Alright – here’s three tips that are really useful and easy – works in both Photoshop and Elements:

Quickly Change Brush Size: Ohhh, I use this one all the time! As you are drawing along and need a larger or smaller brush, don’t go to the menu bar and select a different size brush. Just hit your [ or ] keys to make the brush shrink or grow (The [ and ] keys are to the right of the P key). It saves so much time! This works with most of the tools.

Draw a Straight Line: Every try to carefully move your brush side to side to draw a straight line? Have Photoshop or Elements do it for you. Just hold down your Shift key and the line will automatically straighten up. Try it! You can even click where you want to start a line, hold the shift key, and click where you want to end and the software will draw a straight line between those two points.

Select all the Pixels on a Layer: Instead of trying to use the magic wand or another selection tool to select the pixels on a layer, just hold down the Ctrl key and click on the layer thumbnail and Photoshop or Elements will select everything for you. Where’s the layer thumbnail? Why it’s the little picture of what’s on the layer and it’s right here -

CTRL Click Select

Hope you enjoyed your quickies! I’ll have a new one next week.

The DaddyKitty