about kelby's notes

The idea for this plug-in came to me about four years ago during a lunch break while I was teaching a Photoshop seminar in Atlanta.

Right before I sat down to my convention center-quality turkey sandwich, I was answering questions from some of the attendees. At one point during this one-on-one Q&A an attendee asked where he could find out more, so I told him to look in Photoshop’s help. He looked at me like somebody had just released a skunk into the room and said, “The help function is absolutely no help at all.” Then he continued on, using a host of colorful adjectives to describe his real feelings for the built-in help feature.

Other people standing in line echoed his same sentiments, and within a few seconds we were all standing there in total agreement on how bad the Help feature really was. (Incidentally, we weren’t just complaining about Photoshop’s built-in help, we didn’t like ANY program’s built-in help.)

Everyone there pretty much had the same complaints:

1. You had to learn Help. By that, I mean that Help was a separate application unto itself, and you had to learn how Help worked before you could try to get help.

2. Once you learned Help, you had to know precisely the right Photoshop term to search for. Otherwise, you (a) wouldn’t get any response or (b) would get so many responses that it would take you 10 minutes to weed out all the irrelevant ones.

3. The help file answers often used “techno-jargon,” so if you were new to Photoshop the answers were often confusing. Everyone also felt that many of the answers were worded in such a way that they were only helpful to people who already knew so much about Photoshop that they wouldn’t need help in the first place.

4. The answers everyone needed were either missing from the Help files or were organized so that no one could find them.

5. Help was slow. You had to wait for the Help App (or the Browser) to launch and load, and even then searches were sometimes unbearably slow.

So basically, Help was frustrating to learn and frustrating to use once you learned it. The answers everyone needed weren’t there or they were confusing and over everyone’s heads. Plus, it was slow. Really slow.

A few minutes later I snuck off into a corner to quickly devour my cardboard-like turkey sandwich and thought to myself, “Gee, all they want is to ask the question ‘How do I…’ and get a straight answer in plain English—fast.”

Then I thought, “Adobe ought to create a menu that says ‘How Do I’ and put the answers to the top 100 questions in a simple menu—no key words, no searches, no categories, no techno-jargon, nothing to learn how to use—just a simple question and a simple answer.” Then I figured, “Hey, I should do this! I answer these questions all the time! I know the questions real-world Photoshop users ask, because between the NAPP’s Photoshop Help Desk and my live seminars I answer hundreds every week, and I could provide their answers without all the techno-babble.”

I looked back on my early days of learning Photoshop where I would have killed to be able to ask somebody, “How do I…subtract from a selection?” or, “How do I…remove this banding in my gradient?” or, “How do I…create the color 40% gray?” and get a quick answer in plain English. That’s what this plug-in is all about: no learning curve. In fact, there are no instructions on how to use it—it’s that easy.

I went back to carefully research the questions today’s Photoshop users are asking and I put the top 100 in “Kelby’s Notes for Adobe Photoshop.” That’s why we say, “The answers to your Photoshop questions are just one click away.”