In a battle of the palettes, we don’t know which Photoshop palette would win the “most important” prize, but we do know which would win in the “most telling” category: the Info palette. We almost never close this palette. It just provides us with too much critical information.
At its most basic task, as a densitometer, it tells us the gray values and RGB or CMYK values in our image. But there’s much more. When you’re working in RGB, the Info palette shows you how pixels will translate into CMYK or Grayscale. When working in Levels or Curves, it displays before-and-after values (see Chapter 6, Tonal Correction). New in Photoshop 7 is the Proof Color option, which shows the numbers that would result from the conversion you’ve specified in Proof Setup, which may be different from the one you’ve specified in Color Settings (see Chapter 5, Color Settings). The Proof Color numbers appear in italics, to provide a clue that you’re looking at a different set of numbers than the ones you’d get from a mode change.
But wait, there’s more! When you rotate a selection, the Info palette displays what angle you’re at. And when you scale, it shows percentages. If you’ve selected a color that is out of the CMYK gamut (depending on your setup; see Chapter 5, Color Settings), a gamut alarm appears on the Info palette.
Finding Opacity. When you have transparency showing (e.g., on layers that have transparency when no background is showing), the Info palette can give you an opacity (“Op”) reading. However, while Photoshop would display this automatically in earlier versions, now you have to do a little extra work: you must click on one of the little black eyedroppers in the Info palette and select Opacity.
Switch Units. While we typically work in pixel measurements, we do on occasion need to see “real world” physical measurements such as inches or centimeters. Instead of traversing the menus to open the Units dialog box (on the Preferences submenu under the File menu), we find it’s usually faster to select from the Info palette’s popout menus. Just click on the XY cursor icon. Another option: double-clicking in one of the rulers opens the Units Preferences dialog box. Note that you can also do this by Control-clicking (on the Mac) or Right-button-clicking (in Windows) on one of the rulers. (Press Command-R if the rulers aren’t visible.)