CS6 – The Graphic Mac

OS X Mavericks and Adobe CS6 / Creative Cloud

The official statement from Adobe is that Mavericks and Adobe Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud play nice together. In fact, they claim compatibility back to CS3.

I had to re-enter username & password for the Creative Cloud app after upgrading to Mavericks, InDesign runs horribly, and Adobe Illustrator opens on an old MacBook Air, but not on a brand new iMac with the exact same apps & fonts installed. Previously, Creative Cloud was running perfectly fine.

I’ve also come across dozens of other apps that are now broken, such as two different screen capture apps.

I would say if you haven’t installed Mavericks on your main rig, don’t do it yet.

Adobe InDesign

InDesign CS6 Pantone+ color glitch: a workaround

If you try to get Pantone 543 (or a number of other Pantone colors) in Adobe InDesign CS6’s Color panel, you’ve likely run into an annoying glitch. You simply can’t find it by typing it in as you could with CS5.

InDesign Secrets describes the CS6 Pantone+ glitch in detail, and offers some workarounds.

What I find most annoying about this glitch is that Adobe hasn’t fixed it with a small update yet, and that Pantone doesn’t make the older libraries available for easy download. Hopefully, the new InDesign CC (due to ship later this month) fixes the problem.

Adobe Photoshop

Adjusting your cropping preferences in Photoshop CS6

Adobe Photoshop CS6 brought with it a new cropping method that has left some users frustrated, and others wishing they could tweak it a bit. Fortunately, Adobe has built-in the ability to do both.

With the Crop Tool active (hit the C key to activate it), click the little gear icon in the toolbar stretching across the top of your Photoshop window.

In the pop-up menu, you can tick the Use Classic Mode checkbox to return the cropping method to the way it was before CS6. If you like the new cropping method, as I do, you can also toggle the Auto Centering and Cropped are viewing. In addition, you can adjust the Cropping Shield (the dark area that you’re cropping out of your image).

Adobe InDesign

Fit gradient to text in Adobe InDesign

One of the cool new features of Adobe InDesign CS6 is the auto-size feature for text boxes. It’s useful for those of us who prefer to keep our layouts neat & tidy. But it also has another very functional feature; ensuring gradients applied to text appear the way you expect them to.

As InDesignSecrets points out: when you apply a gradient to text, the gradient is actually applied to the frame itself, it just appears to be applied to the text inside the frame. So the gradient can appear to extend beyond the text.

In the example above, I have the same black-to-green gradient applied to the text in all three text frames. But as you can see, only the bottom one shows the full gradient. That’s because the frame itself is set to auto-size to fit the text it contains. The two frames above it are larger, and the gradient adjusts to the size of the frame itself, rather than just the text.

So the moral of the story is: if you apply a gradient to text, make sure the text frame itself is sized to fit.

Adobe Illustrator

Astute Graphics updates two popular Adobe Illustrator plugins

Astute Graphics has update two of their popular Adobe Illustrator plugins to work with CreativeSuite 6.

DrawScribe features two handy tools: InkScribe and Dynamic Sketch.

Use Inkscribe to replace the Pen and its related tools, and it will revolutionise the way you draw precise and calculated shapes. If you’re a fan of drawing more naturally in vector, but you’d like to speed things up, you’ll love the Dynamic Sketch tool. Whether you sketch with a Wacom tablet or a mouse, this tool provides even more power to produce dynamic vector forms from scratch, to modify existing shapes, and to go back at a later date to adjust the level of detail to your work.

VectorScribe is the ultimate vector toolkit for all designers and users of Adobe Illustrator CS3 and above. It allows you to edit and create vector artwork faster, smarter and dynamically through the use of tools such as PathScribe, Dynamic Measure, and Protractor. The Studio version of VectorScribe also includes Dynamic Shapes and Dynamic Corners tools.

Prices vary for the tools (see the individual web pages), and both offer downloadable trial versions to see if they’re right for you.

Adobe Photoshop

Quickly select skin tones in Adobe Photoshop CS6

I completely missed this new Adobe Photoshop CS6 feature until Grant Friedman pointed it out in the above video over at PSDTuts.

Adobe Illustrator

OS X Mountain Lion & Adobe Creative Suite 6…

After installing Mountain Lion on my 2011 MacBook Air, I’ve found no issues with Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator or Acrobat. Now if Adobe would hurry up and implement Full Screen support, I would be very happy!

General

Extensis Universal Type Server updated for Adobe CS6

Extensis recently announced the immediate availability of updates for the Universal Type Server Client font management software. The updates provide plug-in based font auto-activation to teams that use Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) applications.

The updates are available as a FREE download for Universal Type Client for Mac OS X, and include plug-ins for Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and InCopy.

[ilink url=”http://typeserver.com “]Click here for more information about Universal Type Server[/ilink]

Adobe InDesign

Adobe offers temporary fix for InDesign crashing bug on…

If you just bought a new Retina MacBook Pro or MacBook Air and you’re experiencing crashes in Adobe InDesign, here’s a temporary fix until Apple & Adobe completely fix the issue.

Adobe InDesign

InDesign CS6 offers text frame auto-size feature

Adobe InDesign CS6 allows you to have text frames auto-size to fit the text you’re typing or placing into them. This can be a real time-saver, and it’s easy to set.

To turn Auto-Size on, right + click on a text frame and select Text Frame Options, or simply hit Command + B. In the dialog window, click the Auto-Size tab at the top right and choose your settings.

In the Auto-Size tab, you can set your text frames to automatically grow in specified directions, and by minimum amounts if you choose.

If you’re placing a long text document, the frame will grow to the bottom of the pasteboard.

Adobe Photoshop

Observe Photoshop’s scratch disk use with the Efficiency Monitor

If you’re experiencing a slow-down while using Adobe Photoshop, you may be thinking you need more RAM (always a good idea!), but there’s a chance that isn’t the problem. Thankfully, Adobe offers an easy way to help you decide if more RAM is necessary for a better user experience.

At the bottom left of Photoshop CS5 and CS6’s window is an indicator that can display all sorts of information. Among file size, color profile and save progress, is one called Efficiency. You can click the flyout window arrow and choose Efficiency to get the indicator just to the left (see the image below).

If you’re lucky, it will always say 100%. Anything below 100% indicates that Photoshop has used all its allocated RAM and is using your hard drive as a scratch disk, thus slowing it down. You can allocate more RAM to Photoshop in the preferences, but if memory serves me, Photoshop allocates around 60-70% of your RAM by default. Any more than that and you’re likely to start having problems with the rest of the system. If the Efficiency Indicator displays anything below about 85-90%, I would highly recommend investing in more RAM.