Jul 19
A few Photoshop tips…
2005 at 03.00 am posted by Veerle
Before I sign off just a few very useful Photoshop tips to get you going when I am away ;-)
Where is the image?
I don’t know if our first tip has a PC equivalent but on Mac you can always find out where the image is stored on your hard disk without leaving Photoshop. If you Command click on the file name that appears at the top of your document you’ll get a drop down menu with the path where your file is stored. If you release the mouse button on one of those folders that folder will open in the finder.
Full screen mode
But wait here is one unique to PC :-) Press F twice to enter full screen mode and all your menus will disappear. On the Mac the menus are gone but in Windows there is a small triangle that appears at the top of the toolbox and if you click on it you’ll get a popup with all menus. If you press tab then every palette is gone too.
Highlight your Magnification
If you want to experiment with different magnification settings in the bottom left corner of your image window or in the navigator palette you can type in a new magnification percentage. If you hold down shift before you press Enter you’ll see that the percentage stays highlighted so you can quickly enter another different percentage.
Working with guides
If you hold Option (PC: Alt) you can change the direction of the guide (horizontal/vertical), hold Shift to snap it to the tick marks of your ruler, and hold command (PC: Control) to move a guide when using a tool other then the move tool. Hold the Control key (PC: Right-click) after you start to drag something (guide, selection, layer, etc) to prevent it from snapping to other objects.
Want to learn more?
Layers magazine is the only magazine that covers the entire Adobe® Creative Suite and everything it has to offer. In addition to in-depth tutorials, each issue is packed with tips, Q&A, product reviews, industry news, and feature articles covering the gamut of digital photography, graphic design, Web authoring, motion graphics, and more.
16served
1
Hi there.
Your first tip is not Photoshop-specific, this should work with every Cocoa-Application.
Anyway, thanks for your great website, it’s been very inspirational in the past.
Kind regards from Vienna
.mitro
2
Cheers for that magnification trick. Quite useful now I’m working with a 900x1600 image :)
3
have a great holiday :-)
4
All these little tips help :)
Have a great holiday, you made a good choice on location :)
5
Your tips on the guides will be very hand y to me as I have been trying to figure out how to do several of those things lately. Thanks for the great site.
6
Thanks! I always wondered how to get rid of the palettes in fullscreen :)
So have a nice holiday and come back safe!
7
Thank you Veerle!
Have a nice time :)
8
Have a nice time, Veerle, come back refreshed and forget all about work!
Oh; and don’t get too sunburnt!
Steve
9
The “Where’s the Image” tip doesn’t work quite the same way on a PC but if you place your mouse over the title of the image you do get a tooltip displaying the full path to the file (doesn’t work if you have you image maximized in the photoshop application window however).
10
That first tip actually works quite nice in Safari for navigating a site’s directory structure.
11
Similar to the first tip, In CS2 if you click the little triangle icon at the bottom of the canvas window you get a menu where you can select “reveal in Bridge”, which will open Bridge with the current file hilighted.
12
great tips for guides, thanks!
enjoy your hols.
13
Guides not snapping to ruler ticks has been driving me nuts! Thank you so much for sharing these tips.
14
This is really a cool resource for all designers worldwide. Keep up the gud work veerle!
Cheers...!!!!!!!
15
The guides tips are a really top tip!!
My favourite shortcut is the Duplicate layer; hit Command / ctrl J or Command+Option / ctrl+alt J if you want to rename the layer.
Also you can print out a list of all the shortcuts in Photoshop, Command+Shift+Option K then hit summarise, save the file, open it and print.
;-)
16
Thanks for the useful tips! It seems that it very often comes down to holding ctrl/shift/alt while using certain tools.