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Imageready Window Speed Tip
If you’re using Adobe ImageReady (which comes installed with Photoshop as part of the package), by default the image window displays the original (un-optimized version) of your image. However, if you want to quickly view the optimized version, a 2-Up version (original and optimized side by side), or the 4-Up version (your original and three other optimized options), you can use the quick tip Command-Y (PC: Control-Y) to rotate through your four view choices. A big time saver.
Two Easy Ways To Create Transparency
The most common method for making a background transparent back in Photoshop 6.0 is still available to you in Photoshop CS2, and that’s to go to the Layers palette and simply delete the Background layer. That’s it. This leaves only the layers that were above the Background layer (which already have background transparency). Now, there’s another easy way, and that’s to go to Photoshop’s Save for Web command, switch to the Eyedropper tool in the Save for Web’s Toolbox, and click on the background color you want to become transparent. Then, just below the Color Table on the bottom right of the dialog, click on the first icon, which creates transparency from your selected color.
Imageready Feature Comes To Photoshop
One of our favorite little features from Adobe ImageReady has made its way into Photoshop—it’s called Slices From Guides. What it does is slice your image (for the Web) where your guides are positioned. To make use of this handy little number, just make your rulers visible by pressing Command-R (PC: Control-R), drag out guides where you’d like your slices applied, and then press the letter K to use the Slice tool. With the Slice tool selected, look up in the Options Bar and you’ll find a button called Slices From Guides. Click the button and Photoshop will do the rest.
Zoom Out For Sharper Web Images
This is a tip we use almost daily when we have to greatly reduce the size and/or resolution of an image. Sometimes when you make a drastic size/resolution change, it can really make the resulting image blurry, so what we do is simply zoom out on the image so that the window and image are at either 50% or 25% view. Then, we take a screen capture of our image window at the new smaller size. That way, the image still looks sharp, but it’s much smaller when we open the screen capture in Photoshop. The trick to making this work is using either a 50%, 25%, or 12.5% view size for making the capture. If you view the image at 66.7%, 33.3%, or 16.7%, the image won’t be as crisp (because of the way Photoshop draws the image at those views).
Let Photoshop Make The File Size Call
Oftentimes you have a target size you’re trying to hit when creating Web graphics; for example, you’re creating a Web banner and your file size limit is 32 K. If that’s the case, and you know the target size, why not let Photoshop do all the work? Here’s how: Under the File menu, go to Save for Web. In the Save for Web dialog, just to the right of the Settings pop-up menu, is a right-facing triangle. Click-and-hold it and when the pop-up menu appears, choose Optimize to File Size. In the dialog, enter the target file size you need your graphic to be and click OK to have Photoshop optimize the graphic to fit your target file size. If it doesn’t matter to you whether it’s a GIF or JPEG, choose Auto Select GIF/JPEG and Photoshop will “make the call.”
Crop It Even Closer
When you’re designing graphics for the Web, you don’t want even one extra pixel of unused space, because it adds to the overall file size of the image. Because of that, you want to crop your Web graphics as tightly as possible. Luckily for us (you, them, etc.), Photoshop CS can do it for you automatically. Just choose Trim from the Image menu, click OK in the dialog, and it will crop your Web graphic as tightly as possible for the smallest possible file size. It does this by looking at the pixel color in the upper left-hand corner of your image and cropping down until it hits another color. (Note: The Trim dialog also gives you the option to base the crop on the bottom right-hand corner pixel color or transparent areas). This works especially well when creating type for the Web, because you’ll often create it on a white background.
Need To Shrink The File Size? Use Transparency
Want a killer tip for squeezing even more size out of your GIF Web images? Make something transparent. That’s right, if you can pick an area of your image to make transparent, your file size will drop like a rock. For example, if you’re putting a logo over a white background and you can make the white area around the logo transparent, your file size will be significantly smaller, because the transparent areas are virtually ignored when determining file size, because, after all, there’s nothing there.
Lose Those Annoying Numbers In The Upper Left-Hand Corner
We get more letters from people who ask us, “How do I get rid of that number in the top left-hand corner of my image?” This little puppy appears if you accidentally click on the Slice tool in the Toolbox. Even if you notice your error and immediately switch to another tool, it’s too late. The “slice number” is already in place. To make it go away, go under the View menu, under Show, and choose Slices. Then try not to accidentally click on the Slice tool again. (Sorry, I just felt like scolding somebody. You know, just for fun.)
Adding Music to Your Flash Web Gallery
In CS2 Adobe added two Flash-based templates you can use for your online Web Photo Gallery. Even cooler is the fact that you can now add a background music track to one of these Flash galleries. Just follow these steps: First find the MP3 audio track you want to use as your background music and rename the file as “useraudio.mp3”. Then open your Photoshop CS2 application folder and navigate to Presets>Web Photo Gallery. Inside that folder look for either Flash Gallery 1 or Flash Gallery 2. Depending on which gallery you chose within Photoshop, drag-and-drop your audio file into the corresponding folder. That’s it! You’ve got background music.
Getting Smaller Photoshop Files
Do your Photoshop PSD file sizes seem a little large? It may be because of a Preferences setting that makes Photoshop save a flattened version of your Photoshop image, along with your layered Photoshop file. Why does Photoshop do this? Because there’s a slight possibility you might share this file with someone using Photoshop 2.5 (just like there’s a slight possibility that Congress will vote to cut their own salaries), and Photoshop 2.5 didn’t support layers, so it can’t read your layered document. But because, by default, that flattened version is included in your layered file, guess what—2.5 can open the flattened image. What luck! Who cares? I’d rather have smaller file sizes all year long, and if you would too, go under the Photoshop menu (the Edit menu in Windows), under Preferences, under File Handling, then in the File Compatibility section, for Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility, change Ask to Never. Think about this one for a minute and you’ll wonder why this is turned on by default. Think about it for two minutes and you’ll wonder why it’s in Photoshop at all. Don’t spend too much time on it, or you’ll start to wonder who’s the poor soul that’s stuck on version 2.5.
Don’t Use Crop to Fix Barrel Distrortion
Problem: You’re trying to fix barrel distortion that appears on a photo you’re editing, but using the Crop tool’s Perspective feature is a guessing game. You try the crop and it doesn’t look right; you have to undo it, and guess again. Solution: Don’t use the Crop tool’s Perspective feature (found in the Options Bar), even though it was specifically designed to address barrel distortion. Use the standard Free Transform command instead by pressing Command-T (PC: Control-T) and then pressing-and-holding the Command (PC: Control) key while you drag the corner handles to create your perspective. Doing this gives you a live onscreen preview as you work, so fixing the distortion takes just a few seconds—unlike Crop’s Perspective.
Will More RAM Make Photoshop Run Faster?
Problem: You added more RAM to your system and assigned more RAM to Photoshop, but it doesn’t seem to run any faster. Reason: Adding RAM doesn’t always make Photoshop run faster. It only works if you didn’t have enough RAM to begin with. Adding RAM will only help to make your computer run as fast as it can, but it won’t make your 800-MHz computer run at 801 MHz. For example, if you work on Web images and the average image you work on is 3 MB, you only need about 15 or 20 MB assigned to Photoshop to have it run at full speed. If you’ve got that, and add another 256 MB of RAM, Photoshop won’t run any faster, because Photoshop only needs that 15 or 20 MB that you already had. Freaky. To check your RAM usage, go under the Photoshop menu, under Preferences, and choose Memory & Image Cache (on a Windows PC, Preferences are under the Edit menu).
Faster Application Switching
Do you often copy-and-paste images from Photoshop into other applications (such as FileMaker Pro, Word, etc.)? I’m not talking about importing a TIFF or EPS, I’m talking about copying the object, switching to another application, and pasting your copied image from the Clipboard. You don’t? Great, then we have a tip for you that will speed up your application-switching pretty dramatically. Go under the Photoshop menu, under Preferences, under General, and turn off the checkbox for Export Clipboard (in Windows, Preferences can be found under the Edit menu). Here’s what’s happening when it’s turned on: Whatever you last copied in Photoshop gets transferred to your system’s Clipboard memory when you switch to another application, just in case you want to paste it. If you have a large image in clipboard, it’ll take some time to export the image to the other application (or it’ll be so large it won’t export at all—you’ll get a warning dialog instead). So, turn off that preference, and wait no more.
Stop The “Click-And-Jump-To-That-Layer” Blues
Problem: All of a sudden, every time you click on a layer with the Move tool, it jumps to that layer. Solution: Somehow you turned on a feature called Auto Select Layer, which lets you make a layer active by just clicking on it with the Move tool. To turn this feature off, press V to get the Move tool, and up in the Options Bar, turn off the checkbox for Auto Select Layer. Besides, you never really need to turn this feature on, because you can just hold the Command key (PC: Control key) and click on any layer in your image window.
Let Photoshop Rebuild Your Prefs
If you need to delete Photoshop’s current preferences file (which is a common “first-line-of-defense” troubleshooting move), you don’t have to go digging around your drive. All you have to do is hold the Command, Option, and Shift keys (PC: Control-Alt-Shift) when you first launch Photoshop, and you’ll be greeted with a dialog asking you if you want to delete the Photoshop Settings File. If you do, click Yes, and Photoshop will build a new, factory-fresh set of preferences for you.
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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.
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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
