GfCS

Adobe con­tin­u­ally improves, upgrades and changes Pho­to­shop and I’m no guru but I’m able to do a fair amount with Pho­to­shop myself. My wife is what I would term a Pho­to­shop guru or expert and the things she can get Pho­to­shop to do con­tin­ues to blow me away. My wife uses the newest ver­sion of Pho­to­shop at her job as a Dig­i­tal Designer, but I’m still on Pho­to­shop 7, so please bare with me if my tips are old or outdated.

I have tried here to com­pile 10 tips that will help you use Pho­to­shop in ways you never thought of before or maybe just to use it more quickly to do the things you do now.

1– Edge Burn-in Technique

Try using the Rec­tan­gu­lar Mar­quee tool (M) and select the area slightly smaller than the outer edge of the image (50 – 100 pix­els, your pref­er­ence). Now invert the selec­tion (Select-Inverse) and make a Curves adjust­ment later to darken the edge and click OK. Then apply a heavy Gauss­ian Blur (Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur) to the layer mask with a Radius of around 100 pix­els based on your pref­er­ence. You can cus­tomize this by using the Brush tools or layer Opac­ity slider.

2– Make Image Mid­tones Pop

To avoid sharp shad­ows or high­lights while bring­ing out the mid­tones try this tech­nique. Make a dupli­cate of the Back­ground layer and then choose Filter-Sharpen-Unsharp Mask, and then set the Amount, Radius and Thresh­old to 50/20/20 respec­tively. Now from the Lay­ers palette menu select Blend­ing Options and in the This Layer sec­tion move the Shadow slider to 70 and High­light to 185. Now press Alt (Option) and sep­a­rate the tri­an­gu­lar slid­ers to drag the shadow point to 0 and the high­light to 255 and click OK.

3– Make Fancy Edges for Images With Filters

Open a copy of your image so you keep your orig­i­nal intact and dou­ble click on the Back­ground layer in the Lay­ers palette. Now click OK to make that layer a Layer 0, or nor­mal layer. Use the Rec­tan­gu­lar Mar­quee tool (M) and cre­ate a selec­tion slightly smaller than the outer edge of the image same as in the edge burn-in tech­nique above. Enter Quick Mask mode (Q) and click Filter-Filter Gallery and apply any fil­ters you pre­fer and click OK. Exit Quick Mask mode (Q again) and then click the Add Layer Mask icon in the Lay­ers palette to mask the image in the shape you created.

4– Quick Layer Tip

When you add a new layer it appears at the top of the Lay­ers palette. To make your new layer below the active layer and not the back­ground layer press Ctrl (Com­mand) when you click the Cre­ate a New Layer icon!

5– Make Cropped Images Match

With both images already opened, start by click­ing on the image that is the cor­rect size. Now select the Crop tool © and click on the Front Image but­ton in the Options bar and the Width, Height and Res­o­lu­tion prop­er­ties in the Options Bar are filled in for the front image. Now drag out a crop bound­ary in the sec­ond image and press Enter (Return) and your sec­ond image is now the exact same size as the first.

6– Take Con­trol of Sliders

When you move your cur­sor over a numeric option in most Option or dia­log boxes a slider bar appears. If you want more con­trol over the slider, press­ing Alt (Option) and drag­ging the cur­sor makes the val­ues move 10 times more slowly and hold­ing the Shift key makes them move 10 times faster!

7– Is Your His­togram Accurate?

Be cer­tain that your His­togram is not a cached ver­sion of your pre­vi­ous edits. If you see a small tri­an­gle on the His­togram click it and it will update to the cur­rent version.

8– Reap­ply the Last Filter

If you want to use the same fil­ter again with the same set­tings hold down Alt (Option) as you select the fil­ter and it will open with the last-used set­tings. You can also use the short­cut Shift-Alt-F (Shift-Option-F) to reap­ply the filter.

9– Easy Crop Tool

When Crop­ping © click and drag out­side the bound­ing box and this will allow the crop box to rotate any way you like to change the angle of your image or get it nice and straight. Dou­ble click inside the box to crop. We use this all the time in our cam­era repair shop when tak­ing pic­tures of parts to be placed on the web­site, works great!

10– Make Crisp-Edged Shapes

When using the rec­tan­gu­lar Shape tool, click on the down arrow to the right of the shapes in the Options Bar and turn on Snap to Pix­els checkbox!

I hope you are able to find one or two items that will help with your Pho­to­shop use and I will have more tips soon!