10 Top Photoshop Tips in 10 mins - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 10 Top Photoshop Tips in 10 minutes - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: 10 Top Photoshop Tips in 10 Minutes. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at some handy tips for working in Photoshop and if you'd like to follow along, I've included a link in the class project area so you can download all the files that I'm using here. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help other students to find my classes so they too can learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now, let's get started on our 10 and 10, 10 great Photoshop tips in 10 minutes or less. 2. 10 Top Photoshop tips - The Tips: Our first tip relates to creating multiple lines of type in Photoshop. I'm going for the Type Tool, I'm going to click and add some type. I'm just pasting it in, but it would be exactly the same if I were to type it in. If I want to create this as multiple lines of type, I'm going to have to go to the Type Tool click where I want the lines to break and actually press the Enter key. If I try to do it with something like the Selection Tool where I can see the box around my type and try and make multiple lines this way, I'm actually squeezing up the type instead of creating multiple lines. If you want to create multiple lines of type in a paragraph style, click the Type Tool, and instead of clicking on your document, drag out a box. This time I'm going to place my type in the box, and you can see already that it's wrapped around automatically. When I click on the Type Layer Thumbnail and click on the Type Tool, I get access to this type box and I can drag it out and my text will wrap around to fill the box. The only thing to be careful of here is that you don't use the Selection Tool in this case, because if you use the Selection or the Move Tool and try and squeeze it up, well, all you're doing is scrunching up your type, you're not having any effect on creating multiple lines of type. Our second tip relates to the colors you have selected when you use certain filters in Photoshop. I'm going to choose Filter and then Filter Gallery, and you'll see that a lot of the filters in the sketch area use the current foreground and background colors as the colors that are being applied when you apply the filter. Not all of them do this, but most of them do. If you start off with the default colors, I'm doing that by just pressing the letter D, you'll find that you get black and white here in the filter gallery, and probably more like the results that you expect to achieve with these filters than you would get if you didn't check your default colors before you use them. Our third tip relates to scrolling blend modes in Photoshop. If you're working on a Mac before you do this, you want to select something like the Move Tool or the Rectangular Marquee Tool. This technique won't work if you have a Brush Tool selected. You'll come here to the Layers Palette and select the first of your blend modes. On a Mac, you can then press "Shift plus and Shift minus" to navigate through the blend modes. On a PC, you can just press the down arrow key. The benefit on the Mac is that if you continue to press "Shift plus" you're just going to wrap around the blend modes and you'll be in a continual loop around them. In contrast, on the PC, once you get to the last blend mode, which is luminosity, it doesn't roll around. You're going to have to wind back up to find the blend mode that you want to use for your image. Our forth tip relates to sizing two images to match each other. I have this image here and the texture that I want to put over the top, clearly they're know where near the same dimensions. It doesn't worry me that I'm going to stretch my texture because it is just a texture. I'm going to choose Image and then Image Size. But I want to scale it so it is the same size as the other image. Well I can find that size by choosing Window, and then click on the other image, and when I do, the dimensions here in the image size dialog change to match. I'll click "Okay". This image now is exactly the same size as this image, so I can take it over there. I'm just going to the last palette, I'm going to duplicate this layer onto the other image, and when we get there, you'll see that they're both exactly the same size. Now this works also when you choose File and then New. If you want to match another image's size, choose Window, select the image size that you want to match, and the image will be sized immediately to that size. Our next tip relates to saving a copy of the history of things that you do in Photoshop. You can do this on a PC by choosing Edit and then Preferences and select History Log. On a Mac, you'll choose Photoshop and then Preferences, and you want the History Log tab. Click here to turn the history log on. Save log items to a text file, it's better than metadata. Metadata would embed it in the image, and so that would go out to your client potentially, text files is going to keep it separate. Click "Choose." Type a file name for your file and a location to save it in and click "Save". I'm going to select a detailed log because that's going to give me a detailed list of everything I do with every image in Photoshop. I'll click. "Okay". Here's an idea as to what your Photoshop edit log is going to look like. It will be a very detailed list of every file that you open and everything that you do with that file. Sometimes when you're working with shapes in Photoshop, you may want to flip between shapes and paths. I'm actually just going to draw out a custom shape here if I want to save it as a path that appears in the Paths palette, but it won't be saved, if for example, I remove the shape. You can see it's now disappeared. Let's go back and do that again. If I want to save this shape here as a path, I can just drag this object to the Paths palette onto the new icon. Now when I delete my shape, you'll see that I still have the path in the Paths palette. Now vice versa, if you have a path and you want to make it into a shape, here's how you do it. You make sure that you have your path selected, then choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color, click "Okay", and just click "Okay" again, and you'll see now that over here we have a filled shape. This is a shape layer, this is a shape, and we've made it from a path. When you need to center a layer in a Photoshop document, select the layer control, click on the layer thumbnail. If you go to the Move tool, you'll see that you've got center options here, none of which work to center this object inside the document. Instead, once you've controlled, clicked on the layer thumbnail, press "Control" or "Command A" to select the entire document. Now when you click on these icons here, you will center the object in the document. Our next tip relates to using Layer Comps to compare different versions of an image. When I click here in the Layer Comp on Metal Texture, I'll see the top texture. When I click on Cement Texture, I'll see the bottom one. I can add my own Layer Comps by making the image look the way I want it to look, click on the New icon and type a name for my Layer Comp. I'll click "Okay". Now this becomes one of the options for viewing the image. You can get to your Layer Comp dialogue by choosing Window and then Layer Comps. For convenience, Layer Comps are automatically saved in your Photoshop file. When you want to get a color scheme from a photo, this next tip will help. I'm going to choose Image, Mode, Index Color. For example, if I want to get 100 colors sampled from this image, I'm going to type 100. I'm going to set either to none and click "Okay." To get the colors from the image, I'll now choose Image, Mode, and then Color Table. Here are 100 colors sampled from this image. To save them, I'll click "Save". I'm going to type a file name and save this as an ACT file. In future, I can go ahead and add these colors to my color swatch by clicking the Flyout panel and choose Load swatches. I'll navigate to the location where I saved my file. I'm going to select ACT or Color Table from the file of type list here, select the file that I saved and click "Load", and the 100 colors are added to my Swatches palette. Our final tip relates to adding additional canvas around an image. You could do this by choosing image Canvas Size, but there is another way. Firstly, I'm going to make my background color, the color canvas I want to add, and I'm going to click on the Crop Tool. Because what nobody ever tells you about the Crop Tool is that you can use it to add additional canvas to an image. I can hold "Shift and ALT" to add it equally around all sides. When I'm happy with the result, I'm just going to click the Check Mark. There you have 10 top Photoshop tips in 10 minutes. I hope that you've enjoyed this class. If you did enjoy it and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to say this is a class that they too might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. For your class project, just go and grab the downloads or choose a file of your choice and apply one of the tips from this class to your image. Post an image of the result and let me know which tip you used in the class project area. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.