In this Photoshop tutorial we will see some of the essential Photoshop tips and tricks.

Photoshop is deep, really, really deep. It’s like those National Geographic movies that talk about the world below the surface of the ocean: on the surface it’s smooth and straightforward, but down below you’ll find things that’ll knock your socks off. Here is a Photoshop CS3 tutorial about simple tricks that you should not forget.

•    Changing the Matte Color – You can change the neutral gray background color that surrounds your image when you’re in full-screen mode or when you expand the document window larger than the image itself. Just pick a foreground color, and then Shift-click on the background with the Paint Bucket tool (it’s in the Gradient tool’s pop-out menu). At first glance, this is nothing more than a good trick to play on your colleagues. However, it’s also a good way to preview how an image will look if you’re going to place it on a colored background.

•    Rotating Through your Windows – We often find ourselves in Photoshop with five or more windows open at a time—a frustrating situation when we need to move through them all quickly. You can press Control-Tab to switch from one open document to the next. (In this case, it’s the Control key on both Macintosh and Windows.) This way, you can rotate through the windows without taking your hands off the keyboard, even if you’re in full-screen mode with no menus.

•    Don’t Use Image Cache for Histograms – When the “Use Image Cache for Histograms” option is turned on in the Preferences dialog box (Command-K), the histogram you see is a histogram of what you see on screen, not the histogram of your data. The anti-aliasing you get at any view other than 100 percent can produce a very smooth histogram when in fact your data is already severely posterized. We can’t really envisage a situation where you need to see a histogram of the screen display instead of a histogram of your data, so leave this option turned off (as it is by default).

•    Don’t Select the Zoom Tool – We never select the Zoom tool from the Tool palette. We can always get the Zoom tool temporarily by holding down Command-spacebar (to zoom in) or Command-Option-spacebar (to zoom out). Each click reduces from actual size to two-thirds (66.7 percent), to one-half (50 percent), to one-third (33.3 percent), and so on when zooming out, and magnifies in 100-percent increments when zooming in. (Actually, it jumps from 800 to 1200 percent, and from 1200 to 1600 percent, which is the maximum magnification available). You can also drag around an area with the Zoom tool. The pixels within the marquee are magnified to whatever arbitrary percentage best fills the screen.

Hope you all have seen some essential tricks from this Photoshop CS3 tutorial. So try it out and have fun…

M.A.H.

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