Much-desired feature finally restored to the Mac Finder

OS 9 had it, and Windows has always had it: the ability to select an item from the Trash, and restore it to its original location – wherever it was you originally deleted it from.

But for some reason, Apple dropped this incredibly useful functionality (along with window shades). Instead, you can only grab things out of the trash and move them manually to some other location. If you can’t remember where something was before you deleted it, you’re out of luck.

Good news: Reports are coming in that the next Mac OS version, 10.6 or “Snow Leopard,” will have a “put back” feature. This is really important for scenarios where a file you delete, accidentally or otherwise, needs to go right back to the exact same location where it started out.

The inability to do this has led a lot of users, myself included, to come up with clunky workarounds. For example, if I’m removing an application and its preference files, I end up creating a new folder on my desktop and re-creating the entire subdirectory scheme, moving elements manually into their appropriate folders. That way, I can delete the folder, knowing that if I drag the folder out of my trash back to my desktop at some point, I can figure out how to put things back together again.

If this feature makes it into Snow Leopard, that will be good news indeed – I can simply select a file in the trash, and click “restore” or “put back” or whatever Apple decides to call it, and have the file go back from whence it came.

Isn’t it stupid that this “feature” hasn’t been there all along?

Watercolors without the mess

I’m a photographer, not a painter. But I’ve always been intrigued by Photoshop techniques that can give photos new life – make them look like paintings, charcoal sketches, line drawings, etc.

I never really like the default effects in PS, and I sorta kinda know how to achieve some of these effects manually. But it can be a long, arduous process.

Enter Topaz Simplify and Topaz Adjust, two awesome plug-ins for Photoshop CS3 or CS4. After just half an hour or so of experimentation, I used these plug-ins to create new pieces of artwork from some photos in my collection. Here’s an example of a “painterly” look applied to an otherwise nondescript photo of my friend’s cat:

Before:

After:

Simply and Adjust both let you work on a layer, making tweaks and adjustments to suit your taste, and save those sets of adjustments as pre-sets. Handy for applying the same treatment to a group of photos. You still have to know some image manipulation stuff to begin with, if you want to do anything more than the pre-fabbed default presets. But with a little time and experimentation, you can get some really cool looks. Here’s a heavily-manipulated version of a photo of a church I took in Lancaster last summer:

 

You can take these two plug-ins for a 30-day test-drive by downloading them from Topaz Labs. Have fun!