Some Cool Photoshop Tips I Found

Okay,Hi ya all!  I am interrupting this blog from it’s usual content to talk a little about Photoshop. Though I do not by any means claim to be anywhere near a professional or even advanced PS user, I do claim that it is my passion. It is the one thing in this world that I REALLY want to learn, and learn it well. Therefore, I spend A LOT of time reading books, websites, blogs and magazines on PS related material, and when doing that today I found some simple yet many unknown to me, little tips to make things much easier, and I thought I would share them with you.  I know many of you will already know these, but I also believe there are many like me who don’t. These 10 simple tips can make things SO much easier and quicker. Have a look, maybe you don’t know all of these, and I can be the teacher for once! YAY!

1. Double-click to open documents: To open a document in Photoshop, just double-click on the grey Photoshop window background and hey presto.
2. Hiding the Palettes with the Tab key: Need more room on the screen? Hide the palettes by pressing the Tab key. Get them back by pressing Tab again.
3. Full screen mode: Need even more space? You can toggle between a full screen mode with and without menu bar, and normal editing mode just by clicking the F key.
4. Nudging: Want more precision on your moves?  Hold down the Control key & use the up, down, left and right arrows to move the layer 1 pixel at a time. To move the layer by 10 pixels at a time, hold down the Shift key as well.
5. Moving whole layers: An easy way to move a whole layer is to simply hold down the Control key and click and drag on your layer with the mouse
6. Copy layers between documents: You can copy a layer from one document to another simply by clicking on it in the Layers palette & dragging it across to the second document window
7. Use Layer Sets: Layer sets let you organize your layers into folders – very useful if you have lots of layers in a document! An example of this may be a vector background with a complex foreground mosaic. You could make a folder for each the background and the foreground. To create a new Layer Set, click on the folder icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, then drag layers on top of a layer set to add them to the set
8. Choosing colors quickly: Press I to bring up the Eyedropper tool, then click on a color in your image to make that color the foreground color. Press the ALT key and click to make the color the background color instead.You can also press the D key to reset the foreground and background colors to the default (black and white), and the X key to swap the foreground and background colors.
9. How to get straight lines: Constrain movement of the mouse to the nearest 45-degree or 90-degree angle just by holding down the Shift key while you click & drag with the mouse.
10. I Made a Mistake, What do I do: Try pressing CTRL, Z to undo the last command. If its older than the last then open the History Window from the Windows menu. From here you can see all the changes you have made. Highlight the change you want to undo and then click on the rubbish bin.

Well? Did you know all of those already? Did I help anyone out there? I hope so! Okay back to SL related stuff. *bounces back to photoshop*

Tesa