10 Great Photoshop Tips!

Rather than doing a step-by-step tutorial of how to create something, this time I thought I would throw some Photoshop tips out there that you can u se to increase your productivity or just make using Photoshop a little easier, more efficient and fun.

Tip 1: Boost performance with custom Scratch Disk settings.
It sounds so simple, yet many of us never do it. You can greatly increase the performance of Photoshop by customizing the Scratch Disk settings (the part of the hard drive that Photoshop uses similarly to virtual memory). To do this, open Photoshop and hit Ctrl+K to bring up the preferences, then select “Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks” from the pull-down menu at the top left of the dialog.

You’ll be presented with four more pull-down lists where you can set the first through fourth scratch disks. So what do you select? In order of performance:

A physical hard drive other than the one Photoshop is installed on.
A logical drive partition other than one Photoshop is installed on.
The drive on which Photoshop is installed
An external hard drive or RAM-disk

10 Great Photoshop Tips - Fig 1

What if you don’t have another physical drive or logical partition? Well, sometimes you just have to work with what you’re given, but you can cheaply pick up a small hard drive (20g is more than sufficient) to use for your primary Photoshop scratch disk. For the boost it will give in performance, you won’t regret the purchase.

Tip 2: Clean up printed gradients by adding noise
It sounds a little backwards, I know, but oftentimes, gradients will print with some striation and not give you the clean, smooth transition of colors that you see on screen. The solution? Add noise! Just go to Filter - Nose - Add Noise and enter an amount of 3%, and select “Gaussian” and check “Monochromatic.” Now your gradients will print smoothly.

10 Great Photoshop Tips - Fig 2

Tip 3: Improve local contrast with Unsharp Mask
The Unsharp Mask tool is great for bring out detail and sharpness in an image, but used on low settings, it can also be a great tool for improving an image’s local contrast. Open the image you want to improve and go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask. Enter an amount of 20%, a radius of 50 and threshold of 0. You may have to tweak these some, depending on the image, but this is a good baseline to go by. Click OK and look at the results!

10 Great Photoshop Tips - Fig 3

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Added Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 10:03 pm under Tips.