Odds & Ends: Photoshop CMYK bug?;

QuicKeys & MaxMenus conflict?; Epson hack; more

Photoshop CMYK to JPEG bug? A reader described a problem with CMYK images in Photoshop (see also previous related item): "I discovered that Photoshop 7 after having saved a CMYK image to JPEG and then closing and reopening the file to examine it had converted the white areas from 0C,0M,0Y,0K to 1C,1M,1Y,0K. It does this regardless of color settings or JPEG settings and in OS 9 or OS X. Two of my associates who tried this found the same problem. The only way I could accurately save the file in JPEG format was to revert to Photoshop 6."

Update: Ken Harris replies: "Having been in the pre-press industry for far too many years, I can honestly say that I know of no press in the printing industry capable of printing a screen value of 1% and it's doubtful that these values would even be perceptible to the human eye. If the saved JPEG file is to be used for printing I can't see how the final printed image would be affected."

Update: Isaac Rivera adds: "JPEG is a lossy format intended only for creating small sized photographic images for screen display, not for archiving or sharing high quality images. See this page for more info." [True, but this does not explain why the problem did not occur in Photoshop 6.]

Update: However, another reader adds: "This could be part of a larger issue in Photoshop 7 and 6 in the changing of color modes. I have found that any conversion between RGB, CMYK, Grayscale, or LAB results in solid areas of color becoming dithered. Try this as an exercise:

1. Create a new document (any size, any color mode except bitmap)
2. Fill the canvas with any color besides black or white
3. Now change the color mode (anything except bitmap)
4. Go to Select>Color Range and select the canvas with a fuzziness of 0
5. You'll find that Photoshop has changed your solid-colored into a dithered canvas.

This but wasn't around in version 5, and is quite annoying for photo or design that contains a solid area of color."

Update: Tom Babcock counters: "This happens because the 'Use Dither (8bit/channel images)' checkbox is selected within the color settings preferences. If this checkbox is left unchecked, the dithering described above does not happen. Instead, color shifts can now occur between (for example) RGB and CMYK if the RGB color is not well represented in the CMYK color space."

Update: Bryan Schappel adds: "The solution to the dither problem is very simple. Open the 'Color Settings' dialog, click on the 'Advanced Mode' checkbox. Under, the now visible, Conversion Options section uncheck 'Use Dither (8-bit/channel images).'"

Update: That's enough updates for today!!

QuicKeys X and MaxMenus conflict? A reader reports a conflict between MaxMenus and QuicKeys X. When both are installed, "shortly after startup-but not immediately, something would trigger a run-away condition in which QuicKeys would stop responding. It would grab nearly all of the CPU (up to 97%) and a considerable amount of available memory (40% of 512 MB). The fan in my PowerBook would kick into high speed and other active applications would become noticeably sluggish. Attempting a restart, QuicKeys would not quit. Force quitting QuicKeys would return everything to normal. During all this time, MaxMenus continued to work perfectly. If I uninstall MaxMenus, the problem vanishes."

Update: Several readers report not seeing this symptom.

Will Cosgrove suggests an explanation: "I'm using both QuicKeys and MaxMenus and do not see this condition. What is most likely happening is they are both set to launch at login and he's seeing a login bug that was covered on MacFixIt previously (i.e., Cocoa apps will sometimes fail to launch at login because of a bug in the Cocoa runtime system starting up). Anyway, this is not a conflict between them, rather a bug in the OS' Cocoa runtime which should be fixed in Jaguar."

Getting Epson 850 USB to work in OS X Epson's official driver for the 850N "supports Ethernet connections only and does not support USB." However, a reader writes: "There is a solution to make this driver to work with SC850 USB. There are actually two ways; (1) Install the SC850N driver PLUS the SC 900-USB driver or (2) Install SC850N driver and install the USB.Plugin component (accessed via Pacifist) from the SC900 USB Driver. This page provides a pkg file that does the installing for you.

Retrospect Duplicate/alias bug? A reader states: "After I use Retrospect Express 5.0.205 to create a backup of a volume or partition via the Duplicate command, many of the aliases that existed on the original 'source' drive/partition end up 'pointing' to the duplicated drive/partition."

Word/Classic long file name issue Olaf Bininda-Emonds writes: "Running OS X 10.1.4, when I try to open a Word document (typically one that originated on a Windows PC) in Word 2001 (via Classic) with a file name greater than 31 characters (the limit in OS 9), my screen will momentarily turn black. Then, when it comes back, I find that the whole Classic environment (and any programs running in it) has shut down. The solution is quite simple: trim the file name down beforehand. Doing so afterwards doesn't work because the file apparently gets corrupted when the symptom happens."

Umax reply on OS X drivers for scanner Dan Hopper recently sent an email to Umax asking when they would publish a Mac OS X driver for their Astra 4000U scanner. He got the following response: "Unfortunately, I do not expect that we will have any OS X drivers available for the 4000U. However, new models will not be released until there are OS 9.2 - OS X compatible drivers. Once we have a compatible driver, there should not be any problem using it with OmniPage."