Lessons

Lesson Info

Workflow Tips & Tricks Like a Professional in Photoshop

Hi there. This video is all about workflow tips and tricks. Now. This whole section following is going to be a few videos on it. This particular video though is all the little bits and pieces that weren't big enough to have their own video just like lots of little handy things. Some of them we've covered a touch before maybe in the course, but let's put them all together here. The first one is opening files. So on a Mac. Okay, this is Mac only if you grab an image, hold down the command key and hit tab. It shows you all the available applications that are open. You can just drag it into the actual thing. Okay, so just drag it right into there and it opens up or you can drag it if you prefer just down to your dock and just drag it straight into the icon. The next one is rotating your canvas so I know that. So I'm working on my mask here that we made earlier. Got my brush tool and I can drag down and you know, kind of down the edge of this really easily with my mouse. Okay, all my arm mu...

scles are really good at doing that movement. If I have to kind of go around this way though, I just, I'm just not as capable of dragging it. That was pretty good. Okay, so rotating the canvas is pretty easy. Hold on the R key when you keyboard, just keep holding it down and then just click anywhere. You're not rotating your image. You're just kind of moving it so that you can then work in your kind of like natural habitat in terms of like masking, I'm not sure what I'm doing here but you get the idea, hold on, move it around so that you can kind of get the natural angle for your wakame instead of having to move it around your desk or me. I'm just using my mouse here if you've got a Macbook Pro I think works on any macbooks that were built in the last like five years. You can actually just, you don't have to have the R. K. You can just use your two fingers on your touch pad and just kind of like squiggle them around, squiggles. Not the word but I've got two fingers on my touchpad and just turning it. I don't have to change any tools, it just moves it around nicely. Does that work on a pc? I guess it really depends on the machine. Give it a try to fingers just give it a bit of a rotate like you're in google maps, you can pinch zoom too. Once you're finished you can hit escape on your keyboard in the top left and that just gets it back, you can leave it like this or you like it will still export the right way out. It's just kind of like a temporary thing. Alright escape. Next one is Zuma fire, we cover this in an earlier video but I want to tie in here again to put it all together nicely so I'm working around fixing up the edges here, touching it up and I need to get down to the bottom left. Remember hold down, do you remember what it was? There's a key, you hold it down the H. Key, just hold it down, hold it down, hold it down, click hold your mouse. Okay I'm holding the mouse the whole time and the H key and then let go of your mouse. Okay? It just means you can jump from this point rather than doing the old dreaded like well done it right, your dragon, you're like you've missed it and you're trying to find it and you're like where is it? I should have zoomed out. Okay so just hold down the H key, click hold and drag and then let go and it goes back to the exact zoom. You can start working nicely. Okay another little tip and trick is under view if you're working on one of the new Macbook pros that has the touch bar, okay it's that kind of like it's above your keyboard. It's a physical half physical thing. You don't have a new Macbook pro without the touchbar, it's probably not going to be there. I'm not sure. Go customize touchbar and what you'll find is you can't see it, it's on my other screen here but it's giving me lots of ways to adjust that touch bar, I can just add different things to it, I'll do a screenshot and get the editor to add it in here. And although you can't see my kind of touchbar, they're all wiggling away. And I can say actually I want to go to the one that says blending mode and I want to add that there because I use that quite a bit or see the one on the bottom right there says select the mask, we've used that load. I'm gonna make sure that's on my touchbar. Anything that using loads, you can drag onto it. All right, so about All right, so that's the touch bar. You can also customize the toolbar across here, which is kind of cool. So see these little three little dots here. You can click on this and click, you can hold it down and say edit toolbar. Just means you can tidy this up. If there's tools in here, you just don't use get rid of them. Let's see the lasso tool group, you just don't use any of these. You can just drag him over here and say I don't want you you or you you can see it just disappeared out of my list hiding it up nicely and you can always go back to restore defaults. Another cool thing you can do is let's say the slice tool was helpful. It's not anymore. Right? But whenever I tap, see it turns the I'm not sure if you've done this, but you accidentally type C and you end up with that little graphic in the top left corner, You spend ages through view trying to turn it off, you can say disable the shortcuts for anything that's hidden. So we're not using this three D materials, we're not using the ruler or these ones or council. Okay. All of these, once you've got it, you can save a preset and you're gonna call these the dan presets. You too can call it damn presets. Um It just means that later on, if you restore defaults Okay, you can go back and load it all. Dance presets. Good job in ogden, you can see over here and the eyedropper tool. Nice and tidy, nice and clean. No lasso tool. One of the one in the other, you might turn off just to get it looking nice, grab him, go and edit tool. But you also see the ones you have turned off are actually in here, so not gone forever. That is under this little extras list. Okay, edit toolbar. This one here, you might not use. Quick select. Sit down the bottom here appears disappears. Same with this one you might not use. We're getting pretty nerdy here. Right, so I'm going to go restore defaults, click OK. Because yours needs to look like mine for the rest of this course, I would totally do this if I wasn't an instructor. Alright, so let's close down a couple of these. Don't want to work with you. I'll leave you open and you can go close. So let's say you're working on a couple of images. This one and this one, so this one here maybe retouching and you're trying to work it into this larger kind of group of art boards will cover art boards later in this course. But this one here is quite nice. If you get a view, not view, go to window, go to workspace. This one here can be nice. When I say workspace, I mean arranged. So window arrange and this one here, either of these two I find quite useful. So um to a horizontal or vertical, just means you can see this one and this one at the same time. So it means I can be working on this document is kind of like dragging it across. Just makes life a lot easier than trying to use that kind of up into the tab thing. Okay. Yeah. Just allows two documents open maybe once for reference over here. You're building a montage and you just kind of like got lots of different images and you can have tabs in here as well, but have this kind of overall document open to get back window arrange. And this one here says whereas it consolidate all tabs. Other interesting things that don't get their own video. They get lumped into here is your libraries. We're gonna look at libraries a little bit more if you can't see them go to window and go to libraries. And what's useful in here is let's say that I've got an image of my library actually let's go to my stock images. You can have anything in your library. Just say actually I like this. Can you go out and find a similar image? What it does is it goes and look at adobe stock. You may or might not have like a subscription to this already but you can see it's gone through and found images that are very similar actually in this case the super similar because I got them from, hey look at that. Crazy that I got that one. It's pretty close. Okay, so it's just really handy. You can just dump anything into the library's doesn't have to be a stock image. Let's dump this one into stock images. So I'm going to clear that out. I'm going to dump this one into my library and I'm going to right click it and say go find me a similar similar image please. Goes and checks adobe stock dot adobe stock is a paid service. I pay for it every month man, how much is it? It's like $30 a month. I think you get 10 images. 20 Image. 50 image man, I need to check that out more than I need at least. Alright, so mine is taking a little bit of a long time because my home working in some terrible internet at the moment. But you can see it's gone through and found stock images that match this kind of image here that it's not related at all to Dobie stock. It's just an image from splash. Just dump it into your libraries and click fine visually similar. And if you have a paid subscription like me, I can just click on this one and say either download a preview, okay. Or actually just pay for it, license it and give it to me. Cool. Huh? So if you are paying for like shutter stock or Istock, that great libraries but there are just so many cool ties between adobe stock so you might look at switching over. Alright. Another little tip is if we go to what do we got? Yeah, let's use this one here. So there's graphic that I'm working on for. Actually I finished this one now but let's say I've got this type here now. Put it on its own layer and get rid of this. But down here, just make it clean. Okay, so working with this font here, you can see it is font size, this is the line spacing or leading so I can do a couple of things. One is, I can just drag the icon up. Okay, that can be really handy instead of having to go in here and type and go only gives me 72. Okay, you can just kind of drag that icon up and down. We can also do in any field in Photoshop so any field that we can find or find a few more, there's ones up there, there's ones here, just use the clicked in here and I'm going to use the up arrow on my keyboard so up up up up up, up it just goes up and down, come on, just you don't have to like hold and drag and type just use it up and down and if you want to go a bit faster just hold the shift key down and it does it in like 10 points rather than one. So it's just a good way. So if I want a bit bigger I can just hold down just click in here, hold on shift and just tap the up key, this works in any field, not just fonts, you can hear the line spacing, there is no line spacing, let's click on this one, so click in here and I can just go up hold shift and down just to increase that. So it could be the points as well. So moving the X and Y position. It could be an adjustment layer, I could go into here and say actually not that one and click in here and just go up up up up up down, down, down, down, down, hold shift. Okay and that's any field bad example I guess but just any clickable field that has numbers in it, you can just use your up and down the whole shift to make it go faster. Alright, next pro tip is to look in the channels and passed to see if there's a selection already. This is a stock library image I've downloaded it, it was a PSD and its just one old layer and you're like, oh man, I'm going to mask these out. Okay, I can mask this out but the thing to check, especially if it's a PSD and it's a file from a professional kind of like stock library side. There might be if you're lucky, it's worth checking every single time under channels or paths there might be a saved mask and they're just hidden in here, see here under the paths, somebody's going around this one with the pen tool already and it's just sneakily hiding here and pass, it's not obvious I can click on it holding my command key and it turns it into a selection. That's the control key on a Pc and now I can go back to my layers and add my mask and it's a whole lot quicker than trying to do it myself. Often I find these things after I've spent like an hour masking something out, get to a point, I'm like man, they should have done this before me. Like I'll go and check on parts and let's undo. So they've done one for both books in here. Okay, so I can mask both them out. Sometimes there are paths done with like the pen tool to select. There's also one in here under channels. Remember we did channel mask earlier on. So somebody's done one of those for us here as well. There it is there. I can hold down my command key on Mac, click it back to RGB and then I've got a mask. Okay for that little edge there, not sure what that one's for, but it was in there, I might really need it. So if it's a jpeg it won't include this data. But if you download something and it's a PSD, there are a few other file formats that do contain this as well with a pdf. Not sure GPS, maybe it's worth checking what happens to me a lot is when I get kind of marketing materials, say adobe because I'm a certified training center, they send me lots of market material, it's just this flat graphic and I'm like, how am I going to use this? And I go into channels or pass and I'll see ya. There's a mask ready to go for me. So if you are working with a large supplier and they're sending you these bunk files, it might be that they're just hiding in channels and paths. It's worth a look. There is my kind of adobe instructor certification badge and adobe logo. All of these. I want to have a job shadow and I wanted to be the same. So instead of doing it per layer, what you can do is you can grab all of these guys so I'm clicking and dragging across them all, make sure I've got them all put them in a group and then go down to effects and just apply the drop shot into the whole thing. Big drop shadow. I'm just going to have a teeny tiny one by teeny tiny. That's not even that teeny tiny. I'm not sure why I'm spending ages now, but you can see they all have a consistent drop shadow all around them just using one of them on the whole group rather than each individually. Alright. Two more tips in this 11 is, I don't know why I feel compelled to show you this one is under the eyedropper tool, the one that says the count tool and if I don't know it's me, my math. I think there's some districts here in there. I don't know. But this is helpful. Watch this is the counter, which is how many of these have I got. I use this for rows and columns and stuff when I'm doing web stuff or you might be, I don't know, it's weird. It gets used by doctors and police and forensics. I teach all sorts of people you think, I don't know. I feel like doctors should have some sort of specialized equipment, but often they'll use Photoshop okay with high resolution images and yeah, I'm not sure what we're counting but I know there's 20 of them, you might be for say you're an architect or I'm trying to invent uses for this now, it's clear alright, so I want to say last but not least, but it's on the end of my list here for a reason, right? I use it though, so I was like it has to be in there somewhere because there'll be one person out there that they might find it really useful. So I made a basic selection in here and most people don't know, you can go to select and go to transform the selection okay? And you can kind of make it a bit bigger. I can shrink it down, I can transform a selection like I can do any other shape. I feel like we petered out at the end there. We started with some cool stuff and we ended up with transform selection. I hope you found something good in there. There's still a chunk more of our workflow tips and tricks, but they've got their own little videos now because they've got a bit more substance. Let's go and jump into one of those now