Establishing a Photoshop work is not quite a piece of cake. Photoshop itself is a useful yet complex program, armed with various handy tools to help you alter photos or create marvelous images. In using the tools, the manual alone is not enough to guide you – you might need some tips and tricks to help you perform your imagery miracles:

1. Changing brush size quickly
Press the right bracket ( ] ) to increase the paintbrush diameter and press the left bracket ( [ ) to reduce it. And to toggle the foreground and background colours, press ( X ).

2. Making masking adjustments
Before you make adjustments, you may need to feather a selection. Click Select > Modify > Feather and type a Feather value. You can also click Select > Refine Edge to adjust the selection.

3. On masking color
If the image you are painting on is very red, change the masking colour. Double-click the Quick Mask Mode icon and click the colour box in the Quick Mask Options dialogue box to pick a new colour.

4. In extracting the main subject
If the blue colour from the highlight spills into the rest of the image, your subject was not completely enclosed by the highlight border. Press (Ctrl+Z) to undo and outline the edge completely before filling.

5. In highlighting the main subject
Use a small brush to highlight well-defined areas and a larger brush to highlight wispy areas, such as hair. Pressing the left bracket ( [ ) or the right bracket ( ] ) keys changes the brush sizes quickly, as you highlight the object.

6. To preview the extraction result
To preview the extraction against a plain background, click the Display drop-down menu in the Preview palette on the right. Select Gray Matte or any other colour that makes it easy to see your selection.

7. About Smart Objects
Click Layer > Smart Objects > Edit Contents. Click OK in the warning dialogue box that appears. Edit the original file that appears and press (Ctrl+S), and the smart object image is updated. Or just double-click directly on the Smart Object icon on the layer thumbnail to alter the original image.

8. Duplicating Smart Objects
You can create duplicates of a smart object layer in a document and link them. When you replace the contents of one smart object layer, all the duplicates are automatically updated at the same time.

MAH

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