Photoshop Tips

There is a difference between Photoshop tips and Photoshop tutorials, you know.

A Photoshop tip is generally something that can be described in a few sentences that will make your work flow easier or faster.

A Photoshop tutorial is a series of steps that describe how to apply different techniques to a picture to enhance or change the original image. The tutorials on this site are individual pages with many steps from beginning to end.

Photoshop running slowly? Check your RAM.

If Photoshop seems to be running slowly it may be because you do not have enough RAM and Photoshop can check it for you.

At the bottom of the screen is the status bar which is set, by default, to display your document's file size. If you click and hold the little arrow head a pop up menu will appear.

Choose Show > Efficiency.

If the number is 100% then your RAM is OK. It means that your memory is doing the image work all on its own.

If it is at 75% or less it means that at least 25% of the time Photoshop ran out of RAM and had to use your hard drive to make up for it. In essence it means that Photoshop is running slow at least 25% of the time.

If you have ever done a selection on a sharp corner and the darn thing rounded it off this is how to fix it.

Check your feathering amount - it should be 0 (the default). You may have changed it at some time and forgot to set it back to its default value.

How annoying is it when you want to zoom in or out to 100% to locate the correct keyboard shortcuts or get the zoom tool or fuss with the Navigator?

If you have an Intuos it is not a problem, of course. You have one of the slide switches set for zoom in and out!

Anyway, if you want to get to 100% zoom quickly, simply double click on the Zoom Tool and there you go - instant 100% view.

This Photoshop tip is really amazing! You can get any color on your computer as your foreground color with the eyedropper tool.

Select the eyedropper tool and sample any color on the screen you are working with and then drag it out of Photoshop onto your desktop or other open document. You will need to have the Photoshop window less than the whole screen to get at any open windows on your desktop.

Did you know that Photoshop has a built in Reset Button in the different dialogue boxes?

It does and this is how you access it ...

Say you are messing with curves and the changes you have wrought are just really nasty. Normally you would cancel and reload curves.

Instead of doing that just press the Alt key (Windows) or the Options key (Mac) and the Cancel button turns into a Reset button.

Neat!