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[ 77 ]your selection active around the area you want to fill with
Content-Aware Fill, press Shift-Delete (PC: Shift-Backspace),
and the Fill dialog opens. Choose Content-Aware from the
Contents drop-down menu and click OK. Photoshop will
work its magic (Adobe Magic is now a thing). It’s sticky, so
the next time you open Fill, it will already be on Content-
Aware, so you don’t have to choose it each time.
you type a lowercase character after an uppercase character
in Photoshop, there will be too much space between the
two letters. An easy way to balance the kerning is to look at
three characters at a time. Make them nice and even, then
visually move your eye one character to the right, and look
at the next three letters. Keep doing that, and you’ll have
perfect kerning.BATCH PROCESS IN ACR
Did you know that you can edit more than one photo at
a time in Adobe Camera Raw? Well, you can, and I’m not
even talking about the syncing feature. Select multiple pho-
tos from Bridge and open them in Camera Raw. You’ll see
the additional images in the Filmstrip on the left. If you press
Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A), you’ll select all the images in the
Filmstrip. As you make adjustments to one photo, all of the
other selected photos will be adjusted exactly the same way,
at the same time, all in perfect harmony.ALL IMAGES BY COLIN SMITHCROP AND STRAIGHTEN PHOTOS
If you’re scanning images on a large bed scanner, you can
scan several images at once; just arrange them all on the
scanner and click scan. Then comes the fun—you have to
separate the images. It goes something like this: Duplicate
the document three times, and crop and name each one.
(Oh, you thought I was going to say, “Crop, Save, Undo,
re-crop, rename, resave, undo, and repeat”?) There’s
a really neat tool that’s been in Photoshop since around
Photoshop 6-ish (or was it CS2?). Choose File> Auto mate>
Crop and Straighten Photos. Photoshop will now detect
the edge of each scan, and separate and crop each as its
own image. As a bonus, it also does the second part of its
name: It will straighten the crooked scans too. This one is
a massive timesaver.
FIX THAT KERNING, KID!
Kerning is the space between two characters in a word. You
know, that tiny space that can appear really huge when
you’re looking at a poorly kerned menu or billboard. To the
initiated eye, nothing says amateur faster than bad kerning.
The good news is that it’s really easy to fix in Photoshop.
With the Type tool (T) active, put the cursor in between the
two characters that need to be kerned. To change the spac-
ing, hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key and tap the Left
or Right Arrow keys to change the kerning. Typically, when
REVEAL BOUNDING BOX OF OVERSIZED LAYER
Whenever you press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T), you’ll enter into
Free Transform mode. A bounding box will appear around
the selected layer with points (handles) that can be dragged
around to transform the shape or size of the object. Some-
times when you drag a photo or layer into an existing docu-
ment, it’s much larger than the document, and you can’t see
the bounding box because it extends off the page. Here’s a
tip to make those handles visible: When you’re in Free Trans-
form, press Command-0 (PC: Ctrl-0) (zero). This will cause the
document window to expand so that you can see the entire
bounding box and handles. Yay, crisis averted. n