Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

For all you Photoshop brush junkies out there, here’s a Mac OS X Quick Look plugin to preview Photoshop Brush Files (.abr) in the Finder.

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

Recently I was dealing with a problem in GarageBand, where the application would lock up when I was attempting the change the tempo of a song. For many months I struggled with this until it got to the point where I decided to do some in-depth troubleshooting. How does this relate to illustration you may ask? Turns out the problem was font related, and affected the performance of the software. Since this could affect any piece of software on your Mac, and therefore productivity, I thought it worth passing along as this could easily affect your graphics software as well.

Continue reading 'Mac OS X 10.5: Essential System Fonts'

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

I recently wrote a guest-review over at Mac OS X-based graphic design blog The Graphic Mac for the brand-new font management utility Fontcase.

In short, I have found Fontcase to be a very cool new font manager for OS X. It has a few limitations, but the good news is that the developers at Bohemian Coding have told me all the small gripes I had were to be remedied in the near future and the ones they weren’t aware of (which I suggested) were also added to the feature list.

Continue reading 'Fontcase Review at The Graphic Mac'

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.

The current MacUpdate Promo is offering the excellent shareware tool Default Folder for only $19.95 until midnight on 10/27/2008.

I have been an extremely satisfied user since way back in the OS 9 days, and highly recommend you pick up a license while this great deal is going on. Default Folder is worth every penny of the $34.95 standard price, so at almost half off it’s a steal.

What does it do? Here’s a quick overview:

Default Folder X attaches a toolbar to the right side of the Open and Save dialogs in any OS X-native application. The toolbar gives you fast access to various folders and commands. You just click on the buttons to go to your favorite and recently used folders, manage the folders and files shown in the list, and make changes to your settings.

Continue reading 'Must-Have OS X Productivity Tool Default Folder 43% Off 10/27/2008'

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

This post is a bit off-topic, but seeing as how I found a fix for an issue that seems to be affecting a lot of WordPress users, and I find many a solution to my WordPress issues on other blogs, I thought I would post.

If you are finding that activating certain plugins on your self-hosted WordPress installation is breaking the Visual Editor, this may be the fix you are looking for.

Continue reading 'Fix For WordPress Visual Editor Conflict With Certain Plugins'

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.

Update to my previous post about the bug in Photoshop CS3 and other Adobe CS3 apps under Mac OS X 10.5.3 where saving a file to a networked drive will result in a corrupt file. Supposedly this has been fixed under the just-released OS X 10.5.4 update.

Even more confirmation comes from the fact that it was directly referenced by Apple as one of the fixes in this update.

Continue reading 'Mac OS X 10.5.4 fixes Adobe CS3 ‘Save To Networked Volume’ Bug'

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