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Ever wanted to know what a specific color would be in a specific library (like Pantone)? Select the color with the Eyedropper tool (I). Click on your Foreground color swatch to open the Color Picker. You will notice there is a button for Color Libraries. Click on that, and it will bring you the approximate color swatch for whatever library you chose.
Anyone can take a picture and give it more of an artistic feel using vignetting. In the Lens Correction dialog (Filter>Distort>Lens Correction), there is a setting called Vignette that’s used to correct problems with lenses that darken the edges of a photograph. It can also be used to add vignetting to a picture for dramatic effect. Drag the Vignette Amount and Midpoint sliders to the left. In a few seconds, your picture will look just like the pros.
Pretty much all applications that use a brush can be regulated using the Bracket keys. The Left Bracket ([) key decreases the brush size, while the Right Bracket (]) key increases its size. If you press-and-hold the Shift key, it increases the size by a larger amount.
In most dialogs, you can use the scrubber (slider) to change measurements. To change the performance of the scrubber, try using these keys: Shift will make the scrubber jump very quickly to larger or smaller numbers and Option (PC: Alt) will slow down the scrubber to move one number at a time.
Serif or sans serif? Oblique or Avant Garde? I am from more of a “Yeah, that looks appropriate” school of font usage. If you would like to cycle through your fonts to see what looks good, first commit the type. Once the type has been committed, click on the font name in the Character panel (Window>Character). With the font name highlighted, press the Up and Down Arrow keys to move through different fonts.
To change the properties of a series of Type layers, Command-click (PC: Ctrl-click) on each of the layers that you would like to adjust.
Press Control-Tab (on both a Mac and a PC) multiple times to cycle through all of the documents that are currently open.
When I’m done working with an image, I like to sit and admire it (hey, I spent six hours working on it, I should). To do that, I hit the Tab key, then hit the F key three times. This hides all of the panels and toolbars and lets you see the image by itself surrounded by black. To get back to regular mode, press the F key and the Tab key one more time.
I spent some time playing around with the orientation of images. Instead of having to go to Image>Rotate Canvas>90° CW or 90° CCW, I set up actions for them. To do this, create a blank document. Once you have the document onscreen, create an action called 90 Degrees Clockwise and assign it a keyboard shortcut. Click on Image>Rotate Canvas>90° CW and then stop the action. Do the same for 90° CCW, and be sure that you place both keyboard shortcuts next to one another. It will make working with images a bit easier.
The best way to automate tasks in Photoshop is to create actions of common tasks. When you are working with multiple images, you don’t want to keep selecting an action and clicking on the Play Selection icon. Speed up your workflow by enabling Button mode. In the Actions panel flyout menu, you can select Button Mode, which will let you run your actions by simply clicking on the action in the panel.
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Corey shares another way to get a cool 3D light beam effect.
Corey finishes up the Olympic-inspired design that he began last week in Part 1.
The Olympic-inspired tutorial will be coming in two parts. Stop by next week for the conclusion to this video.
This week’s tutorial deals with creating masks for complicated images by using channels.
You can open RAW images in Camera Raw right from Bridge in Photoshop CS3. This frees up Photoshop to continue working on your files while they’re being processed in Camera Raw. Just select one or more images in Bridge, Control-click (PC: Right-click) on them, and choose Open in Camera Raw. This will open the image(s) in Bridge’s Camera Raw rather than Photoshop. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-R (PC: Ctrl-R).