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If you've been in the business for the last few years, you've probably heard mention of digital printing. It may seem obvious, but it's truly a fully digital process, and as such, has many different advantages and pitfalls than offset printing.

I won't go into digital printing too much, you can read up about it here and here.

In PhotoShop you can create halftone effects (like the background of the type behind the word halftone in the image above) in just few steps with the help of the Bitmap Image Mode. This effect is very popular because it confuses and mesmerizes your eyes if used with enough contrast.

First create an object that you gonna use as your base for your halftone effect. Use the grayscale image mode at this stage. Try bulky typefaces or simple shapes to achieve the best effect.

When you're working on a darker image in Photoshop, it can be quite difficult to make a selection or clipping path because you can't always see the edges of areas you are trying to select or clip. This problem occured for me just the other day while trying to clip out a truck for an off-road racing brochure. The shadows under the druck completely hid the edges of the tires.

You have your Photoshop image window filling the screen, but you want to zoom way out. Many people get frustrated when they hit the Command + "-" key combo and see that it not only zooms the image out, but reduces the size of the window. They begin the mind-numbingly annoying process of stretching the window back to fill the screen again.

This may seem like a very basic technique, but still I see very few PhotoShopers are actually using it.

If you want to quickly change layers. Press "V" to select the Move tool. Than Apple click (Cmd-Click) the object you want to work on. That's it. The correct layer becomes active and you don't need to navigate to your layers palette and scroll through the list to activate the layer you want to work on.

Relevant previous post: PS: Selecting the right layer

If you feel your File Browser is too slow in generating previews, you might want to try this setting. Select Allow Background Processing in PhotoShop /Preferences /File Browser to use extra processing power to pre-generate cache information like previews and metadata. This setting will allow PS to work on thumbnails for your files, while you're busy doing something else.

Exposé is undoubtedly the most innovative function of OS X from a usability point of view.

If you hold Shift while pushing any of the exposé keys (F9-F11) it shows the animation in slow motion. Perfect stunt to make your Windows friends jealous.

Thanks to Michael Fivis for submitting this classic bit.

Someone in a forum I visit asked why he gets incorrect color when converting from Pantone to CMYK in Quark XPress. While I do not have the answer (though I have a guess or two), I do have a solution. It's not the most elegant solution, but it works.

Step 1:
Create a Pantone color in Quark Xpress. For this tip, I chose Pantone 542. (See diagram at right)

I touched up on A9 before, but now that the A9 toolbar is out for Firefox I feel I have to talk about it some more. You can install it in no time and start enjoying it's numerous functions. If you have an Amazon account use that to log in. Here some of the features of the A9 toolbar I'd like to highlight:

Ok, I have no idea what was going through Adobe's head when they put an export option in the help menu. Yes you read that correctly. There is an export command in the help menu. I fiddled around with is for a little bit and discovered something interesting about this hidden option.