Extras:
Cmd-H (Mac) Ctrl-H(PC)
This hides any “extras” such as marching ants of selections, guides, grids and slice numbers/borders. I find it very useful when adjusting selected parts of an image. With the marching ants gone it’s a lot easier to preview the changes. (View>Extras and View>Show to select which extras to view).
Linda also sent in a version of the “spacing” ideas I mentioned above.
More on Keypad controls:
When I read the article the one thing I thought of was that you can fine-tune the opacity on your brushes using the number pad method, but following with a second digit to change opacity in increments of 1 instead of 10. In other words, if you press 1, your brush opacity is 10, but if you press 1 and then immediately press 5 your brush opacity is 15. This saves me bundles of time when retouching photos and more recently with trying my hand at digital painting.
(Note from Patrick – this “quick typing” method works on all the keyboard-number shortcuts, like layer opacity, too!)
Straight lines without the line tool:
Click w/ paintbrush in one spot. Then hold down shift and click in a different spot. It should result in a perfectly straight line from point to point.
And my all-time favorite shortcut – when cutting out a picture with the pen tool: Opt-click (Mac), Alt-click(PC) on your last point after establishing a curve.
This will allow you to make another “C” curve instead of the default “S” curve. This might not make sense unless you’ve used the pen tool a lot, but when you have a complex shape to cut out/form it can reduce the time involved to less than half and the number of points to about 1/4. And as a follow up, if the lasso tool or magnetic lasso just isn’t doing it for you, try making a path with the pen tool and making that path your selection. It’s a lot easier (for me anyway).
Thanks!
Well, that’s it! What an interesting list this turned out to be. And there are probably 100 more things I forgot about! Thanks for all the great input, and the nice comments and letters of encouragement. I hope that this column helps in some way to make your PhotoShopping even more streamlined and enjoyable in the future.
Article by Patrick McEvoy.
