Learn Adobe Photoshop - Easy to follow Photoshop Tips

By David Peters

FREE Photoshop Tutorials For Beginners

1. When working on a colour image, you can use the Paint Brush tool to selectively "paint away" colour to black and white. It can make one portion of your image really stand out. In the Paint Brush Options palette, change the blend mode to Colour, and paint away the colour

2) Press Shift to add more to the selection or Alt to take away from the selection when using your magic wand tool.

3. Follow steps FILE - Automate - Web Images Gallery to have Photoshop's image gallery build a web page of thumb nailed images for you. Great if you have a lot of images to display.

4) To automatically select the entire text layer, double click on the 'T' on a Type layer in the Layers Palette.

There are at least two ways to switch between the choice of measurement units that Photoshop displays.

5) The first is to change them in your Preferences by going to the Photoshop menu under Preferences and selecting Units & Rulers (in Photoshop 7 under Mac OS 9, Preferences is found under the Edit menu). From here you can change the ruler units and click OK.

6) The second way is to open the Info Palette (go to the Window menu and choose Info) and click on the small triangle next to the cross in the lower left quadrant to pull up a menu that will allow you to change units.

7) To cycle through different screen modes, simply press the F key

8. By holding the Cmd/Ctrl key and clicking the mouse on that layer in the Layers palette, you can select only the pixels and not the transparency area of the layer

9. Do you have a layer style you like to use a lot? You can save that layer style as a style that will show up in your styles palette. In the Blending Options, just under OK and Cancel you'll see 'Save Style'. Name it and save it. You'll then find this new style in the Styles palette. Note: the style must be in its own layer.

10) Sometimes when you combine multiple images, there will be a bit of fringe around the edges of the composite images. To hide this, follow steps Layers - Matting - . From the dialogue box, choose the default setting; it that doesn't work, undo it, and try De fringe again at a setting of 2.

11) If you have too many layers, simply select the right layer by using the move tool (V). Right click the mouse over the layer and a drop down list will appear.

Otherwise, you can place your layers in layer sets. At the bottom of your layers palette, click the create new layers set (looks like a folder), name the new layer set, and just drag the layers you like in that set. Great for coping a set too. Just highlight the set right click and copy.

12. Press Shift-Command-M (Mac)/ Shift-Control-M (PC) to toggle between Photoshop and ImageReady.

13) To reach the Save for Web dialogue swiftly, press Shift-Command-Option-S (Mac)/ Shift-Control-Alt-S (PC).

14. Press Cmd/Ctrl J to duplicate your current layer.

15. To bring up the Extract dialogue box, press Command-Option-X (Mac)/ Control-Alt-X (PC). Within the Extract dialogue box, switch to the Extract Edge Highlighter tool by pressing the letter "b.", the Fill tool by pressing the letter "k.", and change the Edge Highlighter's brush size by holding the "]" key to make it larger and the "[" to make it smaller.

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