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Vanishing Point 2

Big changes in Vanishing Point! Now you are not constricted to 90° angles. This offers lots of cool possibilities with the Vanishing Point filter.

Refine Edge

Although there are many tools that will create exact selections, Adobe does step up the game a little with Refine Edge (Select>Refine Edge). With the Refine Edge feature, you have the ability to modify your selection using a set of sliders and preview your output on different color backgrounds. Use the F key in the dialog to cycle through the preview options.

Use Overlay in the Clone Source Panel

Have you ever used the Clone Stamp tool and wondered what exactly you were going to paint in the area? Wonder no more. Now you can turn on the Show Overlay checkbox at the bottom of the Clone Source panel to automatically see an overlay of the image as you would clone it. You can automatically turn this off and on by turning on the Auto Hide checkbox.

The Clone Source Panel

This panel has a couple of neat features for people who spend a lot of time in cloning. You can now set up a series of preset areas in the Clone Stamp tool. Simply click on one of the icons at the top of the Clone Source panel and Option-click (PC: Alt-click) on a point. That will save that location to the first icon. Click on the second icon and do the same thing. Now you can save a series of location points and go back by just clicking on the icon.

Black and White 101

Black and white could not get any easier. Open an image. Choose Image>Adjustments>Black and White. Instead of using all of the sliders that are in the resulting dialog, click on the different areas of the image that you want to make darker or lighter and drag—left to make them lighter, right to make them darker.

Reset a Dialog

If you are working with any dialog that has an OK and a Cancel option, you don’t always have to cancel out to get back to the original state of the effect. If you press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key when you are in a dialog, the Cancel button will turn into a Reset button. This will give you a chance to try the effect again without having to leave the dialog.

Document Your Happy Accidents

Sometimes our best creations happen by pure experimentation and accident. Sitting in front of a Photoshop file, you are 40 History States in, and then it happens—magic! You really want to be able to get back to that moment. To do so, make sure that you turn on the History Log checkbox in the General Preferences (Photoshop>Preferences>General [PC: Edit>Preferences>General]). You can save the information as metadata, as a separate text file, or both!

Sample Color from Anywhere

You can use the Eyedropper tool to pick colors from any area of your screen. First, press the letter I to select the Eyedropper tool, then click-and-hold inside your document, and drag outside the document window onto the object you’d like to sample. Release your mouse button and the sampled color appears as your new Foreground color.

File>Open Recent

Under Photoshop>Preferences (PC: Edit>Preferences), you have an option called File Handling. In the Recent File List Contains field, you can specify how many files you would like it to remember.

Opening Multiple Images in Photoshop CS3

To open multiple images in Photoshop CS3, you can Shift-click a series of images in the Open dialog, and then click Open. You can also select noncontiguous images by Command-clicking.

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Open in Camera Raw from Bridge

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).

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