Archive for the 'Photoshop' Category

How To: Get Mondrianum Working in Photoshop

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.

How To: Get Mondrianum Working in Photoshop
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Photoshop 101: Easy Access to Preferences

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!

Photoshop 101: Easy Access to Photoshop Preferences
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Photoshop 101: The Annoying Phantom Brush

Have you ever had the creative juices flowing, your favorite music blaring, and selected your Photoshop brush, only to find that your cursor disappears and you can’t see the brush outline? Photoshoppers everywhere have endured this little annoyance for years. It’s really quite simple to avoid, but until you know why, it can be quite a thorn in your side.

Photoshop 101: The Annoying Phantom Brush
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Photoshop 101: Lightning Fast Layer Groups

The day I discovered this little time saver, I rolled my eyes in shame thinking about how much of my life I’d wasted doing it the hard way. I want to share a neat little Photoshop productivity tip for faster folder creation in the Layers palette. The method varies between versions (because of shift select functionality added recently to the Adobe Suite) but I’ll show you how to do it in CS3 and CS1. I don’t have a copy of CS2, so hopefully the (you) readers can help us with that in the comments.

Photoshop 101: Fast Folder Creation from Multiple Layers
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Photoshop 101: Edit Text Faster

Editing text in Photoshop can be a nuisance on the fly, but I have a quick productivity tip to make your life a little easier. There is really no need to use the Type/Text Tool to edit a text layer unless you only need to highlight part of the text, or a small part of a large body of text. If you deal with a lot of text layers in Photoshop that are, for example, a bullet point or a short sentence, or small paragraph, this is the tip for you.

Photoshop 101: Edit Text Faster
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