Photoshop Tips & Tricks

I’m getting a head start on my 2019 resolution to ‘master’ Photoshop. I feel like ‘master’ is perhaps an overly ambitious resolution but it sounds more goal worthy than ‘get to a point where I don’t rage quit in frustration because PS doesn’t do YY like app ZZ.’ With PS coming to iPad as well it seems a good time to put in the time to really get familiar with the software. So with that in mind I’m going to be posting frequently a condensed-ish post with tips and tricks I am picking up and sharing them here.

Views
Tips 1 and 2 come courtesy of the incredibly skilled Goro Fujita. In Preferences–>Keyboard-> Views go ahead and set your F1 and F2 keys to something more useful like flip horizontal (F1) and Proof Colors (F2). The second shortcut takes a little setting up but once enabled allows you to quickly turn your canvas black and white to really hone in on those values. Go to View–> Proof Setup–> Custom and then set “Device to Simulate” to Dot Grain 25%. Hit ok. Now you should be good to go when you hit F1 (flips your canvas horizontally) and F2 (switches your canvas back and forth from grayscale to color.)

For an extra win with F2 go ahead and open a new window (if you have the space) and set that window to be grayscale and F1 it for even more win. 🙂

Overscroll
Tip 3. There is an option in Preferences for Tools that allows you to scroll your canvas however you like. For example initially if I had a canvas that was fully visible then I couldn’t scroll and have parts of it be hidden. When doing warm up sketches I typically have really large canvases and don’t need to see all of it at once. So if I wanted to work from left to right it was annoying because I had to either physically move to an awkward position or adjust the size of the PS window. With overscroll selected I could do what felt most natural- move the canvas.