Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

iPhone Photo Keys is an interesting iPhone/iPod Touch Photoshop helper application available on the iTunes App Store.

Photo Keys turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a Photoshop companion tool by putting the entire Photoshop toolbar, as well as many useful shortcuts right at your fingertips. If your iPhone or iPod Touch is nearby that is.

After downloading the iPhone app from the Apple app store, you also must install a server app on your computer so that the Photo Keys app can connect to it via wi-fi. The main toolbar screen contains all the tools in the Photoshop toolbar palette. Simple click any tool to select it in Photoshop. For tools that contain multiple tools, such as the Rectangular Marquee tool, you can cycle through the tools by clicking the same tool multiple times.

Continue reading 'Photo Keys: Photoshop Toolbars On Your iPhone'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

I don’t own a Wacom Cintiq graphics tablet, but I have heard quite a bit of grumbling from Cintiq owners about the way the cursor is displayed: I guess it’s offset a bit with the idea that your hand would obscure the cursor so Wacom has offset it a bit, which takes some getting used to.

But those Cintiq users are in luck: there’s a utility out there that might just ease your pain.

Continue reading 'Cursorcerer: Hide Your Cintiq Cursor'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Here are a few handy keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop for those of you out there like me who spend an inordinate amount of time in the Creative Suite primarily using Illustrator. These are not keyboard shortcuts that you can use in Illustrator, but rather are keyboard shortcuts providing methods of doing things in Photoshop that you are used to doing in Illustrator that at first it might seem isn’t possible, like click directly on an object to select it, drag to a new layer, etc.

Continue reading '6 Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts For Illustrator Users'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

It’s happened to all of us digital creatives. The dreaded day when you just cannot get one of your Adobe applications to launch. Usually there’s a deadline looming (of course). You’ve restarted your computer (three times) and still you cannot get Photoshop to launch. You’ve tried a few tips from some Google searches, but still nothing. Your geek cred is showing it’s limitations. And your deadline isn’t getting any further away.

What if I told you this could be avoided, virtually forever? And also, that you can get back to work with all your settings just the way you like them?

Continue reading 'Adobe Apps: Backup Your Prefs'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Another brief video in my series introducing some great new features in Photoshop CS4 for artists, cartoonists, illustrators and anyone else who sketches or draws using Photoshop.

This video features the excellent new keyoard shortcuts that allow you to drag-resize the size of the brushes using the mouse pointer.

Continue reading 'Video: Photoshop CS4 Drag-Resize Brush Keyboard Shortcut'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Hold down the Option key when erasing using the Eraser Brush, and you’ll get a marquee that you can drag to erase a perfectly rectangular area.

Bonus Eraser Tool tip: edit the keyboard shortcuts so the Eraser uses the “E” key, and remap the Free Transform tool to Shift-E (essentially swapping the keyboard shortcuts for the two tools). Seems much more intuitive this way.

Both tips via FreeTransform

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Wacom has a new online service and free companion software tool download called  Bamboo Dock. The apps available so far are basic — a drawing/doodling app, a map you can draw on and a handwriting recognition app. The others I couldn’t demo as a Wacom Bamboo serial number is required.

The online service is a sort of virtual sketchpad, allowing you to doodle, draw, scrapbook and upload files to “spaces” which are like collections, and inside of each one can add multiple canvases with different contents, themes and such.

I am having a hard time imagining a use for the online portion, but the companion apps look like they might be handy and should be interesting to see how things progress as new tools are developed/released.

Continue reading 'Wacom: Bamboo Dock'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

Wacom has updated their tablet driver software for the USB versions of all Intuos3 (PTZ), Intuos2 (XD), Intuos (GD), CintiqPartner (PTU) and Graphire2 (ET-0405A) pen tablets and the Cintiq 12WX, 20WSX, 21UX, 18SX, and 15X pen displays.

Get the Mac OS X (10.4 & 10.5) version, the Windows XP version or the Windows Vista version. Or visit the main Wacom driver download page for other operating systems.

Continue reading 'Wacom Tablet Drivers Updated'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

I didn’t know about this – and don’t ever plan to switch to Windows – but I thought it might be worth passing on the info that you can indeed switch from Windows to Mac (or Mac to Windows if that’s your desire) and take your Adobe software right along with you without paying for another software license.

Supposedly there is a misonception (and one that I had as well) that once you bought a license for either Mac or Windows, you had to buy another brand new license for the new platform you switched to.

Not so, and really it seems to make the most sense on Adobe’s part. If you paid for the software and switched, most likely if you contact Adobe about this you’re not trying to swindle them – if that was your intention, there’s plenty of options out there for those who don’t feel they have to pay for the software they use.

Continue reading 'Adobe Software: Switching From Windows To Mac (or vice versa)'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.

While I had no idea that Photoshop had a 3GB RAM limit, a clever user over at MacOSXHints.com has figured out a hack/solution/workaround using a RAM disk as a virtual scratch disk. Clever.

Continue reading 'Photoshop’s 3GB RAM Limit – A Workaround For OS X Users'

by George Coghill -
View my cartoon character and mascot illustration portfolio
Contact me to get started on your own custom cartoon illustration projects.