Tip of the Day | Page 50

Put Your Gradient Picker At Your Fingertips

Want to make the Gradient Picker appear under your cursor in your image window? You can do this when you have the Gradient tool (G) active, allowing access to your gradient library, by Control-clicking (PC: Right-clicking) within your image area. It also works with the Custom Shape Picker. Here’s an even slicker trick: You can use the Return or Enter key instead to bring up the Gradient or Custom Shape Pickers.

September 27th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Using The Pen? Stay Away From The Toolbox

Want to save trips to the Toolbox when using the Pen tool (P)? You’re in luck. Better yet, you don’t even have to hold down any modifier keys (such as Option/Alt, etc.), because Photoshop will do the work for you. Here’s why: When you draw a path, move your cursor over a line segment and your Pen cursor automatically changes to the Add Anchor Point tool, so you can click anywhere along that path to add a point. Move your cursor over an existing point, and it changes into the Delete Anchor Point tool (click on the point, and it’s deleted). This is called Auto Add/Delete, and it’s on by default (you can turn it off, should you want to, using the checkbox in the Options Bar).

September 26th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

How To Get An Undo After You’ve Closed The Document

As you probably already know, the History palette keeps track of the last 20 changes to your document, and you can use it for multiple undos when working on a project. The only bad part is that when you close your document, your undos (in History) are automatically deleted. However, there is a way to save an undo, as long as it’s a tonal adjustment (such as Curves, Levels, Color Balance, etc.), by creating adjustment layers. Just click on the half-white/half-black circle icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose your tonal adjustment from the pop-up menu to create an adjustment layer. These adjustment layers are saved along with your file. That way, the next time you open the file, you can go back and edit your Curves, Levels, etc., adjustment by double-clicking on the adjustment layer’s thumbnail. The last-applied adjustment will appear, and you can edit it live. If you decide you don’t want the original adjustment applied at all, you can drag the adjustment layer into the Trash icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. You can also add a Gradient fill, a Pattern fill, and even a Solid Color fill as an adjustment layer, giving you an undo at a later date, because again, they’re saved as layers with the file.

September 25th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Hit Those Channels Fast

When you’re in the Curves dialog (Command-M [PC: Control-M]), if you’re charging by the hour, you can certainly travel up to the Channel pop-up menu and choose each individual channel you want to work on, but if you want to do it the fast way, just press Command-1 for Red, Command-2 for Green, and Command-3 for Blue (PC: Control-1, Control-2, etc.). If you need to return to the composite RGB channel, press Command-Tilde (PC: Control-Tilde). By the way, the Tilde key looks like ~, and it lives right above the Tab key on your keyboard. Don’t feel bad. Nobody knows what the Tilde key is. We’re not sure it’s a real symbol at all. We think it was made up so there wouldn’t be an empty space there on your keyboard. Hey, it’s somewhat plausible.

September 24th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Making The Color Palette Work Twice As Hard

If you use the Color palette (under the Window menu) to select colors, you’re probably already using the color ramp at the bottom of the palette for making quick color selections, but here are two tips that make using the ramp faster and easier. First, the color ramp doesn’t have to use the same color mode as the color sliders above it; for example, you can have RGB for your sliders and grayscale as your ramp. This is great because it gives you two different models to choose from without digging through menus. You can choose the color modes for both the sliders and the ramp from the Color palette’s flyout menu. The second tip is that if you quickly want to change color ramps, Shift-click on the ramp. Every time you click, it will rotate through to the next color mode.

September 20th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Getting More Control Over The Magic Wand

By default, the Eyedropper tool’s Sample Size option (in the Options Bar) is set to Point Sample, which comes into play if you’re using it to read values for color correction. But for now, it’s important to know that the Sample Size option chosen for the Eyedropper tool (I) actually affects how the Magic Wand tool (W) makes its selection (the two have an undocumented relationship). If you increase the Eyedropper’s Sample Size to 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 Average, the Magic Wand will select an average of a much larger range of pixels in the sample area. This is important to know, because if you don’t have Point Sample chosen and you set the Magic Wand Tolerance to 0, it won’t just select the individual pixel you click on—it will select all of the pixels that match any of the pixels in a 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 area. The next time your Magic Wand isn’t behaving the way it used to, check and see if you have changed the Eyedropper tool’s Sample Size.

September 19th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Fix Those Stray Pixels Fast!

Sometimes when making a selection with the Magic Wand tool (W) or Color Range command (under the Select menu), Photoshop will leave little stray pixels unselected. You can tell where they are because they appear to twinkle on and off, kind of teasing…nay, taunting you, because your selection is not complete. Luckily, there’s a quick way to rein in those renegade stray pixels. Go under the Select menu, under Modify, and choose Smooth. Enter a Sample Radius of 1 pixel and click OK. That will usually do the trick—those stray pixels are now selected.

September 18th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Bringing Back Those Cropped-Away Areas

When you’re using the Crop tool (C) to crop images, you’ll find that you actually have some options on how the area you’re cropping away is handled after the crop. For example, in the Options Bar (as long as you’re not on the Background layer) you’ll see an option that lets you either Delete the cropped areas or simply Hide them from view (in other words, the areas are still there, they just expand out into the canvas area). If you choose the Hide option, it crops the image window down to the size of the crop, but since the cropped-away areas are still really there, you can use the Move tool (V) to drag these cropped areas back into view.

September 17th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Reusing Your Last Curve Setting

Once you’ve applied a curve setting to an image, it’s very possible that you’d like to use that exact same setting again, or maybe you’d just like to tweak that setting a bit. Well, you can. To bring up the Curves dialog with the last curve you used still in place, press Command-Option-M (PC: Control-Alt-M).

September 14th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

Creating Temporary Brushes

It’s easy to create a temporary brush based on your preset brushes in Photoshop. Just click on the Brush thumbnail in the Options Bar to bring up the Brush Picker. Using the Master Diameter slider, you can change your brush size from 1 to 2500 pixels. If you like the size of your new brush and you want to save it, just click the Create a New Brush Preset icon at the top right of the dialog. The Brush Name dialog will appear so you can name your new brush. When you click OK, the new brush will immediately be added to your Brush Picker (and Brushes palette).

September 13th, 2007 | Web Editor | Tip of the Day | Comments (0)

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Photoshop Tutorials

- Reverse Restoration
  Corey shows you how to make a new photo look damaged by blending in some unusual textures.
- Rain Drops
  In this tutorial, Corey not only creates the raindrops, but also the splashes that are formed with the raindrops hit the hands.
- G.I. Joe
  Corey's tutorial this week was inspired by a real American hero!

More Fun with 3D

Continue exploring the possibilities with Photoshop’s new 3D tools.
Reverse Restoration

Corey shows you how to make a new photo look damaged by blending in some unusual textures.
3D Background Effects

Use Photoshop’s new 3D tools to create some dazzling background effects.
Striking Match, Part 2

In the second part of this tutorial, Corey finishes creating this illustration of a striking match.

Layers TV: Episode 110
New episodes are coming soon. In this old episode, RC goes start to finish through a Flash CS4 project using the new 3D tools and importing an audio file. Corey talks about the distortion features inside of Adobe Illustrator. You can download each episode by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes. var so = new SWFObject('http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/players/player.swf','mpl','500','300','7'); so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true'); // so.addVariable('type','rtmp'); so.addVariable('file','http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/switch/video/layers-tv-episode-110.mp4'); so.addVariable('plugins','hd-1'); so.addVariable('hd.file','http://media.kelbymediagroup.com/switch/video/layers-tv-episode-110-hd.mp4'); so.addVariable('hd.state','false'); so.addVariable('image','http://www.layersmagazine.com/images/layerstv-logo.jpg'); so.addVariable('height','300'); so.addVariable('width','500'); so.addVariable('autostart','false'); so.addVariable("backcolor","0x000000"); so.addVariable("frontcolor","0xF1F1F1"); so.addVariable("lightcolor","0xF88E21"); so.addVariable("quality","100"); so.write('player'); [...]
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac
The new professional-level Quadro FX 4800 with 1.5 GB of memory brings a much-needed performance upgrade to the Mac Pro lineup.
Prezi
Prezi is a Flash-based visualization, storytelling, and presentation tool that allows you to create nonlinear presentations.
Terry White’s New App | Printing from Lightroom 2
Happy Thursday everyone! Just wanted to pop on in and share what’s new in the intranets: Terry White’s New Iphone App Terry white over at his techblog is usually covering all sorts of technology and letting us know what his favorite apps are for the iphone. He’s taken that love and mixed it with [...]

Adding Keywords to Multiple files

In Bridge, you can add keywords to images to make searching for pictures a little less cumbersome. You don’t, however, want the process to become tedious as well. By either Command-clicking (PC: Ctrl-clicking) or Shift-clicking on images, you can select multiple files inside Bridge. Once you have the files selected, you can go to the Keywords panel and turn on any keyword you like. This will apply the keyword to all of the files that you have selected. It takes away a little bit of the pain of categorization, but just a little.