5 Photoshop tips nobody told me

Apply adjustment layers to entire groups

Make sure the adjustment layer is in the group, and set the group blend mode to anything but “Pass Through”

passthrough

Clip thumbnails in layers

Extremely useful when working with a large canvas: Right click the layer thumbnail and select “Clip Thumbnail to Layer Bounds”.

clearly

Create a 1px solid line

Use the Rectangle Marquee Tool (M) to select the area you want the border. Then fill it with the Paint Bucket (G) keeping the selection active. Press any of your arrow keys ONCE to move the selection up one pixel. Press Backspace (or delete on Windows?). BAM! 1 pixel goodness without dicking around with the pencil tool.

1pixel

Change brushes quickly

When you have a Brush Tool (B) selected right click anywhere on your canvas.

brush

Select any layer by hovering over it

Hover over an element in your canvas and while using the Move Tool (V)  hold down command (control on windows)  and left click. You now have selected that element’s corresponding layer in the layer palette. 2 caveats: if the layer is a group, PS will select the group. Second thing is this trick can be a little finicky because other layers above the one you want to select get in the way.

Comments

  1. derek lapp said...
    October 18, 2009

    i can’t believe no one ever told you about these. i use them so frequently.

    clipping layers don’t only act as a mask, but any child layer will inherit the layers styles of the parent. IE if you have 3 layers clipped to a box, then you add a stroke, inner shadow and gradient overlay to the box layer, the clipped layers will inherit the attribute sets.

    also, if you want to change brush sizes quickly, use the keys with the brush tool selected to pan through the brush palette.

    another gem is cmd (or ctrl) + left-click with the move tool. with the move tool selected, look for a drop-down list and select ‘layer’. now, if you cmd+left-click, photoshop will auto highlight the layer in the layers palette. it’s incredibly useful if you have tons of layers and eventually stop naming them like i do.

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