Photoshop questions? Samples of your Photoshop work? Bring either to our next meeting. We'll have an evening of Photoshop show and tell, as well as answers to your questions. Let's see some tough questions and nice work! Please send questions and sample files ahead of time to: dan at weinberg-clark.com

In your opinion, would a Mac Pro significantly accelerate the processing [while printing]? Is the printing engine in Photoshop multiprocessor aware?

I put the question to Photoshop printing engineer Dave Polaschek, and here's his reply:

While Photoshop's printing code isn't multi-threaded & is mostly disk-bound*, another core may be used by the OS for color management if you're printing in "Printer Manages Color" mode. More cores won't hurt.

That said, the disk (or better, disks) in a Mac Pro are significantly faster than the disk in an iMac, which will help since every printed job is spooled to disk. Plus you can put more RAM in a Mac Pro, which will help in preparing the image for printing.

As with most things in Photoshop, the two biggest gains you can get in speed are:

1 - Put in as much RAM as you can afford and the machine can hold. When friends are buying new Macs, I tell them they should have an absolute minimum of 1G of RAM per core, and 2G per core will still be a noticeable improvement over that. For running Photoshop with big images, I've found some operations which run over 10x faster since I moved from 4GB to 8GB of RAM in my quad-core Mac Pro just because it keeps all the images and intermediate data in memory.

2 - Put in the fastest disk (or RAID array - four 500GB disks in a RAID array are cheaper and faster than a 2TB disk, and the default controller in my Mac Pro could do RAID with no new hardware) you can afford after you're done buying RAM. When we do have to read or save a file, or spool something to disk, that fast disk will mean less time spent looking at progress bars.

[Question via Colin Smith]

* In other words, the speed of printing depends on how quickly data can be moved to/from your hard drive.

This time around, my colleague Michael O'Neill joined me at the event, and I took the stage in the early evening to an enthusiastic capacity crowd. As in Vegas, the session was titled Sharing the Love - FCP & CS4, and I did indeed share it 'round, getting some great responses from the crowd.

My intro slide, snapped by Michael from the audience

Just about to begin, standing on stage, snapping with the iPhone

Prior to the Supermeet, Michael and I spent several days visiting Universities in the South of England, focusing on workflow and integration between CS4 and FCP, as well as Avid Media Composer integration and even mentions of incorporating ProTools into a CS4 project. What was especially cool about these visits is that we got a chance to show-off performance from the latest MacBookPro 8GB laptops, as well as the newest Intel Nehalem Workstation (similar to the one I used at LLB a few months back). Once again, the Nehalem processor continues to WOW people (even primarily Mac-based set-ups) and in conjunction with the supah-speedy MBP 17", it's a true one-two performance punch, for both online and offline production.

And, in case you thought that Universities still have basic 'Broadcast Journalism' majors (well, I 'sort of' though that!) here's a list of what you might be studying at Falmouth U. Where was this stuff when *I* was in school? ;)

Falmouth University Media Degree Programs

With that, my friends, I'm going back to the studio to 'shed' and work on some new materials for upcoming Adobe TV episodes. I've also got a few musical creations in the works, so perhaps I'll post some 'in-progress' versions, if anyone has any desire to hear them. And, since a few people asked where they can get a 'proper headshot', here's the one I used at the SuperMeet (and will likely update my Twitter account with).

Healing People Daily, with my hair down...;)

Until next time,

Blog on.

One of the least-known ways is perhaps the way to change the default captions added by Captivate for various actions you record.

Let’s say the default caption for clicking a menu is “Select the menu” and the style mandated by your client is “Click ”. Instead of editing the captions after you complete recording, you can minimize your editing time by editing the template file from which Captivate sources the default captions.
This file is CaptureTextTemplates_English.rdl, and can be found in your Captivate installation. Open the file in any text editor (wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could edit this file from within Captivate?) and modify the captions as you wish. Save and start recording.
The Captivate team shares many smart tips and tricks on their blog. Here are some of my favorites:
How to create training and assessment modules from one Captivate project
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/06/reduce_your_editing_hours_crea.html

How to set default timing and transition properties and use them across slides, projects and sessions
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/03/rapid_elearning_authoring_is_t.html

The Copy Color as HTML in the color panel is awesome. Everyone uses it all the time. However, times have changed and my guess is that most of the people who use this are writing their colors in CSS. So you always have to delete the color="" part after you paste it into a style sheet.

It would be awesome to simply have a "Copy Color Hex Code" option and get #CCFF00 instead of the full color="#CCFF00" tag.

Or, to cover both bases, add to the panel menu:

Copy Color as HTML ---> color="#CCFF00" as it is now

AND

Copy Color as CSS ---> color:#CCFF00