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you have to re-install Photoshop, you won’t lose all those custom styles
that you built for your projects.
- USE STYLES WHEN RECORDING ACTIONS
When you record an action, it’s usually a step-by-step recipe for a
series of edits you made. When you play the action on another layer or
image, it runs through that recipe and repeats those steps. If your action
includes several layer styles, instead of recording the settings for each
individual layer style such as a Gradient Overlay, Drop Shadow, Inner
Shadow, Outer Glow...(you get the point), simply save all those values
as a graphic style before recording your action.
With the layer (that has all the layer styles) active, go to the Styles
panel (Windows>Styles), click on its flyout menu at the top right, and
choose New Style. Give your style a name, and click OK. You’ll see it
appear at the end of the list in the Styles panel. Now you can record
your action with only one instruction for all those layer styles. Just
click on the style that contains all those custom properties while
recording the action. The action will play much faster and be less
intensive on your computer’s RAM.
- CUSTOMIZE PROOF SETUP
Command-Y or (PC: Ctrl-Y) is the shortcut for proofing colors in Pho-
toshop. By default, it gives you a proof of your graphic or image in the
CMYK color space. But today, many of us aren’t printing or working
for that output target. Go to View>Proof Setup and choose the actual
target output in which you’re most likely to work. You can even create a
Custom Proof Condition based on printer profiles, etc. In this way you’ll
know what your image might look like on the web, in video, or printed.
- MATCH FONTS IN PHOTOS
Use Type>Match Font to discover the font style used for anything
you can reference in Photoshop. (This works best if the type in the
image is straight on and level.) The Match Font dialog will ask you
to use the onscreen crop marks to outline a single line of text. Pho-
toshop will then try to find the closest match to the font on both your
system and Adobe Fonts.
- SELECT>FOCUS AREA
The Focus Area feature found under the Select menu is great
when you want to sharpen the areas of an image that are in focus, or
you can invert the selection (Shift-Command-I [PC: Shift-Ctrl-I]) to
further blur out areas that aren’t in focus.
- DON’T FORGET ALPHA CHANNELS!
Alpha channels aren’t new, but they’re one of the greatest workflow
insurance policies that everyone seems to forget about. As you’re
working, save your selections by going up to the Select menu and
choosing Save Selection. This will let you name and save that selec-
tion as an alpha channel. Now, if you need to bring it back at a later
time, simply go to Select>Load Selection and you’ll be able to choose
any previously saved selection from the Channel drop-down list.
(You can also find these saved alpha channels in the Channels panel
[Window>Channels].) This can save you a lot of time and stress.
- SAVE GRAPHIC STYLES TO CC LIBRARIES
If you’re using layer styles to treat your text, photos, backgrounds, or
anything else, it’s a good idea to create a library in the CC Libraries
panel (Window>Libraries) where you can save those styles to reuse
them anytime you want, share them with others, or access them from
any other machine on which you work.
Just have the layer active where you applied some layer styles, click
the plus symbol at the bottom left of the Libraries panel, and you’ll see
which properties can be saved. Click on Layer Style and those styles
will be saved to the library. Double-click the saved styles name to
rename it. To apply those styles to another object, click on the object’s
layer in the Layers panel to make it active, and then click on the saved
style in the Libraries panel. It’ll save you time, and if, for some reason,
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