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Lesson Info

Day 28: Tips and Tricks

well this lesson today this next hour or so is all about tips and tricks and shortcuts and ideas and things that we haven't talked about at all or might have I might have thrown them in here and there along the way so this ours and the kind of different than all the other ones each other one had a theme like layers or adjusting or re touching this is everything this is things that can help you as you start developing mohr and I'm gonna throw out a bunch of tips and tricks and shortcuts and all those things like you said and it's up to you to decide oh that when I can see that's kind of useful I'm also going to throw on what I would call a couple of techniques which there not really a trick per se but there's something that's not so obvious or in one example called layer comes something has actually been around for quite a long time but people just kind of miss it for some reason I think it's a very powerful tool so let's jump right in and look at some of my favorite little tips tricks ...

shortcuts techniques et cetera most of which that can help you to be as creative as possible so I have a document with a bunch of layers in here and as I want to experiment with this I want to be able to for example turn layers on and off and move layers up and down in the order and I can of course always do that manually by clicking on layers and then deciding maybe this one should be up here and this one should be down here but we also have the possibility of doing that through the keyboard and I mentioned this a little bit and we were talking about actions that if you click on a layer when you're recording an action it will record the specific name that the layer has even and that's when the main reasons why we use shortcuts in actions but even when you're just doing work like this if I got my mouse over here and are to go all the way over click on a layer to then basically show or hide it just seems like unnecessary um work so the shortcut is basically option or alter and the bracket keys so when you press for example the left bracket it selects the next layer down right bracket select the next layer up if you switch to command or control so commanding the macintosh control for windows now command left bracket actually moves the layer down see how it's moving down the stack of layers and right bracket moves it up the layers if you press ad in the shift key it jumps right to the top or as low down as it can go if you have a background layer it won't go below that it'll go right above the background here so this is a nice quick way of saying as I'm experimenting I have a layer but I'm not sure it's in the right place so let me re organize the order of them by using a shortcut all right let's pretend now that I have this layer and I want to experiment with turning the layer on and off and again there's always the possibility of clicking on the eyeball to show and hide the layer but this assumes that my mouse is over here so let's say that I'm working with my move tool or a selection to whatever it might be somewhere over here and I saw it I want to change the opacity of the layer let's first of all time but just lowering the opacity I have a non painting tools selected which tells photoshopped whatever I do next will affect the layers and all I do is I press the first number of the opacity wants in order that I want fifty I just pressed five and noticing my mouth I'm gonna position right around her eyes you can see where it is four for forty eight for eighty nine for ninety two for twenty etcetera to get back to one hundred it's zero now here's a little note about this tip I very carefully said I have a non painting tools selected because when I press this letter shortcut excuse me the number shortcut for the percentage it assumes the layer opacity however the cool thing is the same shortcut works with the brush so if you have a brush or the clone stamp or the healing brush or anything like that selected and you press a number it changed the opacity of that tool so it was part of that checklist concept in this case I just do a quick check to make sure I have a non painting tool then when I pressed this number shortcut it will work that's been around for a while here's something that's fairly new as a photo shop see essex which when I first saw it I kind of thought ok I might use that but actually I use it quite a bit uh it's a nice little shortcut as I just shown you we press like say six for sixty and then zero for one hundred well the problem was before now there wasn't a shortcut for zero percent capacity or hide the layer now there is he distressed zero zero so I just type zeros are really fast and then zero to get back to hundred percent so stick with me on this one takes it it's almost like a tongue twister you press zero zero very quickly to get zero percent capacity then you press zero to get a hundred got it so it's a cool little toggle switch zero zero hides zero shows and then of course you compress all those other ones in between like five or fifty and all that good stuff so kind of a cool idea now since we have this layer document open let's talk about this function called layer comes it's this is the one I was referring to before us has been around for a long time but for whatever reason people forget about it or don't use it are I'm not sure what the reason is I find it very useful function if I'm experimenting for example here I want to create a layout and I have quite a few options here so for example in this case we look we've got this profile photo but I also have just one small photo up here I also have this kind of faded one that I'm not convinced I really like but I want tohave a number of options to say what would it look like with this here versus what would look like with that here and part of the idea behind this is I would be then showing the client to say what do you think between these various combinations instead of me having tohave my layers panel opening me going wait one second while I hide these three layers what you think of that and they go oh okay show me the other one so you hide those again that's a lot of work what a layer comp does is it says I want to make a comp or combinations almost like I'll remember the status of your layers panel which layers are visible where they're located our they see through or not all those kind of things so the layer comes panel I have mine out here already but if you didn't see it you go here to layer comes and at first when you open it it will have nothing just last documents status just means the way you left it but I want to capture what I see here with this small photo up here and everything else I missed him click on this new button and call this let's see small top left just leave it at that for now so that's reminding me this is the one that has the photo small one in the top left I want to remember visibility position and appearance if I wanted to I could put a comment like this is the photo of the bride in her bridesmaid in the top corner that's just for my purposes and I click okay and then I decide okay now I want one with the big profile so we'll click on the new one call it large pro file okay and now let's say well what if we decide that we really want down here at the bottom is I don't want this one to be visible and I want the photo of the bride to be over here so now I'm not only changing the visibility I'm also changing the position so we go back to our layer comes and we choose profile and again what you name these is not important as long as you know what it is with bride photo right corner and again you can either bry looks like I was talking about cheese okay bride photo okay right corner good and then I could also say well let's make one other one just so we see where we're going to take our type player and we're gonna put it higher up and lower the opacity slightly so now we're not on ly changing the position we're also changing the opacity and needless to say you can make as many of these as you want the great thing about layer compasses they don't add anything to your file size because we're not duplicating are adding more layers were just remembering the positioning and visibility of them so now imagine that I'm tryingto to look through the different options said of me having to all that reorganizing instead I just go to layer conference eh let's use this one and it moves everything around let's use this one and you see each one it just changes drag this out here so you can perhaps see it'll better let's to get up here of the way so each one when I click on this it's reorganizing everything for me I can also use thie arrow keys to kind of scroll through them if I had made any notes by the way you would see them under here so at this point what is why do I do this well I saved my psd file now the next time I opened this document those layer comes air already there's upon a remind myself what it looked like for example I can you say oh yeah what was the one with uh oh yeah there it is now you can still tweak it but here's the thing if I take for example this layer comp is now active if I hide this layer or let's do something else like move it the potential is now I see it's it's no longer got that little symbol on it because now I've kind of changed the situation because now saying why I don't know what you mean because when you recorded this layer comp it was back over there if you were to delete a layer now you'll get warning assemble saying well wait a second now you're you're using those layers that layer that you're about to delete in those layer comp so that's a nice little warning to maybe think you might wanna undo this now the only kind of called a catch but it's important to know about layer compton's layer comes to record the position and visibility and appearance like layer style but not the content in other words I have type player a type player here if I want to see what it looked like with a different font I'd have to make a duplicate second type later layer change the font and then hide and show one of the other in two different layer comes so by the same token maybe it had a logo on here if I decided what would look like with a smaller logo I'd have to make a second logo layer and shrink it down because if you change content of like type or size of a logo or color of something that is just meaning the layer congress members well it was over here now it's red used to be white so if you want a white one and a red one you'd have to make two and in the layer comes showing high that makes a lot more sense I think the first time you try it because people usually run in that roadblock they go oh wait I want to try a different typeface well then you end up duplicating the layer and you chain making that part of a new layer come as far as I know there's no limit to the number of layer comes you could add except just probably could get confusing but it's a really nice ability is a quick way to say let me look at different combinations and see the different one so we can see what we have options that are available and again all of these things can change like you could I have different effects on here I could turn those off and make a layer calm because that's in effect now I don't want you to walk away from this discussion thinking okay well if I have a whole bunch of layers doing a layout like this layer comes air useful that's true however it could also be I have a photograph and I'm trying different methods of creating a black and white so I might add a grady in't map adjustment layer and a black and white and a huge saturation and then I want to try different combinations of just this one thes to all three and those could be layer comp so you have a very quick way of kind of scrolling through them and figure out which one you want to use as I mentioned before that one of the very nice parts about doing this is that when you save your psd file it automatically includes the layer comes with it so it doesn't take any overhead doesn't change the size your file if it does it's minute but it gives you this really nice option of very quickly jumping between different combinations okay so here's another little tip for you I've been probably doing this throughout all of our thirty days but haven't been saying it out loud so now I will I want to close this document so I press the keyboard shortcut command or control w because I have made some changes to it it gives me the option of either not saving anything cancelling the whole clothes or saving and you can of course click on those buttons but let's say for example in this case I opened this document to experiment but I don't need to save anything so I would actually press commander control w for a closed window and then instantly press d for don't save so instead of taking my mouse anywhere and clicking on the word don't save or the button I'm going commander control the sorry command control w for a closed window d for don't save escape for cancel or s or their enter key for safe so that's just a really nice way let me show you in real time what it looked like panic control w d so now I've closed it saved it moved on to the next one so here's an interesting option that's available when we talked in our session on pattern shapes and passed I talked a lot about the pen tool and making pass and said that the whole point of a path is you have to do something with it turn into a selection or painted or something else here's an interesting way to use the pen tool I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit closer here and I'm gonna use my pen tool to make try to trace over this path so it might take a couple of shots but well try and see how close we can get that's actually pretty close I think I would get a little closer and just make sure probably I'm holding down the commander control key to temporarily give me the pointer move this up just a hair I think and honestly it might take a few tries to get bang on but usually get fairly close fairly quickly you always have the option of clicking right on the middle of the path itself and kind of dragging it and my goal is to get it very close to this wire so let's just fix up this is just a little bit now I want to take the healing brush well is we saw earlier lesson on healing when you're doing a straight line you can go click shift click with the healing brushes and paints a straight line this one has a bit of ah ah what you call that a lupin at its kind it's not a straight line so this is an options available with past but we have to think about it the same way we normally do when we're using any kind of retouching tool and that is probably want to put it on a separate layer so I still want to make a new layer I still go to my spot healing brush and make sure it says content aware sample all layers and I'm choosing a brush which is just a little bigger than I need something like that instead of me painting along it now what I do is I go to the paths panel and when I option or all click on this second icon it says what would you like to stroke the path with and normally it would probably come up looking like this with either pencil or brush which would mean I would paint along but if I pick for example the spot healing brush now that means it will automatically paint along that path with the spot healing brush so when I click okay it goes like that paints and then if I hide the path that wire's gone pretty cool now it looks like it's still there but what we're actually seeing is the work path so the point of doing this in particular is if you have ah bunch of wires like this drooping was the word I was trying to think of before we drag it on to the next one and then tweak it and say let's try to get it as close as we can to the next wire down so we'll use thie our direct selection tool and drag a little bit now this one office he's gonna have on extra challenge because we have a poll in there but that's part of the reason we do things on the blank layer is now I can just go okay next one and then hide the path of see that one's gone it needs just a bit of work in here so I won't go through the whole thing but that's the concept is you have a bunch of drooping wires that roughly follow the same line you create one path stroke it with the spot healing brush onto a blank player then you drag the path down to the next one and continue in that way you could tweak and adjusted it's a lot faster than you trying to paint along a curve line and make it not jagged or look obvious or anything like that so just a quick little trick that's kind of neat as we're going along okay so let's clothes and don't save and go over to bridge and let's look at this a wan we talked in earlier lessons a little bit about free transform not a huge amount but enough to get the idea of how this works so here's what I've got in this case I've got a stock photo of a wine bottle and even though you could only see up to here I brought over the whole wine bottle because I wanted to do so something with a progression of bottles so what I want to do is end up with a siri's of bottles going across this getting slightly smaller each time so the way that I do that normally if I just went to free transform and made the wine bottle smaller that just makes the existing wine bottle smaller what I need to do some how is telephoto shot I want you to transform a copy and leave the original alone and the way you do that is you throw in the option or all key so I hold down option are all and choose free transform I could also press command option tea or control all t and by doing this now as soon as I go to move this you can see it's making a new layer in a copy and aiken scale us down and said like this one to be this much smaller and let's kind of roughly line up the labels now I hit enter so it's created a second layer that's a duplicate and smaller version of the first one now I'd like to repeat that operation a couple more times instead of me trying to figure out how much did I just transform that because I really don't know instead I use a built in command that's called transform again and its command shift tea or control shifty now I mean let's be more specific if I did that all it does is it repeats the transformation but you see it moved it over so this is one of these crazy keyboard shortcuts where it's the entire left side of the keyboard tea so let me clarify under here where it says transform again that would mean repeat the same operation with the operation being move it and make it smaller I need to tell it transform again to a copy so once again that's where option are all comes into play so I press command options shift tea or control all shifty and each time I do you see I get another bottle another bottle another bottle another bottle now these all went on separate layers because I deliberately did that I kept it on one layer to begin with now before I show another example of this one of the themes that hopefully you're picking up a little bit along the way is thie option are all key often is this x it'll modifier like when you optional all drag a layer it makes a copy when you do optional with free transform it transforms a copy when you're in a certain dialog box and you want to tweak it tio start over again then optional does something different we show you what I mean by that one let's say I was in levels decided do it directly in levels and I'd done all this work and then thought okay that's just not working at all I don't like that instead of clicking cancel to start all over again holding down option or all changes cancel to reset so now I can keep working on this case I will actually cancel it so now I may decide I want to end up with one layer filled with bottles but initially I wanted these to be separate so let's we show you another example of how I might use this command I'm going to make another new layer and let's say all I want to do is have a siri's of small little squares evenly spread out as kind of a design element so let's choose some color and fill it now that last example I showed you the wine bottle I deliberately made sure the wine bottle wasn't selected what I mean by that is when I have like this square here is still selected watch what happens when I do this transform repeat transform operation and I'll show you why I probably wouldn't do it this way so when I first do it they want to make a copy say that far apart then I hit enter and I pressed command option shifter control shifty and the problem is I went to it's the spacing isn't right but now it's one layer so it would be very difficult to change it so instead if I step backwards this is why I used my recurring comment about end up with I want to end up with a series of squares that's evenly spread out but the way I'm going to do that is not have it selected that will automatically mean when I do that same shortcut command option to your control lt and I go to make a copy say that far apart and hit enter now when I do that shortcut the bad news is in a sense I get a whole series of layers which makes my layers panel looks very cluttered but actually the good news about this is now it's a lot easier two tweak so for example if I decide that I really only wanted these squares to go over to here now the spacing is all off let me make that more obvious for you to see so now the spacing is all off so what I could now do because they're all separate layers the first one is selected shift click on the bottom one and now I could tell it let's distribute those by their centers so this is giving me the ability to go and say or maybe I just don't want that last one and I want this one to be over here and then spread them all out I couldn't do this if this was one layer but because they're multiple layers I can continue tweak it so at this point once I'm happy with that I would probably convert them to a smart object because that way now it's treated as if it's one object but in a pinch of someone said can you change the spacing yes I can because I still have all of the separate objects inside that cameras are excuse me inside that smart object I said camera because already thinking ahead to the next thing I want to show you so that's another example of that end up with yes you could duplicate a little object all onto one layer but then if you want to try and tweak them it would be a lot harder because they would be one long one big layer instead of a whole bunch of separate layers you can adjust ultimately I still end up with what appears to be one layer but it's one smart object layer made up of the whole bunch of separate objects much more flexible and useful for me all right we've been talking on and off about camera raw so I double click on something and I let's just say that I make an adjustment and for now I'm just gonna say I don't actually open yet I'll click done twenty time you look at our camera file and you see this little symbol in bridget will tell you some things already been done to this now if I just double click on that file it's going toe every time launch camera off first and then I would open it into photoshopped a work on it but what if I just want to say I just I know what's already set up the way that I want I just want to open it if I shift double click on it it ignores the camera raw dialog box and just jumps right into photo shop now the good news is it jumps right into photoshopped the not so good news is it's not a camera smart object so that would make me a little less happy so I don't do this a whole lot unless I just want to open something very quickly for some other purpose now in photo shop see see we do have the added bonus where I can convert to a smart object and then do the camera filter this way but that's the only downside to this method of doing that directly is that you don't really have that that option of doing the smart object directly so I don't use that a whole lot but just want to show you that is an option all right let's look at this example when we talk about layer styles mentioned that I think a little bit about this but I want to clarify the way this works so I have to shay players just two big arrows both of which have a drop shadow and by default if I open my work and I put this you can see it here here's the layer style for the drop shadow on one of the two layers and if I decide I want to alter the settings I can change it up here but I can also just move my mouse down and you'll see even though I'm dragging one of them see how the other one is adjusting and that's because it's assuming by default that there's one global light source which makes sense most of the time that if there was a light causing this won't have a drop shadow this way the other layer should have the same thing that's what this check box called use global light is for and most of it is on by default on most of time it makes sense because you want to be able to say well if I change this drop shadow the other one should change but maybe you're just doing something where artistically you don't really care about whether it it looks realistic from a direction of light standpoint you just wanted to look the way you want if I go back and double click on this and turn off use global light now you see as I start to move this drop shadow see how the other one is not changing at all so this is how I could decide what I want that too shadows to be independent of each other so I click okay then go to this one and once again turn off use global light and then I could adjust it and this way I'm doing it maur the way it's pleasing to my eye not whether technically it's correct or not now this is a personal choice of course for any design on when you're working on whether you have this turned on or not by default it is turned on then you can decide on a layer by layer basis to turn it back off again thanks so just a quick little tip about layer stiles okay uh here's a couple of finishing examples of camera raw we've been talking about on often gannet normally people open either a camera raw file or you can force a j peg or tift open just by telling it opening camera but even then I see most people thinking of that as well here's a photograph that I want to open and camera raw here's well that's pretty pretty much at either ajay pig or tiff photo but I want to plant a seed in your head that you can open anything in cameron's sometimes that offer some interesting possibilities here's a stock photo that's obviously a graphic elements not a photograph it all it's a graphic and it's ajay pick so I'm going to right or control click and tell it open in camera so it opens this j bacon here why might I do this well for a number of reasons just things like increasing or decreasing contrast or adding clarity and lowering the exposure or hired you know whatever you want all of these things would be so much harder in photo shop because you'd have to say well let me select all the reds and then change those let's go in here and say all right I want actually change the hue of just the reds in this and as I moved the huge slider see how it's moving the red over and will change this is well maybe this direction and the yellows become more green or so all of these options and these air just me moving sliders I can even change the color temperature overall if I want to look cooler so if he wants to look more venal of villainous than he's actually mr ice man I don't know but you get the idea but all I'm doing is moving sliders and you khun take advantage of all the different things in here like split toning and you can even do lends corrections say I want to add kind of ah vignette around the outside I think maybe he's looking a little too blue so let's take that back a bit and then I opened that up and if we compare that with the way it looked originally that's a pretty dramatic difference and yet all it is is camera so I didn't have to go into photo shop and say ok let's add a selective colored adjustment layer and do all these photoshopped techniques now again like any cameras smart object I still have to remember if I want to edit it I double click to go back to camera and the fact that if I decide to do any work on it I can't work directly on the camera smart object I have tto open are at a new layer on top of it but still that ability to use camera on a graphic element is pretty darn cool now one last comment about this because I've done that you'll see it has changed and this little symbol is telling me this is even though it says dot j peg it's had some camera work done to it so if I want a kind of spa take that out completely and say you know what I just want this to be back to being a regular old file just going here right click develop settings and clear the settings then it goes back to being a regular jay pig again now this example is a photograph on old photograph that I want to restore so I just realized I have the psd version of it so we'll have to do it through the camera filter but it's the same thing if you were the only difference would be you'd just like I did a moment ago you right click and choose at it in camera but I'll show you this way because it'll work the same effect of the same thing in the point of this is I've got an old photo I want to do some restoration work on its its colors aren't it's all faded there's some dust specks here and there just doesn't look great and before I spent a lot of time in photo shop doing this I might decide now that is a smart object to do camera wrong again this is the same as if you just started with it in raw and now I can start going in adjusting what if I adjust the exposure and increase the contrast and let's change it to a gray scale so we strip out a lot of that kind of tinted information that will look a little more closely at it and here's one of the reasons why this made sense to me when I first looked at it is occurred to me that specks of dust are very similar to noise from a camera so if I reduce the noise and you see the difference of what's happening look at all the little kind of speckles of noisy kind of dust and just the fact that it's an older grainy photograph if I start adjusting this it's getting rid of some of the major problems that I have very very quickly and I can try to sharpen it a bit to make it look a little better so all I'm doing is using photo shop options to say let's put the highlights of babylon make the black civil darker maybe use a bit of clarity just a bit I click okay look at the difference right away of what a good start I have on this photograph it's not perfect yet but it's a pretty different could start now normally if I over this is a camera smart object I would be able to then build on top of shooting other smart filters here I'm gonna have to just pull a little nested smart object thing just to be able to show you this next part so let's convert that to a smart object and the reason I'm doing that is I want to apply another smart filter and then mask it and if I did that the camera filter would also be masked so we're going to do a filter and there's a filter called dust and scratches and the concept of this normally let me get to one hundred per cent is for things like this kind of issue here so let's take a look I go to dustin scratches and normally you would identify an area to make a selection round first and what I want to do is move the radius just enough that I can't really see that little blemish anymore I want to keep it as low as I possibly can then I put the threshold high enough so it comes back and I'm going to start backing this off and my goal is to find a place where that duster scratched just about disappears but doesn't go too far so I'm going to say somewhere around there looks pretty good now the problem with it as you can see it's taken away detail from a lot of areas so we use our a recurring theme of end up with the look I want so I did the smart filter overall now I take the mask for this inverted to fill it with black and now I take my paintbrush we'll use a regular old paintbrush but make it smaller so I'm using the left bracket key and any time you have a situation like this let's take a step back for a second and think what I've got here I applied the dust in scratches filter to the whole photograph and then I filled the layer mask with black because a smart filter I can do that now anywhere I want to apply dustin scratches I'm painting with white on the mask to reveal the filter so another way to look at it is when you set yourself up this way it's almost like you're painting with dust and scratches filter pretty much so let's take a look if I go in here and I start saying I want to get away with that part there and now I'm just painting over all the little spots that I'm seeing and I can avoid any of the details that go onto his forehead here but I'm doing a little bit of the time and I'm deliberately trying not to get any riel detail area you can see how quick that is yes you could use spot healing but in some cases especially with a photograph like this where there's so much other information around it might pick the wrong spot in this case I kind of like the result that I'm getting here and I won't spend too much more time to get the idea let's turn that off and back on and back on he said so we're all I'm already on a pretty good start forgetting this toe looked away there wants of course then I would save this can you working on it but so the two main points of this is consider using camera raw for more than just I've taken a raw photograph I want a tweak but open a jpeg art if including graphics and logos and also old photos you want to restore it gives you a pretty good start to getting down this road and then this concept of apply a smart filter fill the layer masked with black and then painted in gradually offer some really interesting ways to touch something up very quickly all right let's look at this one so in this situation I have a photograph that I've already created a layer mask and I'm thinking for some purpose I want to kind of create a reflection of this dancer and preserving the mass so that I can keep working if I need to so if I press commander control j to duplicate the layer then I'll do commander control tea for free transform and if once you have the free trans france form handles showing like this you controller right click and choose flip vertical now I can drag him straight down I hold out my shift key too constrain where he goes something like that so now I have this interesting kind of reflection thing but if it's really going to be a reflection first of all I probably need to lower the opacity bit but here's the thing I want to preserve this mass just in case but I also want to make him look more faded out norman the way I would fade out a layer is to add a mask with a grady in well this already has a mask so how can I override this mask or I should say keep preserved this mass but at another one well one way is we've seen could be to create a smart object and that's my most typical way of doing things this is a rare case where I might not because you'll see this other method is a little more instant in other words if I want to edit either mask it's one click away instead of having open a separate document so the trick to doing this is even though there's on ly one layer I'm going to choose to make a new group from layers normally you put multiple groups in a layer in this case sorry say that again normally you're putting multiple layers into a group in this case there's on ly one layer in the group so your first thought might be what what is the point in having a group with only one layer and usually the whole point of a group is tohave multiple layers so I can show and hide them and do all that kind of stuff well the reason is you can add a mask to a group so now I take my radiant tool I've got a white to black great aunt going on let's just makes everything else is normal cam on the mask so I say all right I want him to fade out like this maybe not quite so dramatic let's zoom out a bit so I can go even further there we go that's kind of what I was picturing so now you see I have the mask on the group but if I theworld down the group I also have instant access to this mask so fight not that this would make sense but if I decided in both cases to turn them off for some reason I still could because it's just that one click away could I have turned this into a smart object and done a mass that way absolutely and frankly I probably would just because I'm such a smart object fan I would probably do that but in this case I want to show you that won the advantages of doing things like this with a group is that it's right there I didn't have to open a separate document to be ableto access both of these mass I could just do it directly now just to show you I'm going tio step backwards a little bit here before I had the group it would there is one other possibility and I'd be reluctant to do this unless I was pretty darn sure and that is I could try to say I want you to keep this mask but I want to also do a grady in so what I would do is change the blend mode of the grady int to multiply and this way when I paint over the mask you know see what it does it creates the mask and sort of fills it with shades of grey he only main reason I don't really like that as much as if I changed my mind and want to edit the original mass I've already kind of painted over the top of it so just to show you there's always of course multiple ways to do something that's just another example masking a mask by using a group however is a pretty interesting way to do it now speaking of mass here is a situation that you might run into hopefully this situation comes up because this is either older work you did before you really fell in love with layer mass or someone else started this project and said can you fix this up and the reason I say that is because this woman here has been extracted onto a layer and she doesn't have a mask on that normally that would make me sad because I would prefer to see a mask especially when I can see there's a few problems with her hair so ideally I want to use either refined edge or refined mask to try and tweet this well first of all I don't have an edge because it's not a selection and I don't have a mass so I got to try a couple of different things so the first thing we'll do is turn this into a selection so by commander control click on any layer of transparency that says I will make that into a selection for you then I could click on any selection tool go to refine edge and change it to on layers view and now I could try using either smart radius or maybe paint a little bit with my little refined radius tool and already that looks better now I would definitely say well since we have the opportunity let's turn into a mask so that would be option one and it works very nicely just because we're always trying to show multiple options I could also do it this way same end result pretty much but just taking a different approach and that is to load the selection and then turn into a mask and then go to the properties panel and do mask edge so effectively the same thing just a different way of getting there but this is one way where you might be able to deal with a problem like that and just to show you there's always of course multiple ways to do things the old school way and I love using the term old school for something like photoshopped that's not that old is if you see a little bit of a fringe around the outside of something that's already been extracted like this week go the very bottom of the layers panel we'll be able to see it here but there's a canana very bonds as matting and then d fringe and it says how much would you like to de friend unfortunately there is not a preview here so unfortunately don't really have that option so you have two pretty well take a guess and say well let's try to and then click okay and that's not bad but let's undo that and try a little bit more so this is why to me d fringe is less useful now than creating a mask and using that mask age or just doing that refine edge kind of thing all right let's do a couple of other little quickies here and these air ones I'm going to show in the context of one tool but this is the kind of thing where you can pretty much apply it to almost anything so let's say that I was making a marquee selection and then as I was making it I realized well I can't really decide the right shape yet until I get in the right positions I don't want to let go of my mouse but I want to move it so if you hold down the space bar it interrupts the fact of me dragging the shape of the marquis and lets me we position soon as I let go of the space bar then I could go back to re sizing so space bar in most tools interrupts whatever you're doing so you can move it the exception to this rule of course would be type because if you press the spice space bar with type you'll get space because it's the space bar but this is very nice if you're doing almost any other kind of work with any one of these tools the space bar will interrupt what you're doing temporarily now I mentioned earlier in the lesson on things like brushes and color if I'm working with a paintbrush and it's a certain color and I decide on the fly I want to sample a new color I hold down press and hold option although lets me sample the color than when I let go it returns to paint and we use that for a number of different purposes there's also the possibility of doing this with other tools for example let's say I've got the paint brush and I want to move an entire layer like this one if I hold down commander control it gives me the move tool and I can reposition her and then let go and continue painting so there's a number of these shortcuts let me go through a couple of them will sort of summarize this part if I painting and I sighed I want to move the view of my whole image let's say I zoomed in a bit the space bar in this case with tools like the paintbrush instead of moving a shape is there is no shape it gives me the hand tool to scroll the view of my document if I breast command or control sorry yes commander control and the space bar it gives me the zoom tool to zoom in or alter an option the space bar lets me assume out so you might be asking yourself how on earth will I remember all those and the answer is at first you won't but here's my suggestion to you is how these things start toe kind of get into your head little bit is as you're working and use remember await there was some key that if I held down did the eyedropper what was that was it command no was it control no option other it is because the cursor will show you so if you're uncertain what shortcut what key should I be holding down this is the way to do it now there's one small last little variation I want to show you this if I'm working with say the paintbrush and I want to stop kind of temporarily switch to another tool that say the clone stamp tool if I hold down the letter s it will keep the a clone stamp tool and then when I let go it switches we shot before if you just press the letter you khun switch between tools by pressing like tea for type c for crop the fur move etcetera this holding down the key just temporarily it's referred to is a spring loaded key because then it goes back to whatever tool you had before so that's another little shortcut that could help us and one of things I really recommend to you is that I know there's a lot of overwhelming material like all these different things you can do but a lot of them start to take on kind of a bit of a logic like the option are all keys a good examples we mentioned earlier it's kind of this modifier that often does some really interesting little thing like makes a copy or you know changes that the cancel button to reset so there's a core of keys like option commander control space bar shift those are the ones you're going to use the most and as we also saw earlier control or right clicking will often will we'll give you a context sensitive menu in this case because I have layers it's showing me here's whatever layers are underneath my image if I had a selection going and I control the right click it's showing me all these options now this is interesting to me if I were to let me just do a quick counts a wants you to one to three I'd say I'd have to go to five different menus to access all the information that's right here so because it's saying well based on what you have going on right now here are the main operations I think you might want to do d select inverse feather go to refine edge save this election turn into a path make a new layer by a copying or cutting or just make a new layer transform transform just the selection phil strokes these air all under different menus but it pops up under one thing as soon as I change the context like now I've got my brush tool says while the main thing you would want to do is change the size of your brush if I switch to the clone stamp tool and right control click same thing so any the tools that include brushes that's the main thing it will do so right or control clicking is very useful command now if you're a mac user for years it's been control click but if you don't already have either a mouse that has a right mouse button or abusing and tablet you can program the keys on here to be the same as right clicking to me that's a huge time saver so I still have the same control or right click but hopefully you have some set upon a macintosh is lets you right click is honestly it's a whole lot easier to do it that away now one last little suggestion for you I mentioned earlier that how much I love using adjustment layers one of the only things that is still to me remaining that that is the reality of life in photo shop is by default the adjustments under this menu that frankly I hardly ever use except for things like adjusting a mask have this keyboard shortcuts so for example if I want to do levels or curves the keyboard shortcut automatically opens the very destructive curves dialog box is goingto work directly in the background layer so we talked in an earlier lesson about editing the keyboard shortcuts here's another suggestion for you and that is to go to your panel menus and here two adjustments and here's levels and I'm going to say I'd like that to be commander control elle's gonna say well wait now that's are in use by image adjustments levels you know what that's okay with me because I'd rather have that open up the levels adjustment layer now as I always say whenever I talk about changing dramatically the keyboard shortcuts on the one hand I am not saying you should go and do this right now but I'm not really because I don't want anyone to come back and say wow I changed my keyboard shortcuts the way you said it really messed me up so use with caution consider the situation but for me it comes down to that same third we talked about when I talk to about changing the color picker away from the pen tool personally I use the color picture way more in the pen tool personally I used adjustment there's way more than I used the regular adjustments so personally I have no problem of changing the keyboard shortcuts for levels and curves everything to the adjustment layer equivalents and the reason I kept saying the word personally is again I don't want you to feel like well I guess I'd better go do that because dave's telling me to not at all I'm saying you should consider it and if you feel like I hope you will that adjustment layers are a better solution this is one possible opportunity that khun speed things up and as you go through in the more use photoshopped hopeful you'll find other cases like that where you say wow I could much better use that shortcut for something else like at a mask or make a smart object or something that you do on a regular basis that currently doesn't have any kind of shortcut associated with it now in for today I don't really have it's a homework free day because this was intended just to be ah whole bunch of kind of don't say random but unrelated tips and tricks and shortcuts and techniques is to show you even mohr possibilities with photoshopped if anything I would say a reminder that as you're working just experiment see what happens and find the middle do something and I hold on the space bar or the option or all key or the two of them together and get used to that idea of temporarily active in the tool that you need set of going back and forth the toolbox so we're almost there we're gonna we're getting close to the end will come back tomorrow and we'll start to wrap things up see you then