you to
need him. He gets lonely because most people just neglect him.
We should change that. Take a look below.
Taking a look at the info palette, we see four sections of
information. Clockwise from the upper-left, we have the RGB
values, the CMYK values, the box dimensions portion, and of
course the indicator that tells you exactly where your mouse is
on the screen. Obviously each of these is really nice, and I'll
give you some examples of each.
RGB values are color values based on Red, Green
and Blue. They are the 3 colors that your computer monitor can
display. They are based on a value system that goes from 0 to
256 for each color. So when you move your mouse around inside
your image area, the info palette tells you exactly what RGB
value the pixel you are currently over is.
CMYK is the colors that printers use. The are
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. The same principle applies
here, but you get the colors in percentages instead of raw
numbers.
Just so you know, you can change these options
how you like. There are many color spaces you can use in
Photoshop and you should take advantage of those when needed.
Use the arrow in the upper-right corner of the palette to change
the options.
Now let's talk about the other two portions of
the Into palette. In the lower-right corner is the indicator of
size when you are drawing a box on the screen. I actually
doesn't have to be a box. It can be anything drawn with the
selection tools. It will give you a height and width value for
your selection. This is very handy if you want to select only a
25 x 25 square from an image, say for a thumbnail. You just look
at that info palette while you are drawing your selection.
Last, and one of the coolest things in
Photoshop, is the pixel location portion. This is located in the
lower-left corner. Great, big deal right? Well it is a great
tool to use in making image maps for your Web pages. Let's take
an example image. See below.
You can see that I have my cursor arrow at the
upper left corner of the hotspot that I want in the image. If I
look in the info palette, I can see exactly what coordinates
these are. I write them down using both x and y coordinates. The
I move my cursor arrow to the lower-right corner of the hotspot
area, and I do the same thing. Now when I need to make an area
in an image map using this image, I simply write the coordinates
in the coords attribute and I am good to go. It's as easy as a
Sunday morning. |