10 Great Photoshop Tips!
Tip 7: Don’t desaturate, mix!
Adobe could greatly improve the black and white photography of many amateurs by simply getting rid of Image - Adjust - Desaturate. For better black and white conversions, try the channel mixer instead.
Open your image and go to Image - Adjustments - Channel Mixer and check “Monochrome” down at the bottom of the dialog. This is often all you will need to do, but if you want to tweak the output, small adjustments to the color channels will greatly effect the resulting images.
Just take a look at the difference between “Desaturate” vs. the channel mixer. The value range is much greater!
Tip 8: Convert layer styles to layers
For more precise editing, you can convert layer styles into layers (which you could then even apply more styles to, if you wanted to). Simply open the Layers palette and select the layer whose styles you want to effect, then right click on its layer styles icon and select “Create Layers.” The end result is a layer for each style that you can then tweak to make it appear exactly as you like.
Tip 9: Install fonts in Photoshop only
Ok, admittedly, this tip will probably boost Windows performance more so than Photoshop, but come on, how many times do you use all of those fancy fonts outside of your graphics software? I’m betting it’s not that often, so if you want to install fonts for Photoshop and only Photoshop, here’s the quick solution: Simply put the fonts in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts rather than in the Windows system fonts folder. There you have it, fonts that are still accessible in Photoshop without sucking up any additional resources.
Tip 10: Hide the transparency grid
Ok, the transparency grid is nice and all, for seeing that you have a transparent object, but sometimes, all those little squares get distracting, in the way, obscure detailed artwork, or are just plain annoying after staring at them for a long time. The solution? Hide them!
Hit Ctrl+K to bring up the Photoshop preferences and then select “Transparency & Gamut” from the pull down menu on the left. You’ll see a dialog displaying the colors for the transparency grid, along with a dropdown menu of options (where you can set the grid color). By clicking on the large preview squares themselves, though, you can bring up a color picker dialog and change the colors to create a custom grid. Now just make both squares the same color and your grid is hidden.
Well, that wraps it up. I hope you enjoyed this article and find these tips useful!
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