> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ OCTOBER 2019[ 62 ]
- AUTO-ALIGN IMAGES
Have you ever had a stack of layers of the same image that needed to be
in perfect alignment? Maybe you were doing exposure blending, focus
stacking, or any number of other techniques. I’ve seen people drop the
Opacity, and then use the Move tool (V) and the Arrow keys on their
keyboard to nudge the layers into position, or use the Difference blend-
ing mode (the image will turn completely black when a layer that’s set
to Difference mode is in perfect alignment with the layer below). All of
these are useful methods, but there’s a way Photoshop can do it for you.
Select all the layers in the Layers panel, and choose Edit>Auto-Align
Layers. For most purposes, choose Auto for the Projection method.
Click OK, and you should be good to go. - LOAD IMAGES INTO LAYERS
Speaking of aligning all those layers, how about getting them into Pho-
toshop in the first place? Do you open a bunch of separate windows
and play the drag-and-drop game? Or maybe you do the constant cut-
and-paste. Photoshop can do it for you, and it’s really easy, although not
immediately obvious. Choose File>Scripts>Load Files into Stack. Click
Browse in the Load Layers dialog, choose your images, and click Open.
Back in the Load Layers dialog, you can choose to Attempt to Automati-
cally Align Source Images, which can save you even more time! Click
OK in the Load Layers dialog, and each image will be loaded onto a
separate layer within the same document.
63. GET RID OF HALOS AROUND HAIR SELECTIONS
When you make selections to cut out hair, you’ll often find a halo around
the hair, which is great if you’re creating a Giotto painting, but not so
much for realism. This halo is also called fringing. There’s a checkbox
that will help get rid of it. First, make your selection, then click Select
and Mask in the Options Bar. Once you’ve used the Refine Edge Brush
tool (R) to paint around the edge of the hair to refine the selection, it’s
time to engage this secret option. (It’s not really a secret; the Photoshop
engineers actually put it there to be used.) Expand the Output Settings in
the Properties panel, click the Decontaminate Colors option, and watch
as the hair selection improves.
64. USE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS TO
CYCLE LAYER BLENDING MODES
Layer blending modes are the secret weapon to amazing compositing
and design work. All you need to do is change the blending mode, and
you can get some really great-looking effects between layers. In a recent
and amazing Photoshop update, you can preview the result of each
blending mode by hovering over the mode from the drop-down list near
the top left of the Layers panel. What if you want to preview the modes
on canvas without using the Layers panel? The old keyboard shortcut
still works. With the Move tool (V) selected, hold down Shift and tap the- or – keys to cycle forward or backward, respectively, through all the
different modes.
- or – keys to cycle forward or backward, respectively, through all the
Colin Smith | PhotoshopCAFE.com