Articles by Web Editor | Page 17

Making The Color Palette Work Twice As Hard

If you use the Color palette (under the Window menu) to select colors, you’re probably already using the color ramp at the bottom of the palette for making quick color selections, but here are two tips that make using the ramp faster and easier. First, the color ramp doesn’t have to use the same color mode as the color sliders above it; for example, you can have RGB for your sliders and grayscale as your ramp. This is great because it gives you two different models to choose from without digging through menus. You can choose the color modes for both the sliders and the ramp from the Color palette’s flyout menu. The second tip is that if you quickly want to change color ramps, Shift-click on the ramp. Every time you click, it will rotate through to the next color mode.

September 20th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Getting More Control Over The Magic Wand

By default, the Eyedropper tool’s Sample Size option (in the Options Bar) is set to Point Sample, which comes into play if you’re using it to read values for color correction. But for now, it’s important to know that the Sample Size option chosen for the Eyedropper tool (I) actually affects how the Magic Wand tool (W) makes its selection (the two have an undocumented relationship). If you increase the Eyedropper’s Sample Size to 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 Average, the Magic Wand will select an average of a much larger range of pixels in the sample area. This is important to know, because if you don’t have Point Sample chosen and you set the Magic Wand Tolerance to 0, it won’t just select the individual pixel you click on—it will select all of the pixels that match any of the pixels in a 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 area. The next time your Magic Wand isn’t behaving the way it used to, check and see if you have changed the Eyedropper tool’s Sample Size.

September 19th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Fix Those Stray Pixels Fast!

Sometimes when making a selection with the Magic Wand tool (W) or Color Range command (under the Select menu), Photoshop will leave little stray pixels unselected. You can tell where they are because they appear to twinkle on and off, kind of teasing…nay, taunting you, because your selection is not complete. Luckily, there’s a quick way to rein in those renegade stray pixels. Go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Smooth. Enter a Sample Radius of 1 pixel and click OK. That will usually do the trick—those stray pixels are now selected.

September 18th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Bringing Back Those Cropped-Away Areas

When you’re using the Crop tool (C) to crop images, you’ll find that you actually have some options on how the area you’re cropping away is handled after the crop. For example, in the Options Bar (as long as you’re not on the Background layer) you’ll see an option that lets you either Delete the cropped areas or simply Hide them from view (in other words, the areas are still there, they just expand out into the canvas area). If you choose the Hide option, it crops the image window down to the size of the crop, but since the cropped-away areas are still really there, you can use the Move tool (V) to drag these cropped areas back into view.

September 17th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Reusing Your Last Curve Setting

Once you’ve applied a curve setting to an image, it’s very possible that you’d like to use that exact same setting again, or maybe you’d just like to tweak that setting a bit. Well, you can. To bring up the Curves dialog with the last curve you used still in place, press Command-Option-M (PC: Control-Alt-M).

September 14th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Creating Temporary Brushes

It’s easy to create a temporary brush based on your preset brushes in Photoshop. Just click on the Brush thumbnail in the Options Bar to bring up the Brush Picker. Using the Master Diameter slider, you can change your brush size from 1 to 2500 pixels. If you like the size of your new brush and you want to save it, just click the Create a New Brush Preset icon at the top right of the dialog. The Brush Name dialog will appear so you can name your new brush. When you click OK, the new brush will immediately be added to your Brush Picker (and Brushes palette).

September 13th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Making Your Guide Flip

Just like most page-layout applications, Photoshop has non-printing guides you can pull out anytime you need to align objects or type, but there’s also a trick for flipping the guides. To access the guides, make your rulers visible by pressing Command-R (PC: Control-R), then click-and-hold within one of the rulers and drag out a guide. If you pull out a horizontal guide from the top ruler, but really wanted a vertical guide, just press the Option key (PC: Alt key) as you drag and your guide will flip from horizontal to vertical (pretty slick). You can pull out as many guides as you need (there’s probably a limit to how many you can use, but we’ve never reached it). When you’re done using a guide, just use the Move tool (V) to drag it back to the ruler where it came from. To remove all of your guides at once, choose Clear Guides from the View menu.

September 12th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Instantly Find The Center Of Any Object

This is a great tip for quickly finding the exact center of any object on its own layer. You start by pressing Command-T (PC: Control-T) to bring up the Free Transform bounding box. The bounding box has a handle in the center of both sides and center handles at both the top and bottom. Now all you have to do is make Photoshop’s rulers visible (Command-R [PC: Control-R]), and then drag out a horizontal and a vertical ruler guide to these handles to mark the center. Better still, if you have the Snap command active in the View menu, the guides will snap to the center of your object as you drag.

September 11th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Speed Tip To Rotate Through Open Images

Have a bunch of images open on your screen and can’t see the one you want? Just press Control-Tab to move from one open image to the next, cycling through all of your open documents.

September 10th, 2007 | Web Editor | News | Comments (0)

Get More Control Over Your Paint Strokes

Photoshop lets you affect a brush stroke even after you’ve painted it by using Photoshop’s Fade command (found under the Edit menu). Fade works like “undo on a slider,” and dragging the Opacity slider all the way to the left will completely undo your freshly painted brush stroke, but if you stop anywhere before the far-left side, it will instead simply lighten the stroke. You can also use the Mode pop-up menu to alter how your stroke blends with the object below it.

September 7th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Navigating The Brush Picker Like A Pro

Now that you’ve learned how to bring up the Brush Picker right where you want it, it wouldn’t hurt to learn this quick navigation tip to keep you from spending more time there than necessary. Once you’ve selected a brush in the Picker, just use the Arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate up, down, left, or right to other brushes in the Picker. Once you choose a brush and you are no longer in the Brush Picker, you can use the Period and Comma keys to move forward and backward through the different brushes. Shift-Comma and Shift-Period will jump you to the first and last brushes in the Brush Picker, respectively.

September 6th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Brushes Right Where You Want ‘Em

Here’s a tip that gives you a faster and more convenient way to switch to another preset brush without using the Brushes palette—and you might find that you like it even better. Just press the Control key, then click within your image (PC: Right-click) and the Brush Picker will appear directly under your cursor. Plus, you can even change the Master Diameter of the brush that you choose in the Picker. This is one you’ll have to try to appreciate the sheer speed and convenience of putting your brushes at your fingertips anytime.

September 5th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Get Rid Of Unwanted Brushes

You probably already know that you can add a brush to the Brushes palette, but did you know that it’s even easier to delete them? Just hold the Option key (PC: Alt key) and you’ll notice that your cursor changes into a pair of scissors. Click once on the brush you want to delete and that baby’s gone—no warning dialog, no chance to change your mind—it’s gone.

September 4th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Rotate To Any Angle The Fast Way

If you have a specific angle that you’d like to rotate a layer to, it’s easy. Get the Measure tool (it looks like a ruler and is in the Eyedropper tool’s flyout menu in the Toolbox), and click-and-drag out a line at the desired angle. Then go under the Edit menu, under Transform, and choose Rotate. Your layer will instantly rotate to match the angle that you drew with the Measure tool. Note: To rotate the Background layer, you must first select it (Command-A [PC: Control-A]).

September 3rd, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

You Don’t Need The Brushes Palette To Change Brush Size

In Photoshop CS2 you can increase or decrease the size of your brush by 10 pixels by pressing the Left or Right Bracket keys when the Brush tool (B) is selected. Once your brush is more than 100 pixels in size, it then moves in 25-pixel increments; if you go higher than 200 pixels, it moves in 50-pixel increments until you reach 300 pixels, at which point it moves in 100-pixel increments.

August 31st, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

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Photoshop Tutorials

Design Effects
Corey shows how to use the luminosity of an image to create a cool design effect and spice up your simple photos.
Stylized Comic Book Effect
Using this effect, you can transform anyone into a comic book character with a halftone, saturated look.
Text Shape Layers
Converting text into shapes allows you to distort the text as you like while retaining straight, clean edges.
Borders Under a Minute
Create really cool borders in under a minute to use on virtually any one of your photos or even video for that matter.

Halftone Smudge Brush

Here is an unusual way of using the Smudge tool to generate interesting halftone streaks.
Scale Effects

Now this is something that still seems to stump people in Photoshop when it come to Layer Styles.
Energize That Photo

Learn how to add excitement and energy to your photo in just a few simple steps.
Design Elements from Photos

Here is a cool way to use parts of you photos as abstract design elements.

Acrobat 9 PDF Security
In this tutorial, learn about applying and removing security options in Acrobat 9
Flash Video the Easy Way, Pt. 3
Tom Green demonstrates how to embed a Flash document into a Dreamweaver document and play it on a browser using the Insert>Flash Video menu in Dreamweaver.
Premiere Pro CS4 Nest Command
In this video, Franklin McMahon uses Premiere Pro CS4 to create a nested sequence and then overlay it over a backdrop.
Roundtrip Logo From Illustrator to Photoshop
Dave Cross creates some grungy text using graphics with a texture image.

Imageready’s Supercharged Eyedropper

In previous versions of Photoshop, you could only use the Eyedropper tool to sample a color from other open images in Photoshop, but for some reason, ImageReady had a supercharged Eyedropper. If you clicked the mouse button within your image and held it down, you could leave your image window and sample colors from, well… just about anything—including your computer desktop or any other open application. Freaky! Fortunately, Adobe finally added this same power to Photoshop’s Eyedropper tool.