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Thought it would be good to start a thread on photoshop tips and tricks.
Was wondering what was your favourite quick photoshop trick or tip?
My first tip would be on sharpening. I often use the highpass filter to sharpen images. I usually create a copy of the image as a new layer and put the highpass filter on this to quite a low level until just the edges can be seen on the image (don't add too much though, experiment with this), then I just overlay the new layer (on the blending options). I find it quite a good method of sharpening, sometimes better than the normal sharpen options.
Nick
I would love to have a bunch of Photoshop tips and tricks in one place, as I have just switched from PSP to PS CS3. However, there are a whole bunch of articles in the "techniques" section that offer good advice.
Perhaps if people post their tips and tricks here, then someone could then put them all together into the techniques page.
Staying with sharpening try selective sharpening a landscape, i.e. sharpen the foreground more than the middle ground and even less for the sky. Select each area with the lasso tool, feather the selection and sharpen using your prefered method.
Most of these have been posted here before (and even come from here) but I'll add them for those who haven't seen them:
Sharpening Actions
Digital Velvia
Boosting colour with LAB
It pays to take the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts to switch between tools - it really speeds up operation. My most used ones would be the space bar for moving around your image and the square brackets for increasing/decreasing brush size.
I've got a huge pdf file somewhere with hundreds of keyboard shortcuts (I'll try to dig it out).
My favourite however is the auto-levelling tool. Use the measure (right mouse click the eye-dropper - it's the bottom option) on a wonky horizon, click Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. PS will find the exact degree of rotation to make your horizon level.
Oh, and when you're using layer masks it's handy to know that 'D' sets foreground colour to black and background colour to white, whilst 'X' reverses the foreground and background colours.
Great idea for a thread. One of my favourite tricks (ok, it's more of a mini technique) is to use the transform tool to correct converging verticals.
>CTRL A (select all)
>CTRL T (transform tool)
>Hold down CTRL + SHIFT + ALT then drag the top right anchor point out sideways until the verticals are vertical (holding down CTRL, SHIFT, and ALT makes the opposite top corner 'mirror' the action).
>Drag the top middle anchor point up a bit to correct any 'squat' appearance in the image
For landscapes try using selective levels and curves. Lasso the sky and feather and then do levels and curves, then inverse and use them on the ground.
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