Workflow tips & tricks like a professional in Photoshop
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, this video is all about Workflow Tips & Tricks. Now this whole section following is going to be a few videos on it. This particular video though is all the little bits and pieces that weren't big enough to have their own video. Just like lots of little handy things. Some of them we've covered a touch before maybe in the course, but let's put them all together here.
The first one is opening files, so on our Mac, this is Mac only, if you grab an image, hold down the 'Command' key and hit 'Tab', it shows you all the available applications that are open. You just drag it in to the actual thing. So just drag it right into there, and it opens up. Or you can drag it, if you prefer, just down to your dock, and just drag it straight into the icon. The next one is rotating your canvas, so I know where that-- say I'm working on my mask here that we made earlier, got my Brush Tool, and I can drag down, kind of down the edge of this, really easily with my mouse. All my arm muscles are really good at doing that movement. If I have to kind of go around this way though, I'm just not as capable of dragging it. That was pretty good.
So rotating the canvas is pretty easy, hold down the 'R' key on your keyboard. Just keep holding it down, and then just click anywhere. You're not rotating your image, you're just kind of moving it so that you can then work in your kind of like natural habitat in terms of like masking. I'm not sure what I'm doing to the edge here, but you get the idea. Hold down 'R', move it around. So that you can kind of get that natural angle for your Wacom instead of having to move it around your desk. Me, I'm just using my mouse here. If you've got a MacBook Pro, actually I think it works on any MacBook that were built in the last like five years.
You can actually just-- you don't have to hit the R key, you can just use your two fingers on your touchpad, and just kind of like squiggle them around. Squiggle's not the word, but I've got two fingers on my touchpad, and just turning out. I don't have to change any tools, it just moves it around nicely. Does that work on a PC? I guess it really depends on the machine, give it a try. Two fingers, just give it a bit of a rotate. Like you're in Google Maps, you can pinch and zoom too. Once you've finished you can hit 'Esc' on your keyboard in the top left, and that just gets it back. You can leave it like this all you like, it will still export the right way out. It's just kind of like a temporary thing. All right, 'Esc'.
Next one is Zoomify; we covered this in our earlier video, but I want to tie it in here again, put it all together nicely. So I'm working around, fixing up the edges here, touching it up, and I need to get down to the bottom left. Remember, hold down-- you remember what it was? It's a key, you hold it down, it's the H key. Just hold it down, hold it down, click, hold your mouse. I'm holding the mouse the whole time, and the H key, then let go of your mouse. Just means you can jump from this point, rather than doing the old dreaded, like-- you drag in, you're like, you've missed it, you're trying to find it, and you're like, "Where is it, I should have zoomed out." So just hold down the 'H' key, click, hold, and drag. Then let go, and it goes back to that exact zoom, you can start working nicely.
Another little tip and trick is, under 'View', if you're working on one of the new MacBook Pros that has the touch bar, it's above your keyboard, it's a physical, half physical thing. Don't have a new MacBook Pro without the touch bar, it's probably not going to be there, I'm not sure. Go 'Customize Touch Bar', and what you'll find is, you can't see it, it's on my other screen here, but it's giving me lots of ways to adjust that touch bar. I can just add different things to it. I'll do a screenshot and get the editor to add it in here. Although you can't see my touch bar, they're all wiggling away, and I can say actually I want to go to the one that says Blending Mode, and I want to add that there because I use it quite a bit. Or, see the one on the bottom right there? It says Select & Mask, we've used that loads. I'm going to make sure that's on my touch bar. Anything that's using loads, you can drag on to it.
So that's the touch bar. You can also customize the toolbar across here, which is kind of cool. See these three little dots here, you can click on this, and click, click and hold it down, and say 'Edit Toolbar'. Just means you can tidy this up. If there's tools in here you just don't use, get rid of them. You can see the Lasso Tool group, you just don't use any of these, you can just drag them over here and say I don't want you, you, or you. You can see it just disappeared out of my list, tidying it up nicely. You can always go back to 'Restore Defaults'.
Another cool thing you can do is, let's say the Slice Tool, was helpful, is not anymore, right? But whenever I tap C, it turns-- I'm not sure if you've done this but you accidentally type C, and you end up with that little graphic in the top left corner. Probably you spent ages through View, trying to turn it off. You can say Disable the shortcuts for anything that's hidden. So we're not using these 3D materials, we're not using the ruler, or these ones, or Count Tool. All of these, once you've got it, you can save a preset, and you're going to call these the 'Dan Presets'. You too can call it Dan Presets. It just means that later on if you restore defaults, you can go back and load, get all of Dan's presets. Click 'Open', click 'Done', you can see over here, under the Eyedropper Tool, nice and tidy, nice and clean. No Lasso Tool.
One other one in here that you might turn off, just to get it looking nice, grab him, come on, Edit Toolbar. You also see the ones you have turned off are actually in here. So not gone forever, they're just under this little extras list. Edit Toolbar, this one here you might not use Quick Select. See down the bottom here, appears, disappear, same with this one, you might not use. We're getting pretty nerdy here, right? So I'm going to go 'Restore Defaults', click 'OK'. Yours need to look like mine for the rest of this course. I would totally do this if I wasn't an instructor. So let's close down a couple of these. Don't want to work with you, I'll leave you open, and you, I'll go and close.
So let's say you're working on a couple of images, this one, and this one. This one here you may be retouching, and you should not work it into this larger kind of group of Artboards. We'll cover Artboards later in this course, but this one here is quite nice. If you go to 'Window' go to 'Workspace', this one here can be nice. When I say Workspace I mean Arrange. So 'Window', 'Arrange', and this one here, either of these two I find quite useful. 2-up Horizontal or 2-up Vertical, just means I can see this one and this one at the same time. It means I can be working on this document, kind of like dragging it across. Just makes life a lot easier than trying to use that kind of, up into the tab thing. Just last two documents open, maybe ones for reference, over here you're building a montage and you're just kind of like, got lots of different images, you can have tabs in here as well, but have this kind of overall document open. To get back, 'Window', 'Arrange'. And this one here, it says, 'Consolidate All to Tabs'.
Other interesting things that don't get their own video, they get lumped into here, is your libraries, we're going to look at libraries a little bit more. If you can't see them, go to 'Window', and go to 'Libraries'. And what's useful in here, is let's say that I've got an image in my library, actually, let's go to my 'Stock Images'. You can have anything in your library, to say, "Actually, I like this, can you go out and find a similar image?" What it does is it goes and looks at Adobe Stock, You may or might not have a subscription to this already, but you can see it's gone through and found images that are very similar. Actually in this case they're super similar, because I got them from-- look at that. Where is it I got that one? Pretty close. It's just really handy, you can just dump anything into libraries. Doesn't have to be a stock image. Let's dump this one into stock images, so I'm going to clear that out. I'm going to dump this one into my library. Then I'm going to right click it, and say, go find me a similar image, please.
It goes and checks Adobe Stock. Now Adobe Stock is a paid service, I pay for it every month. Man, how much is it? It's like 30 bucks a month, I think. You get 10 images, 20 images, 50 images? Man, I need to check that out. More than I need at least. So mine's taking a little bit of a long time, because I'm working on some terrible internet at the moment. You can see, it's gone through and found stock images that will match this kind of image here. It's not related at all to Adobe Stock, it's just an image from Unsplash. Just dump it into your libraries and click 'Find visually similar'. And if you have a paid subscription like me, I can just click on this one and say, either download a preview, or actually just pay for it, license it, give it to me. Cool, huh? So if you are paying for Shutterstock or iStock, they're great libraries, but there are just so many cool ties between Adobe Stock. So you might look at switching over.
Another little tip is, if we go to-- what have we got? Let's use this one here. So there's graphic that I'm working on-- actually I've finished this one now, but let's say, I've got this type here, I put it on its own layer. I'll get this bit down here, just make it clean. So working with this font here you can see it is the font size, this is the line spacing or leading. So I can do a couple of things, one is I can just drag the icon up, that can be really handy instead of having to like go in here, and type, and go, "Oh, only gives me 72." You can just kind of drag that icon up and down. We can also do in any field in Photoshop. So any field that we can find, I'll find a few more, there's ones up there, there's ones here. Just use the-- so I've clicked in here, and I'm going to use the up arrow on my keyboard, just goes up and down.
You don't have to like hold, drag, and type, just use up and down, and if you want to get a bit faster just hold the 'Shift' key down. And it does it in like 10 points rather than 1. So it's just a good way-- so if I want it a bit bigger I can just hold down, I just click in here. Hold down 'Shift' and just tap the app key. This works in any field, not just fonts, you can hear, the line spacing, there is no line spacing, let's click on this one. So click in here, and I can just go up, hold 'Shift', down, just to increase that, so it could be the points as well. So moving the X and Y position. It could be an Adjustments Layer, I could go into here and say, actually, not that one. I'll click in here, and just go up, up, and down, down, hold 'Shift'. And that's at any field, a bad example I guess, but just any clickable field that has numbers in it, you can just use your up and down. Hold 'Shift' to make it go faster.
Next pro tip is to look in the Channels and Paths to see if there's a selection already. This is a stock library image, I've downloaded it, it was a PSD, and it's just one old layer, and you're like, "Oh man, I have to mask these out." Okay, I can mask this out, but the thing to check, especially if it's a PSD, and it's a file from a professional kind of like stock library site, there might be, if you're lucky, it's worth checking every single time, under Channels or Path there might be a saved mask, and they're just hidden in here. See here, under the Paths, somebody's gone around this one with a Pen Tool already, and it's just sneakily hiding here in Paths. It's not obvious, I can click on it holding my 'Command' key, and it turns it into a selection. That's 'Ctrl' key on a PC. And now I can go back to my Layers and add my Mask, and it's a whole lot quicker than trying to do it myself.
Often I find these things after I've spent like an hour masking something out. Get to a point, and I'm like, "They should have done this before me." I go and check on parts. Let's undo. So done one for both books in here so I can mask both of them out. Sometimes there are paths, like with the Pen Tool. Let's 'Deselect', there's also one in here under Channels. Remember we did Channel Mask earlier on. So somebody's done one of those for us here as well. There it is there, I can hold down my 'Command' key on my Mac, click it, go back to RGB, and now I've got a mask for that little edge there. Not sure what that one's for, but it was in there, I might really need it.
So there's a JPEG, it won't include this data, but if you load something and it's a PSD, there are a few other file formats that do contain this as well, but a PDF. Not sure, EPS maybe, it's worth checking. What happens to me a lot is when I get kind of marketing material, say Adobe, because I'm a Certified Training Center, they send me lots of marketing material, just this flat graphic, and I'm like, "Hmm, how am I going to use this, and I go into channels or paths", and I'll say, there's a mask ready to go for me. So if you are working with a large supplier, and they're sending you these bunk files, it might be that they're just hiding in channels and paths, it's worth a look. There is my kind of Adobe Instructor Certification badge, Adobe logo. All of these, I want to have a Drop Shadow, I want it to be the same. So instead of doing it per layer, what you can do is you can grab all of these guys, so I'm clicking and dragging across them all. Make sure I got them all, put them in a group. Then go down to 'fx', and just apply the Drop Shadow to the whole thing. Big Drop Shadow. I'm just going to have a teeny tiny one. By teeny-tiny, that's not even that teeny tiny. I'm not sure why I'm spending ages now, but you can see they all have a consistent Drop Shadow all around them. Just using one of them on the whole group rather than each individually.
Two more tips in this one, one is, I don't know why, I feel compelled to show you this one. It is under the Eyedropper Tool, the one that sees the Count Tool. And if-- I don't know, it's me, my Math, I think there's some dyspraxia in there. I don't know but this is helpful, watch this, it's the Count Tool, it's these. How many of these have I got? I use this for rows and columns and stuff when I'm doing Word stuff. You might be, I don't know, Photoshop's weird, it gets used by doctors, and police, and forensic, I teach all sorts of people. I don't know, I feel like doctors should have some sort of specialized equipment, but often they'll use Photoshop with high resolution images.
I'm not sure what we're counting but I know there's 20 of them. It might be for, say you're an architect, I'm trying to invent uses for this now. Let's click 'Clear'. So I want to say last but not least, but it's on the end of my list here for a reason, right? I use it though, so I'm like, it has to be in here somewhere, because there'd be one person out there that might find it really useful. So I made a basic selection in here, and most people don't know you can go to 'Select', and go to 'Transform Selection', and you can kind of-- I can make it a bit bigger, I can shrink it down. I can transform a selection like I can do in the other shape.
I feel like we petered out at the end there. We started with some cool stuff and we ended up with Transform Selection. I hope you found something good in there. There's still a chunk more of our work flow tips and tricks, but they've got their own little videos now because they've got a bit more substance. Let's go in and jump into one of those now.