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Don’t Use It? Hide It!
Photoshop has more than a hundred different filters, and most of us probably use just a handful in our daily work. In fact, so far as we’ve been able to determine (through years of user-testing), only three people in the world today use either the Pattern Maker filter or the Fiber filter, and even they don’t like them. So, if there are filters you never use, do they have to hang around clogging up your filter menus? Absolutely not (if you have CS2). Just go under the Edit menu and choose Menus. In the list of Application Menus commands, double-click on Filter to reveal a list of all Photoshop filters. Now, just turn off the Eye icon (a.k.a. the Visibility button) beside the filters you don’t want to see. Don’t worry, if for some reason you decide you need to temporarily access one of those hidden filters, just go under the Filter menu, to the submenu where it used to appear, and choose Show All Menu Items.
Want Some Hints For The Tool You’re Currently Using?
If you want some tips about the tool you currently have selected, just go to the Window menu and choose Info. This brings up the Info palette and at the bottom of the palette you’ll find a tip or two for the tool you’re using. If you don’t see these tips, go to the Info palette’s flyout menu and choose Palette Options. When the options appear, at the bottom turn on the checkbox for Show Tool Hints.
Side-By-Side Photo Review
Want to compare two photos side-by-side? Just open both in Photoshop CS2, then go under the Window menu, under Arrange, and choose Tile Vertically, which places both photos onscreen, side-by-side, at their maximum “fit-in-window” size.
Cursor Too Small? Make It Bigger
At long last, bigger brush cursors are here. Just go to Preferences under the Photoshop menu (or under the Edit menu in Windows), under Display & Cursors, and choose Full Size Brush Tip. You also have the option of adding a crosshair to the center of your brush cursor by turning on that option (which appears just below the Full Size Brush Tip).
Saving Bridge Workspaces
In Bridge, your custom setups can be saved as workspaces. For example, if you shoot a lot of portraits, you could use the previous tip to set up your Bridge window to your liking and then save it by going to the Window menu, under Workspace, and choosing Save Workspace (name it something you’ll remember, like “Bridge 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 horizontal photos—just drag the divider bar along the Panel area to the right until the preview takes up most of the Bridge window. Now switching between huge portrait and landscape previews only takes one click.
Making The Preview Palette Bigger
Want a taller preview in Bridge for photos taken in a portrait orientation (tall rather than wide)? Just double-click on the Folders (or Favorites) tab, then double-click the Metadata (or Keywords) tab), and they will both “roll up,” allowing the Preview pane to expand, giving you a preview that’s twice as tall.
Nesting Your Bridge Panes
Nesting palettes (putting commonly used palettes together in one palette, with just their tabs showing) is very popular in Photoshop, and you’re able to do that within Bridge as well. Just drag-and-drop the tab of one palette onto another palette (just like you would outside Bridge). For example, if you’d like all four Bridge pane tabs side-by-side at the top of the Bridge’s Panel area, just drag the lower three tabs up to the Folders pane, one by one.
Changing Metadata Font Sizes
If you’re older than 17, chances are you’ll find the font size Adobe uses for the Metadata palette in Bridge way, way too small. Luckily, Adobe doesn’t have many 17-year-olds on the payroll, so they included a way to increase the font size for the metadata. Just click on the flyout menu (it’s the little round button with a right-facing triangle in it on the top-right side of the Metadata palette) and choose Increase Font Size from the contextual menu. The cool thing is—you can choose this command more than once, making your font size bigger and bigger each time you choose it.
Batch Renaming Earns A Shortcut
Finally, the Batch Rename command (where you rename multiple photos at once) has a keyboard shortcut. It’s Command-Shift-R (PC: Control-Shift-R), which brings up the Batch Rename dialog.
Scrolling Thru The Views
Want to quickly scroll through the different thumbnail views in Bridge? Press-and-hold Command (PC: Control) and the Backslash key (\). Hey, don’t scoff at this seemingly innocent shortcut—Mac users have been waiting years for any shortcut that makes use of the Backslash key. In the captures shown here, I’ve scrolled from Thumbnails view to Filmstrip view.
One-Button Refresh for the Bridge
When you’re working in CS2’s Bridge, you’ve probably noticed that when you plug in a jump drive, memory card, etc., your Folders pane doesn’t always update immediately. If that’s the case, there’s a simple one-button trick—press F5. If you’re charging by the hour, you could always choose Refresh from the Folder palette’s flyout menu, but that just takes too long. Instead, just press F5 for an instant refresh anytime.
Jumping Between Bridge and Photoshop
Here’s a shortcut you’ll want to start using to jump you back and forth between Photoshop and Bridge (when they’re both already open). It’s Command-Option-O (PC: Control-Alt-O).
Batch Renaming Earns a Shortcut
Finally, the Batch Rename command (where you rename multiple photos at once) has a keyboard shortcut. It’s Command-Shift-R (PC: Control-Shift-R), which brings up the Batch Rename dialog (as shown here).
How to Keep From Losing Your Bridge Changes
Before there was Bridge, there was the File Browser. One downfall of the File Browser was that if you moved photos from one folder to another, you lost all the changes (and cached thumbnails) you had made while in the Browser because you lost the link to the invisible files that stored that information. But you can change that in Bridge, so your edits (and thumbnail cache) follow wherever you move your folder of images. First, press Command-K (PC: Control-K) to bring up Bridge’s Preferences. On the left side of the dialog, click on Advanced, and then click on the Use Distributed Cache Files When Possible option under the Cache section. This makes two normally invisible files now visible, and when you move your folder of images, they move right along with them.
Jump to the Largest Thumbnail Size in One Click
If you want to see your thumbnails as large as they can possibly fit within Bridge’s main window, just go down to the Thumbnail Size slider (along the bottom of the window) and click on the little rectangle icon that appears at the end of the slider on the right side. This jumps you instantly to the largest possible thumbnail size in just one click.
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Photoshop Tutorials
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Wild West Grunge
Corey shows you how to recreate this rugged, weathered look using a couple of filters, blending modes, and layer masks.
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Wall of Text
Use a clipping group to place an image inside of a background of text, with another layer of text placed in front to create depth.
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Natural Brushes
In this tutorial Corey shows you how to take an existing image and turn it into it’s own custom brush.
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Custom Coins
In this tutorial Corey creates a realistic-looking coin effect using the channels palette and the lighting effects filter.
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.- Custom Coins
In this tutorial Corey creates a realistic-looking coin effect using the channels palette and the lighting effects filter. - Natural Brushes
In this tutorial Corey shows you how to take an existing image and turn it into it's own custom brush.
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Creative Contrast in Photoshop CS3
In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at some interesting techniques for improving contrast using the Shadow/Highlight command, empty adjustment layers, blend modes, and the Blend If sliders in the Layer Style dialog. -
Enhanced Workflow in Lightroom 1.1
In this article, we'll focus on techniques that will strengthen your workflow skills and simultaneously reveal some of the new features in Lightroom 1.1. -
Handlin’ Photoshop and Illustrator Content in Flash
we’ll take a look at how things work across Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash-specifically, some features and techniques for getting rasterized Photoshop content and vector Illustrator content into your Flash movies. -
Understanding Channels in Photoshop CS3
Photographer Chris Alvanas wants to go over Channels, because understanding what they are and what they do is key to understanding what their potential is.
Removing Those Typographically Incorrect Spaces
If you’re trying to set type that looks typographically correct in Photoshop, there’s an old habit you’ll have to break, and that’s the curse of putting two spaces at the end of every sentence. This is a holdover from people who at one time used traditional typewriters, where adding two spaces was necessary, but in typesetting that’s a huge no-no. About 70% of the text I copy-and-paste from text files that people give me has two spaces, but I use this Photoshop tip to fix the problem in just seconds. First, go under the Edit menu and choose Find and Replace Text. In the Find field, press the Spacebar twice (entering two spaces), then in Change To, press the Spacebar just once. Click Change All, and every time Photoshop finds two spaces at the end of a sentence, it will replace it with just one, making you typographically correct.
- Chicago, IL
Photoshop CS3 for Photographers Tour May. 19 - Nashville, TN
Photoshop CS3 for Photographers Tour May. 22 - San Francisco, CA
Photoshop CS3 for Photographers Tour May. 28 - New York, NY
Maximum Photoshop Tour May. 30
