Adobe Photoshop CS Quick Tips

Photoshop CS Quick Tips

HARNESSING THE MIRROR TOOL
Liquify’s Mirror tool does a great job of flipping whatever is to the left of the cursor and pasting within the brush path. But to control the Mirror tool is another story! Use the Freeze tool to stabilize the area you want to copy first, then drag the Mirror tool along the edge of the frozen area to flip it into the brush.

SWITCH TO PERCENT
Before recording an action that adds artwork or text (perhaps copyright information) to the center of an image, change the unit of measure for Photoshop’s Rulers to Percent. Doing so ensures that you’ll paste into the center of the image, regardless of size or orientation. Make the change in Photoshop’s Preferences or by Control-clicking (PC: Right-clicking) on a Ruler.

SAVING FILE BROWSER SETUPS
In Photoshop CS, your custom File Browser setups can be saved as Workspaces, which opens a new way of working within the File Browser. For example, if you shoot a lot of portraits, you can double-click on the Folders tab (to roll it up out of the way, giving you a taller Preview palette), then drag the divider bar between the palettes area and the thumbnail area to the right to make your preview even bigger. Since your preview is so large, you can shrink the size of your thumbnails (go to the View menu in the File Browser and choose Medium Thumbnail). Once you’ve done all this, save this setup as a Workspace by going to the Window menu, under Workspace, and choosing Save Workspace (name it “File Browser Portrait”). Then, next time you’re looking through some proofs, you can have huge previews in just one click. You can do the same thing for wide photos—just drag the divider bar much farther to the right, until the preview of photos with a landscape orientation takes up most of the File Browser Screen. Now switching between huge portrait and landscape previews only takes one click.

OPENING MULTIPLE IMAGES AND CLOSING THE FILE BROWSER
Want to open multiple photos at once and have Photoshop close the File Browser for you? Just Command-click (PC: Control-click) on all the photos you want to open, then press Option-Return (PC: Alt-Enter). All the selected photos will open, and the File Browser will close.

HOW TO GET AN UNDO AFTER YOU’VE CLOSED THE DOCUMENT
As you probably already know, the History palette keeps track of the last 20 changes to your document that you can use for multiple undos when working on a project. The only bad part is that when you close your document, your undos (in History) are automatically deleted. However, there is a way to save an undo, as long as it’s a tonal adjustment (such as Curves, Levels, Color Balance, etc.), by creating Adjustment layers. Just click on the half-white, half-black circle at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose your tonal adjustment from the pop-up menu to create an Adjustment layer. These Adjustment layers are saved as layers, along with your file. That way, the next time you open the file, you can go back and edit your Curves, Levels, etc. adjustment by double-clicking on the Adjustment layer. The last applied adjustment will appear, and you can edit it live. If you decide you don’t want the original adjustment applied at all, you can drag the Adjustment layer into the Trash icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. You can also add a Gradient fill, a Pattern fill, and even a Solid Color fill as an Adjustment layer, giving you an undo at a later date, because again, they’re saved as layers with the file.

SCRUBBY SLIDER SHIFT-CLICK TRICK
Adobe borrowed scrubby sliders, a very cool feature from Adobe After Effects, and put it in Photoshop CS. You use it by clicking on a field’s name, rather than in the field itself, and the value in the field changes as you drag (scrub) over the field’s name. However, it scrubs in very small increments. That is, unless you hold the Shift key, which is ideal when you need to make big changes in the field (like from 0 to 256).

LOCK THOSE PIXELS AND FILL
This is a great timesaving shortcut when you have an object on a layer, and you want to fill just the object with the Foreground color (rather than filling the entire layer with color). Press Shift-Option-Delete (PC: Shift-Alt-Backspace). What this does is turn on Lock Transparent Pixels for the layer in the Layers palette, fills the object on your layer, and then turns Lock Transparent Pixels back off. What if you want to fill your object with a gradient? It’s a little more laborious. Turn on Lock Transparent Pixels by using the Forward Slash key (/) shortcut. Drag your Gradient tool through your object, and then press Forward Slash (/) again to turn off Lock Transparent Pixels.