From the Studio with Patrick McEvoy.
Welcome back to the wonderful world of overlooked PhotoShop features! This time out, I’ll continue with a few more of my favorites, plus some great ideas sent in by readers. Let’s get started!
See Layer list
Some people don’t have a very good time with layers, because it can get confusing to have 10, 20, 30 layers stacked up. Even if you name them properly (and you should!) it isn’t easy to manage all of them or is it? Actually, it is!
Ctrl-Cmd-click (Mac) or Ctrl-Shift-right click (PC), to see a pop-up list of ALL layers under the point where you clicked. The neat part is that they are in order, top to bottom, just like the layers are. Now, if you’ve named the layers, you can scoot right to the one you need to activate.
(If you have the Move tool selected, it’s a bit different, by the way: Cmd-click (Mac) or Right-click (PC)).
New View
Here’s one that I couldn’t live without! Now, one of the great things about making art on the computer is that you can zoom in close to do your work; which is great, but then you need to see your art zoomed out so you can view the more of it at once. And it’s a real drag to constantly zoom in and out to do this. What to do?
Just open a duplicate of your current picture, and look at both the large and small versions at the same time! Interestingly, this is a feature that Adobe has done its best to hide, by moving it three times in the last three versions of PhotoShop (and renaming it along the way, too!)
PS 5 & 6: View>New View
PS 7: Window>Documents>New Window
PS CS(8): Window>Arrange>New Window for xxx (name of file)
Fade
To add some subtlety to your Filters, adjustments, brush strokes or other actions, use the Fade feature. Immediately after doing something, go to Edit>Fade This will give you a control box which lets you fade your action by a certain percentage – if you leave it at 100, it will keep your action at the full amount, and you can slide all the way down to 0. This is very useful if you can’t quite make up your mind about how much of a filter you need.
