Quick marble

You can create a marble texture easily with a couple of filters: Clouds and Difference Clouds. Choose black for the Foreground and green (or any marble-like color, other than white) for the Background color (at the bottom of the Toolbox). Go to the Filter menu and choose Render>Clouds, then choose Filter>Render>Difference Clouds.

Press Command-F (PC: Ctrl-F) a few times to reapply the Difference Clouds filter until you get the desired look.  from Bert Monroy

April 13th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Contrast clouds

Pressing the Option (PC: Alt) key when invoking the Clouds filter (Filter>Render>Clouds) will increase the contrast between the Foreground and Background colors, giving you clouds with a higher contrast.

Immediately following the cloud rendering, if you press Command-Option-F (PC: Ctrl-Alt-F), you’ll get clouds with even more contrast. Press this key combination as many times as you like until your clouds are visually appealing.    from Bert Monroy

April 10th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Position a paste

When you’re pasting an element from the clipboard into a Photoshop document, you can specify where to place the object by making a selection—a small circular selection with the Elliptical Marquee tool will suffice. The pasted object will fall centered over the selected area.

from Bert Monroy

April 8th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Creating a starfield is easy!

Press the D key and fill the layer with black (Option-Delete [PC: Alt-Backspace]) and then apply the Add Noise Filter (Filter> Noise>Add Noise). You’ll need to enter a large Amount (we used 230%) in the dialog to produce a lot of noise. To introduce some gray values to the noise, apply the Blur More filter (Filter>Blur>Blur More).

Now comes the trick to make the noise behave so you have a star field: Choose Image>Adjustments>Levels. In the Levels dialog, drag the dark value (black) slider almost entirely to the right and move the highlight slider (white) slightly to the left, with the mid-tone slider gray) between the two. Click OK and your star field appears.

from Bert Monroy

April 7th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)

Get rid of that shape layer outline

If you’ve worked with a shape layer, you’ve probably noticed the appearance of a thin outline around the shape. The outline you see around a shape layer really doesn’t mean anything. It won’t print or show up on a saved Web image; however, it does look flat-out distracting when you’re trying to work with your images. Just click the mask next to the shape layer it’s on, and that outline will disappear. Click on it again if you ever want to turn it back on.

April 6th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Cycling through Layer Blend modes (part 2)

If you’ve tried the previous tip but have a tool selected that also has blend modes associated with it (like any of the Brush tools), then you’ll find that the keyboard shortcut cycles through the blend modes for the brush in the Options Bar and not the layer.

The workaround is this: First select a tool that doesn’t have blend modes (like the Move tool or one of the selection tools), and then use the shortcut from above and it’ll work just fine.

April 4th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (2)

Cycling through Layer Blend Modes (part 1)

Sometimes it’s useful to quickly cycle through your blend modes to see which one works best.

Manually clicking on each one just isn’t quick, so try this: Click on the Blend Mode list in the top left of the Layers panel to select a blend mode.

Then press Shift + (plus key) to cycle down the list and Shift – (minus key) to go back up.

April 2nd, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (3)

The font-resizing shortcut

Want to make your font size larger or smaller without going to the Size setting in the Options Bar? This one is really easy. Double-click the Type layer thumb nail to select your type. Then press Command-Shift-> (PC: Ctrl-Shift->) to make your font larger or Press Command-Shift-< (PC: Ctrl-Shift-<) to make it smaller.

Bonus tip:
Add the Option (PC: Alt) key to the mix and the size will change in increments of 10.

April 1st, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Unlink that mask for flexibility

If you want to move a layer around your image, but leave the layer mask exactly where it is, you need to unlink the two. Click the little chain link icon between the layer thumbnail and the layer mask to unlink them. Then you can move the layer around wherever you want to. Click between the layer thumbnail and layer mask again to re-link the two.

March 31st, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Turn off or disable a layer mask

You can Shift-click on the Layer Mask thumbnail in the layers panel to turn off or disable the mask. You’ll see a red X appear over the mask icon in the Layers panel. The
mask is actually still there but it’s disabled. Shift-click on it again to enable it.

March 30th, 2009 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (1)