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Power up your skills as we reveal 30 Photoshop secrets that will increase your productivity overnight.
Photoshop is an amazing bit of software that many designers use on a daily basis. It's such a flexible bit of kit that you could spend a week learning new features, and still have only scratched the surface of what's possible. Once you've overcome the beginners' learning curve, however, there are some real gems hidden inside Photoshop that can help you speed up your work and get more out for less effort. Here we've rounded up 30 of the best Photoshop secrets to help sharpen your skills and improve your productivity.
Did you know about this hidden menu? In the top right hand corner of every panel is a little icon that reveals a fly-out menu, giving additional options that you might not have seen before. You can use this menu to set your layer panel thumbnails to be larger, crop to artwork and much more - experiment!
Move the shadow around by clicking and dragging on the canvas When youre adding a drop-shadow layer style, move the dialogue box to one side. By clicking and dragging on the canvas you can use your mouse to interactively move the shadow around relative to the layer casting the shadow.
Here's how to preview a single layer If youd like to preview a single layer, you can quickly get a look at it on its own by Alt+clicking on the layers eye icon in the layers panel.Alt+clicking on the eye icon again will return you to the previous layer visibility state. Note that if you accidentally click on another layers eye icon youll lose the ability to revert back to the previous state.
Enable the history state for layer visibility If you want to avoid the problem of losing layer visibility settings while previewing individual layers, you can tick a setting in the History Panel options dialogue box that will enable history state for layer visibility. Once checked, you can use Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+Z to step backwards through your history as you always have, but youll find changes to the visibility of layers is now included within that history.
Merge two vector shapes together and keep the result as an editable vector If youre lucky enough to have Photoshop CS6 at your disposal, you can merge two vector shapes together and keep the result as an editable vector. Simply select the two shape layers
and hit Cmd/Ctrl+E on your keyboard to merge them together. In previous versions this would have resulted in a rasterized layer, but Adobe have updated the functionality for CS6. Also read: Make interesting vector shapes in Photoshop CS6
Press Cmd+Return on your keyboard to finish editing text and move focus outside the text field When youre working with text boxes in Photoshop it can be frustrating to move between tools as your shortcut keys wont work. A great little secret tip is that you can press Cmd+Return on your keyboard to finish editing text and move focus outside the text field. This allows you to quickly select other tools using their shortcut keys as appropriate (e.g. V for the move tool).
Drawing straight dotted lines with the brush tool is a neat trick A common Photoshop technique is to use the brush tool to draw straight lines. With the brush tool selected click to place a point, then hold down Shift+click at a second point to draw a straight line between the two points. You may not know that you can open the brush panel and set the brush spacing to 150%+ to draw a dotted line instead of a solid one!
the opacity field of the layers panel, click and drag on the value for opacity. A scrub to the left reduces the opacity, a scrub to the right increases it.
As well as copying a layer to a new layer, you can do the same with layer styles If you've been using Photoshop for a while you'll know you can copy a layer to a new layer by holding down Alt/Opt and dragging a copy of the artwork across the canvas. You can use this same trick for layer styles: simply hold down the Alt/Opt key and drag the FX icon in the layers panel from the layer with the styles to the target layer - the styles will be copied right over!
You can also close your documents quickly. You're probably familiar with the shortcut combination Ctrl+F4 (Windows) or Cmd+W(Mac). This closes the current document, but if you add a second modifier key you can automatically close every document. Hold downShift+Ctrl+F4 on a PC, or Alt+Cmd+W on a Mac to close all open documents. If you have multiple documents with changes you'd like to discard, check the Apply to All box when choosing Don't Save to avoid having to confirm each document.
Share your screen with colleagues or friends easily in Photoshop One of the nicer features that arrived recently in Photoshop is the ability to share your screen with other users. Choose File > Share My Screen and log in with your Acrobat.com username/password. Your web browser will open and a new online meeting will be set up automatically to which you can invite friends and colleagues. You'll be able to chat, share webcam footage and your screen to make for productive collaboration - even if you're the opposite side of the globe to your friends.
Pattern fill includes handy Scripted Pattern option Photoshop CS6 introduces a new pattern fill option based on a script. First isolate an object on a transparent background and define it as a pattern (Edit > Define Pattern). Next, access the fill command as you normally would (Edit > Fill or Shift+F5). Choose Pattern as the fill type, then select your isolated object from the patterns drop-down. Finally, tick the Scripted Patterns checkbox and choose one of the options from the predefined scripts. All bar spiral will add a colour and brightness shift randomly to your object as part of the fill operation. You can also write your own scripts to use in this dialogue!
Use placeholder text to help utilise text boxes A small new feature that will help save time when you're producing mockups inside Photoshop is the handy new Lorem Ipsum function. Select the type tool and draw an area type box by clicking and dragging out a selection. Now choose Type > Paste Lorem Ipsum to automatically fill your type area with faux Latin text.
Snapshots ensure you can return to any point in the history of your work If you're accustomed to using the history feature in Photoshop when you've made a mistake or want to back-track a few steps, this tip will allow you to take complete control of your artwork. Open the history panel, and click on the camera icon each time you reach a milestone in your artwork. This will create a history snapshot that you can return to at any point. Snapshots can also be used as the source for the history art brush!
clicking on each layer in turn inside the layers panel) and change the blending mode for all selected layers at the same time.
Your cropped areas need not vanish into the ether with CS6 Another nice addition to CS6 is the ability to crop without throwing away the bits of image outside your crop area. Choose the crop tool and uncheck the new Delete cropped pixels checkbox. Now when you apply your crop, the areas of image outside the crop will simply be hidden for later retrieval. To get access to the area outside your crop, simply choose the crop tool again and change your crop accordingly.
3D extrusions can now be easily added using CS6's new tool You can now add punch to your titles using 3D extrusions in Photoshop CS6. The 3D interface has been overhauled to make it more friendly to non-3D modellers, and it's now really easy to create high-quality, textured 3D type by simply creating a type layer and choosing 3D > New 3D Extrusion from selected layer. Shadows and reflections are easier to control too, making it a great way to create engaging display type in a hurry.
Blur gallery in Photoshop CS6 has made adding focus easier With the new blur gallery in CS6 you can selectively blur and, by extension, add focus to your image. Individual focus points can be added to your image, with the amount of blur, fall off and iris size all edited directly on the canvas using the HUD. You can also add special effects such as lens bokeh with ease, making it simple to draw attention to the parts of an image you're interested in.