In the new iPhoto ’11, there is a completely new way to email your photos within the application. You don’t even leave the iPhoto application to email now. If you are more familiar with the previous method, where the photos are sent to Apple Mail, you can change this feature. You can navigate to iPhoto > Preferences > General. Here you can change which application to email photos with. Simply change this from iPhoto to Mail. Now when you highlight photos, Share, Email, the photos will be sent to the application of your choice. No longer will you need to send email messages from within iPhoto ’11.

Customizing the Finder and Sidebar on your Mac can help save you time and be more organized. In this video tip I show you a couple options for customizing you Finder experience. You can enable a Path Bar at the bottom of the Finder. It displays your location within your drives and folders. You can customize the toolbar in the Finder, too. This lets you add, arrange, and remove icons at the top of the Finder. You can add icons for Burn, Eject, New Folder, Delete, and more. This allows you to quickly choose actions with just a single click in the Finder.

I also show you advanced settings for the Finder that you can enable. In the Finder Preferences, you can choose which location on your Mac opens first when you open the Finder. You can enable or disable showing certain items on your Desktop like hard disks, external disks, CDs, DVDs, and more. In the Finder Preferences you can also customize which locations and items are conveniently placed in the Finder Sidebar for quick access. This includes customizing quick access to Devices, Shared, Places, and Search For. Finally, I show you how to manually customize which items are in the Sidebar on the left of the Finder. This gives you complete control over your Finder experience.

I found SwitchResX when looking for an application to allow 16:9 widescreen resolutions on my 16:10 widescreen Apple Cinema Display.  I needed this aspect ratio to record the video tutorials that you see here on the website.  It is much easier editing video at a native 16:9 widescreen resolution in software like Final Cut Pro.  SwitchResX made it possible for me to use a resolution of 1280x720 on my 1920x1200 display.  It didn’t take long to set it up either!  Prior to finding this application, I had purchased a monitor that allowed a 720p resolution for recording the tutorials.  Now I can use my Apple Cinema Display.

There are many more features that this powerful application offers.  I mostly only use it for the custom resolution.  There are other great settings for example to help set up an HDTV, Plasma or Video Projector.  You can also adjust color depth for your displays, video mirroring, display rotation, and overscan.  These settings can be adjusted in the System Preferences.  SwitchResX has a preferences pane for all of the settings.  You can even adjust these settings and monitor profiles from customizable menus in the menu bar or with a contextual menu plugin.  To read up on the complete features you can visit their website.  If you need to customize your display or monitor, you have to try SwitchResX.

An easy way that you can speed up your editing workflow is to utilize shortcuts and buttons. In Final Cut Pro you can customize buttons in the upper right hand corner of your Browser, Timeline, Canvas, and Viewer. There are a few default button layouts but you can customize your own too. You will see in this video tip how to completely customize your Final Cut Pro interface with shortcut buttons for the functions that you most often use. In most cases this can save you a lot of time. You no longer need to memorize lots of keyboard shortcut combinations or search through the menu bar lists for the function you are looking for. With this tip you will learn how to simply browse the Button List for functions you use often, and add them to the interface for instant use. Speed up your Final Cut Pro editing workflow today!