0 Photoshopping On a Lappy Top
Being that I’m pretty green to the whole mobile work-week warrior club house it’s been quite the experience trying to be productive in Photoshop on track-pad.
Learn the Shortcuts
Working on a laptop means that mouse-driven interaction is more of a nuisance than a convenience. Dragging my fingers around is not that fun when you’re doing it off and on for almost 8 hours a day. Unless you play the acoustic guitar like Dave Matthews, then you’re in for a frustrating bout of annoyingly light finger callus.
In response, I’m learning to use keyboard shortcuts. I always envied those programmers who only use Vim for all their text-editor needs. The thing is completely keyboard shortcut driven! Well good news for me, all the critical aspects of Photoshop can be accessed by a keyboard shortcut also. Where this counts the most is in the toolbar on the left.
Web Design and Photoshop
Designing things for the web in Photoshop kind of feels like an ugly duckling. When Adobe released the first version of Photoshop, they didn’t intend it to be used for designing user interfaces for the web. I mean, the name alone signifies it’s original and innate purpose; Photoshop.
Because of this awkwardness, I’m all over the Photoshop interface to get things done. The toolbar is the worst offender. For a single design task I may jump from the move tool to the vector shape tool and then the ruler tool to measure something. Using a mouse, this can be quick depending on your hand-eye coordination. But on a track pad it’s highly annoying (even with tracking speed maxed out) and slooooow!
So to solve this I finally had to sit down and learn the shortcuts and use that knowledge in practice. Needless to say, I can get around Photoshop pretty quickly without ever touching the mouse. I consider this challenged pwn’d!