The Info Palette
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.
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