Tim Gray's DDQ

In Tim Gray’s Digital Darkroom Questions email this morning, there was a question about the nonresponsive "sticky sliders" in ACR 4 in the new CS3 Bridge. Tim answered the question wrong, but he clued me into a feature that’s going to save me a lot of time.

When you make adjustments to your RAW file in ACR, you don’t need to navigate to those tiny sliders. Click and drag on the slider label instead. It’s a larger target, and lined up vertically, unlike the default values of the slider positions. This is going to really improve my workflow.

The reason Tim was wrong is that the sliders in ACR 4 (specifically the Fill and Recovery adjustments) have a delayed response time no matter which way you use to change them. It has nothing to do with navigating to a smaller target, which Tim suggested was the reason. It's a serious aggravation that Adobe needs to address.

If you’re learning a digital workflow, I highly recommend Tim’s DDQ list. Every day, when he’s in town, he posts the answer to a question about digital workflow that someone has sent him. It’s at a fairly basic level, but about once a week I learn something new from it.

Comments

[Jeff Henderson]

What I'd like to be able to do is click on a slider or it's title and use the scroll wheel on my mouse to increment the setting by 1 for each wheel click. Anyone know how to make that work? LightRoom Beta did that, V1.0 jumps in increments of 3 per click, which I don't like. CR V4.1 did not appear to have any scroll wheel functionality at all. Maybe there is a way to turn it on.

JeffH

[Guy Scharf]

"...the sliders in ACR 4 (specifically the Fill and Recovery adjustments) have a delayed response time no matter which way you use to change them."

While I only rarely use ACR, the sliders certainly seemed responsive in my testing. Maybe delayed by a very small fraction of a second compared to some of the other sliders but nothing I found to be a serious distraction. Perhaps this is a processor power issue? (I'm running a Xeon 3070 with 3 GB RAM on Windows XP Pro.)

One thing that irritates me about PS CS3 is that some of the great new features, such as smart filters, are slow. When using smart filters and CS3, my fast new machine is slower than my pokey old machine with CS2! So I avoid smart filters unless I really need them.

Thanks for info about the DDQ mailing list. I've just signed up for that and am looking forward to Tim's comments. I've found his "Photoshop CS2 Workflow" book to be quite helpful.