I’m a great believer in using keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop CS/CS2/CS3 or Elements to work more efficiently and quickly. Here’s two great ones:

• Ever wanted to quickly duplicate a layer and make a new one? Instead of selecting the layer, copying it, creating a new layer, and pasting, just hit Ctrl-J (Command-J on a Mac) and it happens like magic. Neat trick huh?
• Ever wanted to fill a layer fast with the foreground or background color? I used to go to Edit-Fill, select Foreground or Background from the pull-down menu, and click Okay. Instead hit Atl-Backspace to fill with the foreground color or Ctrl-Backspace to fill with the background color. (And use Shift-Backspace to bring up the fill dialog box quickly)

Hope you enjoy these tips - till next week Keep Scrappin’!

Stan - The DaddyKitty

How can the $99 second cousin to the most powerful and best image editing software beat it hands down? By doing something far easier and better -

Here’s what I mean. I love this picture of my daughter Kate:

It captures her in that pensive moment that epitomizes her growing into a teenager. But its not that great a photo - the color’s dull, the water’s an icky green. I wanted to change the mood and make it a black and white. The usual way to do this is by going in Photoshop and using Image-Adjustments-Hue and Saturation and lower the saturation to 0. This gives me:

Notice it’s kind of dull and looses some of that nice light showing on her face. Now I could play around with the curves in Photoshop and get it better. But in Elements you have a whole tool devoted to B&W conversions that gives you a variety of choices. Go to Enhance-Convert to Black and White. You get this box:

Look at all the choices! The styles gives you the basic look and then you can fine tune it using the intensity and color adjustments. Try it and see! Here’s a few variations on our picture:

This great tool is available in Elements 5.0 and 6.0, and a more sophisticated version is available in Photoshop CS3.

Keep scrapping!

Stan - the DaddyKitty

Here’s a really cool one that I always forget how to do! (Maybe writing about it will help me remember!) See a color on your screen that you just love and want to use it in a layout? Use Photoshop or Elements to grab it.

Here’s how:

With Photoshop or Elements open, create a new document of any size - I usually make a small little box of 1″ x 1″.
Resize your Photoshop or Elements window by clicking on the Restore Down button on the upper right of the window:

Drag your window around until you see the color you want to grab (You can drag the edges of the window to make it smaller or bigger).

In Photoshop or Elements, hit the “I” key to select the Eyedropper tool.

Click inside your blank document and hold. Now drag the mouse around the screen - any color that is below the mouse will automatically be filled as your foreground color! Drag the mouse over the color you want - now you’ve got your color!

Please keep coming back for more tips. If you have any questions you can contact me here or leave a comment.

Stan - The DaddyKitty

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 -

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

The DaddyKitty

Here’s a DaddyKitty Quick Tip:

Ever have a photo like this?

It’s easy to fix using either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (all versions). Go to Image - Adjustments - Shadow/Highlights. You get this menu:

Notice that the more you move the shadow amount slider to the right, the lighter the shadows will get. The more you move the highlight amount slider to the right, the darker the highlights get. You can also adjust slightly the color correction and midtone contrast sliders although these usually look good where they are.

And here’s what you get!

We’ll be having lots more Quick Tips in future posts - stay tuned.