Archive for the Photoshop Category
I have a time saver for you folks. I have a keyboard shortcut I’d like to share it with you. I could have done this with screenshots, but I’m playing around with video these days, so here it is, my first video tutorial. I hope is saves you some time :)
Hidden “Reset” Button in Photoshop Adjustment Palettes from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.
I guess this could also be categorized as a workflow tip, but it’s good to know, no matter what you want to call it. I’d like to take a second to show you about Photoshop’s (and Illustrator’s) “Button Mode” in the actions palette. If you aren’t familiar with actions, they are customizable tasks that save you time and make you more productive by eliminating redundant tasks. I haven’t written an article on Actions themselves yet, but here is a nice one I found on the web.
Many of you might remember my Free High-Res Grungy Paper Textures I gave away a while back. I had a lot of requests for a tutorial on how I actually made those textures, so I here we are. Fire up good ‘ol Photoshop, have a scanner handy, and let’s dive in, shall we :)
I want to share a very useful tip with all of you who have ever wanted to throw your computer across the room because of Photoshop for one reason or another. It’s inevitable, every once in a blue moon, software can just make your day a living hell for no obvious reason. It can be anything from the Layers palette won’t show up, to menu items grayed out when they shouldn’t be. I want to show you a quick way to put your problems behind you without having to re-install Photoshop.
I’m pretty sure this is new to CS3 (please chime in if you have CS2, because I don’t) but you can now open jpegs with Photoshop’s Camera Raw plug-in. Camera Raw is essentially what the name suggests, a RAW image processor, built into Photoshop. CS3 now allows us to open jpegs in this neat little editor. You might ask yourself: “Why would I need to use Camera Raw? Why not just edit the image in Photoshop itself?” Well, maybe you don’t want to use Camera Raw, but it’s nice to know you have the option. Especially if you take a lot of pictures in jpeg format (or your camera doesn’t shoot RAW) and you just want to tweak your images without having to apply tons of adjustment layers to get what you want.
If you haven’t heard of Mondrianum yet, it’s a neat little (shareware) plugin for Photoshop (Mac only) that adds Adobe’s Kuler color combinations to the Apple color picker. It doesn’t just work in Photoshop. After installing Mondrainum, it works system-wide with any Mac app that uses the Apple color picker, like iLife, iWork, etc. Granted, most Photoshoppers probably don’t prefer the Apple color picker over Adobe’s, but if you are ever in need of a little color inspiration with the help from Kuler, it can come in handy. I’ll show you how to get it working in Photoshop.
There are tons of undocumented Photoshop shortcuts out there, lots of which can make our lives a lot easier if we only take advantage of them. I want to show you one that I use often. I would only assume that as designers, we would typically have our rulers turned on most of the time. (I’ve tested this as far back as CS1) To access your Photoshop preferences quickly, just double-click on a ruler! That’s it!
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