Art Of Photography

Selecting Colors from an Image Quickly To take a color from your image and turn it into the foreground color Press I to activate the Eyedropper Tool and then click on any color in your image. To take that color and turn it into the background color, press the ALT Key and click on any color in your image.

Change Brush Tip Sizes Quickly With any brush selected you can press the Right Bracket Key “]” to increase the size of the brush tip, or Press the Left Bracket Key “[” to decrease the size of the brush tip.

The Move Tool & the Arrow Keys Getting in the habit of activating the Move Tool through the keyboard is a timesaver; you can do this using the shortcut, “V”. Once you have the Move Tool activated you can use the keyboard arrow keys to push a layer or selection in 1 pixel increments. You can speed things up by pressing the Shift key along with the arrow key to nudge in 10 pixel increments.

Hide Your Palettes To hide all your visible palettes you can press the tab key. You can bring them all back again by once again pressing the Tab key. To hide all visible palettes with the exception of the toolbar press Shift+Tab.

Zooming In & Zooming Out To zoom in Press Command and the plus sign “+” (PC: Control and the plus sign). To zoom out Press Command and the minus sign “-” (PC: Control and the minus sign).

Navigating In Magnified Images If you are magnifying your image using the zoom tool and lose your bearings you can jump quickly to specific views using the following shortcuts: To change the view to the top left hand corner of your screen or image press the Home Key. You will want to press the End Key to set the view to the bottom right hand corner of your image. To move the view down one full screen view press the Page Down Key. Press CTRL+Page Down (Mac: Command +Page Down) to move the screen view one full screen to the right. Press CTRL+Page Up (Mac: Command +Page Up) to move the screen view one full screen to the left.

Selecting Just the Pixels in a Layer One easy way to highlight an object that is contained on a transparent layer is to press the Control Key (Mac: Command key) and then click on the layer that contains the object in the Layers Palette. Doing it this way ensures that only the visible pixels will be highlighted.

Tile Images for Better Visibility When you simultaneously open a bunch of files in Photoshop they automatically cascade, and it can be difficult to select individual windows within all the overlapping files. To eliminate this problem choose Window> Arrange> Tile and all of your open files will rearrange themselves to be visible all at once. When you’re ready to close the windows you don’t have to spend time closing them individually, instead use the Close All shortcut Control+Option+W (Mac: Command+Alt+W).

Getting Rid Of The Welcome Screen - And Bringing It Back When first launching Photoshop CS you’ll see a Welcome Screen that has links to some Tutorials, some Tips and Tricks, and a set of Color Management Help Files. After a while you might want to get rid of this screen. There’s a check box at the bottom you can select to hide the screen at startup. If you change your mind later and decide you’d like to investigate the tutorials and other goodies, you can temporarily bring the screen back by going under the Help menu and choosing Welcome Screen.

Cycle Through All Of Your Open Documents Sometimes you’ll want to find one of your open documents that is hidden, but navigating using the Window menu won’t help because you can’t recall the name of the file. Instead press Control-Tab repeatedly (MAC and PC) to cycle through all of your open documents.