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Photoshop Tips & Tricks

There are an endless number of tips and tricks that you can learn about using Photoshop in this video. I'm gonna show you some of my favorites and just some things that didn't fit in didn't get a chance to mention in the other lessons. So let's figure out how you can get more done with Photoshop by learning the ins and outs of the tips and tricks. If you're on a Mac and you have a file somewhere where you're in your operating system and you can find it, you want to open it, just drag that picture to the doc icon for Photoshop and it'll open in Photoshop. That way. If you navigate your hard drive manually, instead of using bridge or being in Photoshop's open screen, you can quickly get an image into Photoshop. Then right now I have a bunch of documents open. You can see them as tabs across the top of my screen if you ever want to cycle through the tabs. So you can see all the images you currently have open, hold down the control key on Mac or Windows and hit tab control tab will switch ...

to the next document. The next document. And if you go too far, add shift and you'll go the other direction. Therefore, you could do a kind of slideshow by just opening a bunch of images and doing control tab. Then if you really wanted it to be a slideshow, you could hit the tab key all by itself and that will make your panels disappear, pressing it a second time would make them show up. And then to get into full screen mode, you can type the letter F and if you type it, I think there's three modes and here's full screen. So now we're back to normal, full screen with menu bar and then full screen. So at this point, I could do control tab, control tab, control tab and cycle through all my documents and give a slideshow or a lecture. When I'm all done, I hit tab all by itself to get my panels back and I type the letter F to get out of full screen mode. Then if I want to close all these documents, because I'm done giving my presentation, you could go to the file menu and there you'll find a choice of clothes. It has a keyboard shortcut that I use all the time. It's command W control W and windows. If you add the option key, you'll close everything. So I'm just gonna do option command W and if there's been any changes made to any of the images, it'll ask if you want to save. And at least on a Mac, when this particular dialogue box comes up, you can press the first letter of whichever button you want to uh press. And so when I'm teaching classes, oftentimes I close an image very quickly by typing and w and I instantly press the letter D for don't save because when I'm giving a presentation, I might make modifications to my images and I want them to look the original way the next time I give a class and therefore I don't want to save them. So anyway, that's another little uh trick you can use. Then when you're ever in this screen where you have no documents open, if you want to get to the full Photoshop interface, just go up here in the upper left and click on the Photoshop icon that will make it so you can see all of your normal panels because maybe what you wanted to do is go to the actions panel and load some actions and you didn't need to work on a picture at the time. So you just wanted to get to it. Then if you ever want to get back to that other screen, the screen, you get usually when you have no documents open, just go to the upper left and there'll be a home icon, click on it and that'll bring you back. So this brings you into Photoshop that brings you back to this home screen and here's some recent images. I'll just click on one of them and let's say you want to scan a bunch of family photos. If you have a flatbed scanner instead of scanning one at a time, why not just throw them on the scanner and do it quick where you don't try to get it all lined up and everything because we can have Photoshop, help us to do some of this work. You can fit as many photos as you want on your scanner and don't even worry about getting them straight then opening the result in Photoshop, go to the file menu, come down here and choose automate and you'll find a choice called crop and straighten photos. And when you choose that, we're gonna end up with one file for each of these images and it will attempt to straighten them as well. So now I'll do my trick of control tab to switch between them and you can see that all these images are straightened and the only thing it did is sometimes it keeps a little bit extra and that's because the edge of the photo right down there at the very edge looked a little blurry or had a little bit of a shadow and it didn't know if that was important to the image or not. So you might need to do just a little bit of cropping afterwards. Well, let's talk about cropping. Let's say I just wanna crop out this tiny, little like one pixel thick uh area. Well, the problem with that is if you go to the crop tool and you attempt to crop out like one pixel, you're gonna find this snaps, you get like close and it just pops its way to the edge and that's about the smallest amount I can crop out. That is unless I hold down the control key. If you hold down control after clicking the mouse, then this will not snap. And that's also true. If you move layers, you just have to click first, not before you click and then hold down control and it will prevent snapping. So I just crop the top in the right side. And then let's see how much I was able to get rid of. I'll just choose undo and you see, I was able to get rid of just that tiny little area. The other thing that I commonly do if I want to get rid of like just a one pixel wide area is just do select all with command A and then if you're in a selection tool, you can just use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the selection. I'm gonna move it two pixels to the right and two pixels up. Then I can go to the image menu and choose crop. And therefore I got rid of that tiny little edge without having to maneuver with the crop tool. Instead it was command a for select all and then the arrow keys to move this one pixel at a time. Once I get the little bit out of there, then I can go to the image menu and choose crop. In this case, I'll crop out more than needed. All right, I'm gonna close all these images. So I'll do command option W and I don't want to save any of them because I'm just using them for demo purposes. And let's just get an image open. One thing that kind of annoys me with the way Photoshop is laid out by default is they put the tools on the far left of my screen. And when I choose a tool, all the options are up here at the top, but they're moved all the way over to the left side of the screen. Do you see how the right side pretty much isn't used over here? And then my layers and other things are way over here on the right side. Well, I often like to rearrange this and what I'll end up doing is I'll click right up here on this bar that is above this right column and I'll just grab it and I'll move it over here to the other side and I have to move it until I see a little blue bar of here right up against my tools panel and then let go. And now by having this set up, all the stuff I need is on the left side of my screen. So when I choose a tool, the settings are really close to where I'm at. And when I need to switch what layer I'm working on, it's also in the same general spot and therefore much more efficient. If you ask me, then just in case I teach a class where I have to have it set up in the original way, what I'll do is come up here and this is where you can save a workspace. And I'll just say new workspace layers on left and I'm going to click save. Now, if I ever get reset or something happens where I can come up here and maybe choose, I don't know one of these others. If I choose essentials, I think that's what I was working on at the time I moved the panel over there. And therefore it thinks I wanted to update my essentials to have it on the left side. I just choose reset essentials because essentials comes with Photoshop. And if I reset it, we're back to the normal setup, it would be in. And now I can go over here when I want to get back to that setup where maybe I'm not teaching a class and I want to get back to it. I just choose layers on left and all my panels move over there. I can work as I want. Then if I need to give a class where it's supposed to look normal, I just come down there to essentials. And now it looks like everybody else would have if they're trying to follow along at home. But I just find that to be more efficient to keep your layers panel on the left side of your screen takes a little bit of adjustment though, if you've used Photoshop for a long time. Now let's look at our tools. If you look at our tools, there's this big empty space down here at the bottom and mine has a banana. I bet you you don't have a banana in yours. Well, let's learn how to get a banana and how to utilize this space. Because what I don't like is that if I go into my retouching tools, there are tools that I use in here all the time. I use all three of these top tools almost every single day. But they've put the three tools into one slot to save space. Well, if you have like a laptop computer with a small screen or maybe a tablet, maybe it uses all the space on the side of your screen. But on monitor, monitors, usually you'd have a lot more than what you even see here. So what I wanna do is customize these to get all those retouching tools to separate. So they have their own slots every year. I might do the same thing for some of the selection tools because I use the quick selection tool and the object selection tool. All the time. So why should I have them separate? Well, to do that, you have a couple of different ways you can go to the edit menu here and there's a choice called toolbar or you can click and hold right here. And there's a choice called edit toolbar, regardless, it's gonna take you into the same place. And all you need to do is first if there's a tool you absolutely never use. Like, for instance, for me, I personally don't use the art board tool so you can put it over here if it's something you never use. And it's just cluttering up the icons. I also never generally use these particular choices. I used to back when I used to clean up screenshots and there'd be a single pixel between them and I need to select that. But what I'm gonna do and here then is just come in and I'm gonna separate the object selection tool from the quick selection tool by just clicking here and dragging up into an empty space above. And I'm also gonna come down here and I'm gonna get the spot healing brush to be separate. I'm gonna get the remove tool to be separate and I could look through here and see if there's anything else I'd want. Maybe when I come in here, I end up using the um pen tool a lot and I'd like to get these to be separate or um, maybe I use the shape tools and I wanna get to these individual uh tools well, just dress them into uh the little gap between these and it'll become its own panel. And there's, there's something you never use. Like I never used the rotate view tool that would rotate my view of a document without actually rotating the information in the document. Uh that might be useful if you're using a graphics tablet that is a screen built in and you're having it on like your leg where it's not straight or something, but I never need it so I could put it over here and then it will no longer be found when I go to my um tools pan. So I'm gonna click done. And now if you look, we have these two tools have been separated and now I got all my retouching tools sitting there very easy to get to. And it'll just take me a little bit of time to get used to it because I'm so used to going to a particular tool and having to click to get to the extra tools that are hidden behind it. Then down here we have these three little dots. If you ever need one of those tools that I hid, then click and hold on the three little dots and you're gonna find any of the tools that you've hidden. So now this is kind of a catch all for all the hidden tools and therefore you can still access them if needed. But now let's choose edit toolbar and show you how to get a banana. That's what's known as an Easter egg. It's where the programmers hide something in Photoshop. All you have to do is be in this screen called customized toolbar. Hold down the shift key at the time you click done, then you should end up with a banana in your tool bar. If you just switch to a different tool, if you click on it, you're gonna get it to go away for a few minutes until you click away. But that's a little hidden Easter egg. Then there's a feature that I use all the time, which is generative fill. But if I make a selection to use generative fill and I come up to the edit menu, you notice it does not have a keyboard shortcut. Well, let's add one under the same menu, the edit menu, you'll have the choice down here of keyboard shortcuts. And in here, all you gotta do is figure out what menu was that found in. You gotta set this to application menu. So it's thinking about the menu across the top of your screen. You come down here and choose edit and then I scroll down until I see the choice called generative fill. Then right here, I'm gonna type in a keyboard shortcut and you might as well just hold down a bunch of keys. I'm gonna see if I can do control option command because those on a Mac at least are right next to each other. So I could just plunk down three fingers on them and then hit g now, if the keyboard shortcut you type in was already used by something else, it would warn you and you'd be able to accept it or not. Uh But that's why I use the control key as part of this because the control key is almost never used for keyboard shortcuts. And so at least if you're on a Mac, you can use those three keys and then uh any letter you want. So now if I click and I head back up to the edit menu, you're gonna see generative fill. Now has a keyboard chart cutt if you're not used to these hieroglyphics here, that means control, that means option and that means command. And so I could easily apply that particular command. Well, then let me show you some keyboard shortcuts that you probably could really use but wouldn't usually be aware of. He had a session on advanced retouching. I ended up using the clone stamp tool. And with that, I went up to the window menu and there's a choice called clone source. And this came up and this is where I was able to scale what I was copying uh horizontally vertically. I could change the angle and all that kind of stuff. Well, there are keyboard shortcuts for a lot of this stuff, but I didn't share them with you. So let me show them to you. Now, uh let's say that I needed to replace the face of this with this one. Maybe there's a bad reflection in it or whatever the price is listed isn't right. Whatever it is, I want to copy from here and put it there. So if I was in the clone stamp tool, I would likely go to the corner of this, I'd hold down the option key and I'd click. So it knows where I want a copy from. Then I would come over here to the other one and I would get that corner to line up as best I could and I would click like that. And then if I started to apply this and I put it over here, you'd notice that that thing I'm copying from is too big. It's taking up way too much space. I can't use it over there at that size. So let's choose undo and let's figure out how to scale it. Well, I show it in the advanced retouching lesson. You can come up here to width and height which are linked together right there and you could lower this and scale it. Well, the problem with that is you have to have your mouse over here to mess with things and I want my mouse over here where I can see what's going on with that edge. So here are the keyboard shortcuts for using clone source. What you do is you hold down, shift and option on a Mac that would be shift and alt. If you're in windows, then if you want to scale, uh, the image, what you want to use is the square bracket keys. Therefore, I'm holding down shift and alt and now I'm using the square brackets and when I do, you'll notice that inside my brush, I can see it getting smaller and I'll get it until it's just the right size, which I think might be somewhere in there. And then I can come in here and see if that's gonna work out. It's the right size, at least in width. But when I come down here in height though, it seems to be off a little bit, I think I'm gonna need to scale it in one direction more than the other. Well, there is not a keyboard shortcut that allows you to do the width separate from the height. So what you do is you turn off the length symbol, then just click on the number for height. And when you get over here to your image, don't click just hover and now just use the up and down arrow keys. And that means change whatever setting is currently uh selected where it thinks I'm typing in text and just increase or decrease that number. So now I was able to get the width of that set up just right and also the height. So at this point, I can press the return key so it accepts the number that's in there for the height and then I can come in and replace this whole area with the one from the other pump. So that was scaling. But what if, what I needed to do was rotate. Let's say that I was gonna retouch this and to get rid of this. I don't know, I needed to copy from up here or something. I'm just making it up so I can describe a keyboard truck cut. Well, I'm gonna option click right here to say that's what I would like to copy from and then I'll move it somewhere else and let's see if I can get her to rotate within my brush. What I'll do is hold down the same two keys I mentioned before. Shift an option in this time instead of using the bracket keys, I'm gonna end up using the greater than and less than keys. And if I do, if you look over in the clone source panel, you'll see the number for angle is changing. It'll take it a little while to rotate at a large amount. But you get the idea that I can and if I use the other one of the greater than less than keys, I can go the other direction. And so that's great, I can rotate and then I can scale as well. And then the only other thing is, let's say I decided I was going to apply this over here or somewhere else and I clicked and then I chose undue and I often do that because I use a big brush to get it to line up around multiple surfaces. And then I choose undue which just locks in this offset, which is how far away I'm copying from. And then I get a small brush when I want to apply it so I can put it into tight little areas. Well, how can I, if I find this is not lining up perfectly right now, it's the littlest bit too high when I get over here, how can I move it? Reposition it just a little bit with precision. Well, you hold down the same two keys we use for the other two hints, which is shift an option that shift in all in windows and then just use your arrow keys down arrow key will move it down up the arrow key and move it up and we can also move, move it left and right. And therefore using just your keyboard, we can reposition it, we can rotate it and we can scale it. Now, the one thing we can't do is hit this little button right here with our keyboard, which is really necessary because once we're done re uh retouching, we need to reset all these things back to normal. Otherwise the next time I do retouching, which might be a week later, these are still gonna be dialed in and might not be appropriate for another image. So let's figure out how we can invent a keyboard shark cut to reset this. So these all zero out to defaults. Well, what we can do is there's a choice on the side menu. It's called reset transform and it does the same thing as clicking that little u-turn icon. Well, if you go up to the edit menu and you choose keyboard truck cuts. One of the choices up here is to work on panel menus, then this will list all those panels you can get and one of them will be clone source. And in there right, there is reset transform. So you could type something in here. If you're used to doing shift and option, then I could try to do R but unfortunately, it won't let you even though it ends up letting you use shift an option as a keyboard shortcut when changing those settings up there, like I showed you for rotation and such when you assign a keyboard shortcut here, you must use the command key as one of them. So I'm gonna instead hold down three keys that are right next to each other, at least on a Mac. And that's control option and command. I use that combination of three for all my custom keyboard shortcuts whenever possible. And so I'll hold those three down because control is almost never used. And therefore, if I press R I bet it will be usable and yes it is. So now I have a keyboard shortcut for resetting the clone source tool. I'll click. OK? And now let's just try it out. I'm holding down those three keys. I'm looking over at the clone source panel and I'll type R. Yay. That means I don't really need this panel to be open for the majority of the time because I mainly do scaling, rotating and repositioning. And now I'm also able to reset then while we're talking about re uh retouching. Uh one thing I didn't get a chance to mention is that you can actually retouch between two documents. Let's say what I really needed in here was another one of these little hedges or bushes and I found one in another photo. Maybe I took a picture of the same little weird service station and I actually captured this back area. I can see just the hint of one of those hedges here. Well, if I had a good hedge from another picture, I could copy from that picture and apply it here. Now, I don't have the exact scenario I just described. So I'm just gonna randomly choose a picture here and just let you know that you can copy between them. So let's pretend this, this is a hedge. I'm gonna hold down the option key and click on the base of it to indicate this is where I want to copy from. And then I'll switch to the other document and just show you that yes, I can clone between documents. This might be a little on the large size for here and is not really appropriate content. But hopefully it gives you an idea that you can go between documents. Now in order to do so the two documents must be in the same mode. So I look up here in the tab for one and it says R GB and the one over here also says R GB. So we're good to go there. The other thing is they need to be the same bit depth. And that's what this number is. If this one's in 16 bit mode, this one over here needs to be as well. If it wasn't, you could always go to the image menu and choose mode. And right here is where you switch between the two and you could switch whichever one you would like to what would be needed to match the document you need to retouch, then you can clone between documents. And when you're cloning between documents, you can also scale and rotate using that cloned source panel. But let's close this image and look at some more kind of general tips. Here's a mac specific tip. Sometimes I forget where a particular feature is within the menus at the top of my screen, especially when it comes to filters like where is the emboss filter? Uh I, I don't know it's in there somewhere. Well, if you go to the help menu on a Mac, the very first thing there is search in the moment you click on help, you'll see a little flashing cursor indicating that that's where you're gonna be typing if you start typing. And so I'm just gonna type in what I want. And if I do below, it will tell me where I can find that particular menu command. And if you hover over it, it will actually show it to you. And if you were to let go, then it's going to actually apply it. And therefore you don't have to go into the menu system, you know, to, to manually navigate to it. But that can both remind you of where it was and allow you to actually access it so often. It's when it's a menu command, I rarely use, but I know it's in there. Well, then the help menu to me can be useful when it comes to painting and using colors in general. A lot of people will end up coming down and using the color picker that's down here. Well, there's an alternative to this. You can have first off this, which is the color panel, which is like a miniature color picker, but I don't like it taking up space. In fact, most of the time I have this whole little panel hidden, I'll close that tab group to save some space. There is an alternative way of getting a uh color picker. And if you remember the three keys that I hold down for my keyboard, shortcuts on a Mac that's control option and command. If you just hold all three of those down, when you're in the paintbrush tool and click, you're gonna get a temporary color picker right here. So you can pick the color you want from this vertical bar and then just slide over here, pick a shade of it and that's much faster than coming in and actually adjusting your foreground color. So what am I doing on a Mac is the three keys that are just to the left of the space bar that's control option and command and then click your mouse and on windows. I haven't tested this, but usually the control key on Mac is the equivalent to the right mouse button in windows. So I'm assuming it might do it with um alt control, right mouse button. If it doesn't, then Google put in the word Photoshop and then the word hud that stands for heads up display color picker and then the word windows in somewhere, you'll be able to figure out what it is on windows, but you can customize it if you come over here to settings and on windows, that would be under the edit menu and it's either gonna be under general or tools. Let's see right here. It is hud color picker. You can choose its style and what I like to have is a hue wheel that's like a color wheel and a small version of it. So now if I click, OK, instead of seeing that boxy version, uh what I'm gonna see instead is this, now I can choose a color from around the outer ring. And once I find the color I want or I should say the hue I want, then I can snap in here to the middle to get a shade of that color and get exactly what I want. And that's my personal preference. But you can experiment with the other preferences that were in there and tell you to find the one that you really like. Once you found the color that you want, let's say what I'd like to do is create a new layer and I wanna fill an area like this with it. So I made a selection. So that's the only area I can work on. And then there are keyboard chart cuts for filling with your foregone color and filling your background color. And that's what I use all the time whenever I need to uh put a color somewhere. So here's what they are. If you want to fill with your foregone color on a Mac, do option delete on windows that would be alt backspace if you want to fill with your background color, instead do command delete on windows that would be control backspace. And therefore you can quickly uh use either one if you want to get fancy. Let's say that um let's say there was something in this layer already. Maybe there was some paint, let me just put it in there just making it. So there's something in there and I changed my foreground color, maybe using that heads up fanciness there. And now I want to change the color of what's already in that layer. And this will only work if you were to hide all the other layers and only see surrounding it transparency meaning emptiness. Well, there is a way to get it to preserve the empty parts. And by doing so, you're only gonna fill the parts that already have color and to do so you use one of those two keyboard shortcuts. I just showed you to fill with your foreground and background colors. And the only thing you change is you add shift with if you have shift, held down, it means preserve the transparent areas. So therefore, I could replace what's in there. Oftentimes we do that when I have some text on a layer and the text was not uh the kind you can edit instead, it's just sitting there. Oftentimes it's a file somebody else gave me and I just want to change the color of the text. It was sitting on it own layer surrounded by transparency and I needed to change it. Well, that's how I do it. I just add the shift tea when I end up filling. Let's get rid of that ugly squiggle. And let's talk a little bit about uh selections. I often have things in layer masks like these and I want to load one of these as a selection. I wanna get the parts of this mask that are white, that's the parts that are visible in that layer. Uh And I want to get it as a selection. Well, to do. So down here, I can see this would be the sky most likely. Uh Here's a trick you can go right on top of this little thumbnail image. And if you hold down the command key, that's control windows, there's gonna be an icon on top of the usual hand icon that looks like a selection. So if you command click on a mask, then you're gonna load it as a selection and you can do this to a layer mask. You can also do it. If you happen to have any channels down here where you've saved selections or you can just command click on them to load them, you can even do it for a layer. If you do it for a layer where you're not clicking on the mask, but the image itself, it's going to uh load wherever that layer has contents and the selection will end wherever the edges of the layer end. So this layer on top, it extends all the way to the edges of the document. So if I command click on it, it's gonna be the same thing as select do. But if I had a layer which I'll create right now, and I put something on that layer like a white box and later on I came back and I say, I really wish I could select that white box. Well, as long as it's in a layer and it's just surrounded with transparency. Put your mouse on top of that little thumbnail, hold down the command key, control windows and click and you will get it. The other thing you can do is sometimes I want to load the brightness of my picture as a selection and there's all sorts of uses for that. But just so you know how to do it, you can come here to the channels panel and put your mouse on the topmost channel, right on this little picture, command click and all the areas that are white in your image will become selected in any area that's not white will become selected based on its brightness. The darker it is the less selected it will be. So here, I'll save this selection into my channels panel by clicking right here and then we can go look at what it just made. This is the uh selection or mask that it just produced, which is simply based on the brightness of the picture. Not everybody will know what to do with that, but I find it to be immensely useful. Well, if that loads your image as a selection based on its brightness, then if you ever have your signature or any simple graphic, you could come in here and adjust it with something like levels and make sure the background is solid and that the text is solid as well where you're drawing by using level. And then if I load this as a selection, I'll just go to my channels panel, hold down the command key and click on that little thumbnail for the channel that gave me all the white areas. I'd want the exact opposite of that unless you just wanted to hit delete right now to remove the background. But that usually leaves a little bit of an edge around it. So I'm gonna choose inverse to get the opposite. And then what I like to do is just do a solid color layer. And now the selection that's currently active will limit where it shows up. And therefore I can come in here and choose any color I want. And then I actually throw away the original because otherwise, if you try to uh delete the background from the original, there's usually in the edge, an area that's semi transparent and you can still see a hint to the old background color. But by using what I just did, uh you'll never have that because this layer can only contain whatever that solid color is set to. And so this can be a nice way of removing the background on logos and signatures and similar, very simple stuff. Then let's talk about some tricks related to using layers. Uh When you're in the move tool, if you ever want to delete the layer that is currently active, all you need to do is literally press the delete key that would be backspace and windows. And it doesn't matter if there's one layer or if I got, you know, a bunch of layers here and I hit the delete key, you're gonna be deleting all those layers. So it's just a nice quick way of doing it. Uh Then when it comes to uh viewing and working with my layers, there are a few things that I don't like that Adobe recently uh enabled and it makes it. So I find my screen looking more cluttered. I like it when I look at my picture and it looks exactly like the end result will look like. But I find when I move my mouse on top of my screen, I see all these little rectangles showing up and it just isn't what I like. Uh So what that is is if you're in the move tool and you come up here to this gear icon, there's a choice in there. First one is show transform controls that would make it. So you could come in here and, and easily rotate and you could scale one or more layers very quickly. And I personally don't like that because look at how busy this looks the moment I switch to a different layer that I see those controls and it feel like I can never see my real image. So I come up there and I turn off show transform controls. Because if I ever want to transform my image, I've been programmed to type command T command T means transform and I'd see the same handles. So to me it's very easy to get to. And so I don't like the uh other method, but then I still see all these little things. And what that's doing is showing you the topmost layer that's underneath my mouse. Uh Where is its bounds? The bounding box for it? What's the smallest rectangle that would contain all of what's in that layer? And you might like that. But I just find it's way too busy and I get distracted as I'm looking at my image when that's the case. So over here there's another control and it says show layer bounds on hover. I'm gonna turn that off. So now when I come in here to the image, it doesn't do it. Uh Now the tongue you might like that is if you happen to use the choice called auto select layers. Uh because then every single time you click, you're changing which layer is active. But that's another feature I don't like. Uh it's not that I don't like it. As I say, I don't like it to default to being turned on. What happens is with auto select light when you're in the move tool, if you just hold down the command key for the length of time you have it held down that will toggle to the opposite of its normal setting. And so whenever I want to select a layer, I hold on command and I click and I'm like, OK, I got this layer. OK. Got this one and I can move these layers around very quickly. Uh What's cool about that is you can also add shift to get two layers or to get three layers uh in that kind of stuff. But there's no need to have the check box turned on. You just hold down the command key to use it temporarily. Then there's one that I do like I don't mind. And that is if I hover over a layer here in the layers panel, I can get it to put a box around what's in that layer because often times my layers can look like they do right now where I can't even see what's in them. And so hovering over them and being able to see it highlight what's there. I don't mind that because the moment I move away from the layer, then I see the normal image and that is enabled by going up to this gear icon. And it is right here show hover bounds from layers. That means when your mouse is in the layers panel. Uh So that one I don't mind having turned on. So I'm gonna select a bunch of layers and hit the lead. Simplify this image. Now, if you ever want to change the size of these thumbnails, there's a little shortcut. If you're working on a simple document where you have empty space below your layers and that is just press the right mouse button uh below those layers. And on a MAC control clicking is what you use if you only have one mouse button. And right here, I can choose uh what size thumbnails that I would like. And therefore it can be a little easier to see them if you'd like. And that is just a shortcut. Uh You can also come in here and change it. So the what you see in those thumbnails changes. So it crops in to try to show you just what is in the contents of that layer. And I'm mixed on that depends on what kind of document I'm working on. Sometimes it can be nice. But most of the time I'm just used to having it set to the default, which is the bottom. And if you have a whole bunch of layers in here, so you can't get to this empty part, you can just go to the side menu of the layers panel. And in there is a choice uh somewhere down here called panel options. And I was just accessing a shortcut and it was just changing this which is the size of the thumbnails. And then right here this setting as well, which is how much are you going to see in those thumbnails? You'll also find some extra options down here. One of them you might want to turn off is I never want the word copy usually on a layer. So I might turn that off. So if I duplicate a layer, I just have the same name as the original layer. And uh that's often what I want and we'll click. OK? Then I'm gonna choose undo until I have undone all that deletion that I'd done before. And let me clean this, oops clean this document up a little bit. I'll just move this over here. I'm holding command to get auto select layers when I want to move these things. Uh Let's talk a little bit about transforming. So I right now have the beak layer active and I'm gonna type command t now when you type command, T you probably are not gonna have this little cross here in the middle, at least with default settings, you don't. What that cross here is, is the pivot point where if you rotate a layer, it pivots it around there to show you that watch what happens when I move this down to there. Now, when I rotate, you can see that it's pivoting around that symbol. And so I find that to be very useful. And in order to get that to show up you need to come up here in the upper left. And when you're in the middle of transforming, it's gonna be right here. If you turn that off, you wouldn't have it. If you turn it on, you will, then one thing that can be useful is if you wanted to uh change where it is, let me zoom up, be more precise. I don't always like having to grab it and move it somewhere. So another trick is while you're in the middle of transforming, if you move your mouse to where you would like that little thing to be, just hold down the option key and click and therefore it will move instantly to where you option clicked. Uh Then you could rotate and it'll pivot around that particular spot. The other thing you can do with this is let's say that I came in here. And what I wanted to do is I don't know, move this in some way so that the tip of this beak was in a particular location. First off notice this is snapping, I can feel it snapping. And when it snaps, I see pink guides to show me what is snapping to. And if I want to avoid it snapping while you're got the mouse button held down, just hold down, control. The same thing I mentioned when using the crop tool works here as well. And so I wanted to get it right about there. Then let's say when I scale. I wanna keep the tip of this in the exact same location. It currently is. Well, usually when you scale, it doesn't do that. It's thinking about the uh opposite corner from where you're dragging. So if I drag from up here, it's gonna keep that spot consistent and that kind of thing. Well, here's how you can do it where it will keep wherever this is positioned uh in a consistent location. Uh For instance, let me just put it right here. Well, whenever you grab one of these handles and you click after you click your mouse, hold down the option key, when you have option held down, it usually means drag the opposite corner the one directly across it in equal amount. But when you've moved this little guy, it will do that and keep that spot in a consistent location. So you can scale and say, hey, right here is where this might line up with something and I want to keep it lined up. And therefore when you rotate, and if you hold option, when you scale that spot will remain consistent by default, when you're scaling, if you grab one side, it's going to not just adjust this side, it's gonna also adjust in the other dimension. But let's say I wanted to make this little beak skinnier and I don't want it to be taller. Well, if I'm pulling like this, it's gonna pull both dimensions to try to keep it consistent to prevent that from happening. All you need to do is hold down the shift key. If you have shift, held down, you're turning off the constrained proportions feature. And so therefore, I can squish it in one direction. I can also add that option key. If I wanted to keep that cross hair in a consistent position, the same is true in making selections. If you make a selection, usually you're not constrained in the shape of this rectangle. But if you hold shift, you will be and you'll get a perfect square, then let's talk about blending modes because sometimes I need to play with those. That's the menu you find up here at the top of your layers panel. Well, sometimes I like to experiment and just go through all of these modes and see which one I like. But I don't always like doing it with my mouse because it's sometimes hard to just think about getting exactly on the next mode while you're looking at for here at your picture. So if you're ever in the move tool and you want to change the blinding mode of the layer you're currently working on, then just hold down the shift key on your keyboard and then use the plus and minus keys. Shift plus is going to be changing the blending mode, one blending mode at a time. And therefore you could cycle through all of them that shift plus if you pass one that you really liked then do shift minus and you'll go the opposite direction in the blending mode menu. And so I can experiment with all of these blending modes very quickly. When it comes to those blending modes, I should let you know about a special set of them. This is a special set of blending modes. And what's special about them is when you come up here to the top of your layers panel with all the other blending modes, adjusting opacity and adjusting fill would do the exact same thing. So it wouldn't matter which of the two you chose to lessen the effect that you're applying. But when it comes to this special set of blending modes, the fill uh choice will act differently than opacity, it will lessen the effect. But when it comes to something like hard mix, usually hard mix makes your image look overly posterized and that will control the amount of poster. But with the other modes that are here, you'll find they react differently. So therefore you want to experiment with both opacity and fill when working with those particular blending modes, then let's talk briefly about working with text. So over here, I'll grab the text tool and I'll click on my image and I'll just put in some text and let's use move tool, repossession that up here. Uh Now if you wanna select the text so you can change it. All you need to do is come over here to the layers panel and double click on the thumbnail for the layer. And that will select the text. But when you do it has this reversed look where it just shows you the opposite of the colors uh In if all you want to do is change the formatting of the text instead of replacing the text with something else. I just type command H um that's control H and windows. That means that the text is still completely selected, but we hid the edges or hid the effect. And therefore I can then click up here to get to my character styles and I can experiment with whatever I'd like, I can make the text bigger, smaller uh change the color, whatever it is. Uh The main thing is that I don't have to look at that reversed look of the text. But then there are some things I like to do with text. So one thing is if I come up to the type menu, uh one of the choices in here is called convert to shape. So after I formatted my text and got it looking exactly the way I like I choose. Convert to shape. And now it thinks that I made the text uh with this tool down here. And what that means is I can come in here and grab this path selection tool now and I can grab the individual letters and move them around. I can also type command T to transform them if I would like one of them to be at an angle or be slightly larger. And I could come into each one of these and fine tune it, typing command. T we're just moving them around. I can even take them so that they overlap like this. And then up here, I can say what should they do when they overlap if I choose intersect? Uh Now we're only gonna get the areas where the intersect. I want probably want to choose exclude which means poke a hole wherever these letters overlap. And therefore I can grab a letter here and just kind of move it over to the other one and come up here and say in this case, I'd like to exclude where they overlap. Although I might need to click on the other and choose it to really get the effect I want. So therefore, I could do a creative layout of my text. I think what I've done here is terrible. But you get the idea. If you actually spent the time to pick good typefaces and to experiment with angles and rotation, you can be a bit more creative with your text, but let's get rid of that layer. I'll go to the move tool and hit delete in one panel that I have open a lot of the time when I'm doing adjustments is the info panel because with it, I can measure color in one area and potentially use it in another. Well, I find with default settings, the info panel is way too big. So I go to the side menu of the info panel, I choose panel options and this comes up and in here, what I like to change is first, I turn off this bottom choice called show tool tips. That's this bottom section here which will show you tips related to the tool you're using. Well, once you get beyond the absolute most basic level, then you'll find those tips aren't all that useful. So I end up turning that off and it ends up saving a lot of space. Then it usually has this information which gives you an idea of how much uh memory your document is taking up. And I don't find that to be all that useful. What I do find to be useful is this choice called document profile. So this is the way I like to have this set up, I'll click. OK? And now you see that the info pallet is much smaller. And the reason why I want this is if I ever refer to red green and blue number, either over the phone, describing a color to somebody else or using them between two different Photoshop documents, those numbers only describe a color. Uh if it's in the same color space, meaning that if this document is in Sr GB in a different document is in something else like Adobe R GB or PRO photo, then those numbers would mean something else, they would describe a different color than what I'm seeing in this document. And therefore, if I'm ever wanting to describe something, using these numbers to somebody else over the phone or writing them down or using it between two do documents, I need to make sure I refer to what color space it is in order for them to either see the same color on a different computer or to be able to use those numbers in a different document and end up with the same color. So that's why I like to have it there. Finally, let's talk about a place where you can store elements that you plan to use regularly. Uh So if you would like to use this typeface and maybe that color very frequently, maybe this is part of your logo and therefore you wanted easy access to it. Then what you can do is go to the window menu and choose libraries. And a library is a collection of images, colors, styles and can also include type styles, uh that type of thing. And let's see how it works. Uh I'm gonna expand this so it doesn't uh gives me all the space I need. And in here I have some logos that I use. So let's say I would like to use this logo. I'm just gonna drag it out on top of the image and let go and then it will ask if I want to resign and I'll bring it down maybe about that size, press return or enter. And so therefore, anytime I need one of my logos have it here, I have about three or four different companies and I have a library for each one. And with that, I have corporate colors. And if I want to use one of these corporate colors, all I need to do is click on it and when I click on it, it changes my foreground color to become that color. So if I wanted this one or that one could easily get to it, uh then other things that I could store in here would be like this. This is a layer style that means a combination of effects like drop shadow, Beverly and boss and so on. And I could just click on it and it's going to apply to the active layer. And therefore, if it's a style that I use quite frequently, then it's very easy to get to it. Then I can click up here on this little arrow that'll bring me back a level. And here's a list of all my libraries you can have as many libraries as you want. So the one I was just looking at was for my photographic arts and I could come down here for a different company I have called Masters Academy. And if I wanted to use one of uh its logos, I can just drag it out here onto the image and then scale it to whichever size I would like and press return or enter to indicate I'm done. Uh And I could scroll down right here. I have a type style. So if I had some text active in the image that's here, I could click on this and it would apply this type style which means the typeface, the color, the size, all that kind of stuff uh could be standardized. So if I have a corporate font, I don't have to remember what it is. I could save a style form here and here again, corporate colors that I might want to use. So how can you create your own library and start storing stuff in it? Well, I'm gonna hit this little back arrow to get out of this particular library into my list of them and just up here at the top it says create new library. I'll click there, give it a name. I'm gonna call mine class just so I remember. Why do I have this one? And now we have an empty library. I want to start putting things into it. So the first thing I could do is change my foreground color to maybe my corporate color. Let's just say it's this one. Then down here at the bottom, there's a plus sign and if I click on it, it says foreground color and I, I could choose that. And now I have it sitting there in here. Now it just happened to put a name on it here and I think what it did is it used what's known as the hexadecimal uh name for that color. I could just right click on it and there's a choice called rename and then I could call this corporate color. And then that would be its name up here at the top. You have a search field. So if you ever needed to find something based on its name, you could type it in there and it would limit what we're seeing below. Uh Let's say I also had this layer right here which had that uh layer style on it. So I'll go to my layers panel, I'll click on the layer that has a layer style applied. I'll come up here to the plus sign and, and here it will look at the layer I'm currently working on and determine what is it that it could grab from that layer? Uh And one of it would be the layer style. So there it is, it's now been saved into that library. I can save entire graphics in there. So let's say that this little owl guy was something that I used regularly. Well, I'd need to figure out what layer it's in. It looks like this is it, I might open that up and I see that I have separate layers for eyeballs, eyes, uh some other pieces and I might get all those particular uh layers, but I don't need the branch. So I'm just gonna select all those layers. So we have them all. I'll come up here to the plus sign and I'm gonna say, let's add a graphic and it will look at what's currently active in my layers panel and it will put it in here as a graphic. But I noticed it picked up the name of the topmost layer and it's just calling it eyeballs. I once again, right click, choose rename and I'll just call this owl. Then there's a texture applied to this image and it's something I might want to use over and over again. It's right up here at the top. So I'll click on it. I'll hit the plus sign and I'll say I want to add that graphic, then I have some text up here and I want to save the color that was in there and the uh type settings. So I'll click on that particular layer. I'll hide it and turn it back on just to make sure it's the layer I'm thinking of up here. I'll hit the plus sign and I can either save the whole graphic. So it would be the literal text that is there the layer itself. Or instead I could choose the colors that are found there or in my case, I'm gonna use the character style which so therefore, in the future, when I want it to be that size and, and set up, I can very quickly apply it. All I would need to do is click on a layer like here's a type layer and then I would click on the style and it would instantly change it. I could then if I wanted to add this layer style to it, if I would like to. And if I wanted to, uh let's say this texture wasn't already there. Uh I could grab this layer, drag it on out and there's my texture. The only thing is that I would most likely need to use a blending mode in order to apply it. And so I'll come in here and maybe try out something like soft light. So now this is adding a nice texture to my image. Now, there are some other details you should know about this. And that is if I drag an element from here out onto my image, it's going to usually produce a new layer of whatever that content is. And if you remember when I added this uh little owl thing was made out of about five or six different layers. Well, if I grab it here from my library and drag it into my image and let go, it's gonna see if I want to resize it, I'll just press return or enter to keep it at that size. And if you look at my layers panel, you'll find that it's only one layer and you'll see it's got a cloud icon in the corner. That's because this is a smart object just like a normal smart object. But this smart object is stored on the cloud. In fact, everything I put in my library is stored on the cloud and that's so I could access the exact same assets from any other computer if I logged in with the same Adobe ID. So if I have a computer at home and another computer at work, I use the same Adobe ID, then the moment I open up the library panel, it will start downloading any assets have been that have been added to my libraries, so I can access them from multiple machines. If I were to make a change to this owl, let's say I'll pull it out here more than once uh and apply it. Well, if I come into my layers panel and I double click on this and I come in and let's say what I'd like to do is change the color. So I'll work on the body and I'm gonna change the color of the body to hm to this. Uh I'll use a keyboard shortcut for that, which is option delete, which fills with your foreground color, but that filled the entirety of the document I mentioned in a tip earlier that you can add, shift to only fill the areas uh that already contain info. And so now I have a different color. I'll end up closing this and I'm gonna choose save. Now when I choose save you'll notice you see what changed was over here in my library panel and not actually in my document. That's because all of these are linked back to the library. And if you end up changing one by double clicking on it, you're gonna be changing it in the library, then if you look at my layers panel, you'll see a little warning triangle on each of those layers. And if I were to come up here to my properties in that symbol means this does not reflect what that smart object links to. So if I click on this, I can say let's update that modified content. And now the use of it in this document is updated as well. So you gotta be careful if you end up making changes in a document because it will be reflected over here in the library. So what if you want that to be independent of the library? Well, if you've already got it in your document, then you can go to the layer menu, you can choose smart objects and there's a choice called embed linked. That means that it's linked to the cloud, stop that link and make it. So instead it's independent in this particular document. Now if you look in the layers panel, you'll see the standard smart object uh icons. And now if this is changed in the library, this document will not know that that happened because it's no longer linked to it. The other thing that you could do. Let me delete these particular layers just to clean things up a bit is when you're dragging something from a library into your image, hold down the option key. If you hold the option key, what you're saying is do not create a linked smart object in instead just give me the original layers that that was originally made out of and so I can have them here and that this will be independent of what's in the library. So I can change this as much as I want without affecting the one that's in the library. Let's throw those away and holding down the option key is also necessary. If whatever it is you have in your library uh requires using a blending mode or an adjustment layer. Uh because any blending modes or adjustment layers that are used in these will only affect what is found within the smart object itself and would not affect the document I'm about to drag it into. But if I hold down the option key, when I drag it in, it's not a smart object. And therefore, if it had a blending mode to begin with, it will have it here and it will apply appropriately. For instance, this texture had the blending mode of overlay. And when I dragged it over without holding option, it ignored that. And so I had to bring it over where it did not come in as a smart object, you can also drag and drop elements into the library as well. And one final thing that I'm not gonna get into too much detail on, but you can share libraries amongst people. Do you see one here where you see two little people icons? Well, that's where I share content with my wife Karen. So if I want her to work on a graphic, I'll put it in there, then she can get it on her machine. And when she's done, she lets me know about it and I go and look there to get it back. If you right, click on a library, you will find a choice called invite people. And that is how you end up sharing something like my wife made this graphic and that's what is in this particular library. So I hope that fills you up with a sufficient amount of tips and tricks for working in Photoshop.