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Photoshop Tips & Tricks — Variety Pack Volume 2
Here is a collection of useful tips and tricks to improve your Photoshop skills.
Flip Through Your Font Collection
Often when I am searching for that perfect font for a logo I will try hundreds of font faces.
I used to change them one by one in the font pallet. However you can speed things up a bit if you just put your mouse in the font drop down box to select it and use the up and down arrow keys to tab through all your fonts.
It makes quick work of the task and you can even find a few fonts that you never would have tried otherwise.
Reset Dialog Box
When Photoshop opens most of it's dialogue boxes it offers you the ability to click OK or Cancel to accept or cancel the task. Some of Photoshop's dialogue boxes offer a hidden "Reset" option. Items like Levels, Curves, and Hue & Saturation.
Holding the Option key changes the Cancel to a Reset, allowing you to reset the dialogue box without having to cancel, and re-open the box every time you want to start over.
Copy Layer Styles
Here is a handy time saving tip I found very useful within my own work flow. Many times when I am working I create elements all on separate layers. Well then I decide much later on that I want to apply a style to those layers.
Normally, you may just recreate the effect over and over again on each layer individually. What if you have 20 layers with 4 or 5 layer effects?! That's more work than what I am up for. Fortunately Photoshop has an easy way to apply a style to multiple layers all at once.
First link all the layers that you want to effect. Then select from the menu Layer/ Layer Styles/ Copy Layer Style. Then go back to the same menu and select Layer/ Layer Styles/ Paste Layer Style to Linked.
You can also access these functions by CTRL-Clicking the layer itself. Now all your layers have the same effects applied to them in a matter of seconds.
Stroke A Path
The ability to stroke a path is an elementary, but not widely known function in Photoshop.
Select the path by clicking on the path layer and Option(Alt)-Click the Stroke Path button at the bottom of the Path palette to open the Stroke dialog box.
Choose from the list of tools. Now that you know what tools are available go back to the tool settings to set them up before applying the stroke to a path.
You can create complex effects if you create several layers of strokes with different tool settings.
For example select a hard brush tip with big spacing to create a chain of objects or use the smudge tool to simulate a finger smudging a painting along a path.
Color Sampler Tool
Here is another useful feature of the Eyedropper tool.
When you compare several samples of colors with each other you don't need to jot down the numbers on a piece of paper. You can press Shift while clicking with the Eyedropper tool (shortcut: "I"). This opens up an extended Info palette. You can click on your image up to four times. For each selector you will be able to see a corresponding color value in the info palette.
To delete any of the selectors press Apple (or Cmd) and drag them out from the image. If you want to see the values in different color systems click the tiny Eyedropper icon below the number in the info palette to bring up a little menu with several options to choose from.
You can also use this function to sample the same color several times and have the info palette show you the values in real time for different color systems, while you're adjusting colors in your image. The position of the color samples are saved into the document, so you can refer to them even after reopening the document.
Pick Up The Average Color
I've touched on one of the special features of the Eyedropper tool above. BTW it's easy to remember the tool shortcut for the Eyedropper: it's "i" as "eye".
Sometimes when you have a bitmap image, the individual pixels that make up the color of a surface can be very different from each other, especially if the image is noisy. In these cases when you want to pick a color from the surface, you might end up with a much lighter or darker color than the average surface color.
In this case Press CTRL when clicking the area for your sampling to pick a little square of 3x3 or 5x5 pixels instead of just one particular pixel. This way the picked color will truly reflect the overall feel of the color of the surface.
Photoshop CS3 Upgrade Options And Bundles From The Adobe Store
Photoshop CS3 Extended is ideal for film, video, and multimedia pros and for graphic and web designers using 3D and motion. Get the full version for US $999, or upgrade for US $349. The standard version of Photoshop CS3 is available for US $649, or as an upgrade for US $199.
Photoshop Extended is also available as part of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium ($1,799/$440), which combines all-new CS3 versions of Photoshop, Flash Pro, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat 8 Pro. International options are available at Adobe's UK Store, Europe Store, and Australia Store.
SiteGrinder Photoshop Plugin - CSS Web Tool
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. Read our review of SiteGrinder.
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