Other Color Models

When you’re in the Color Picker and you click on the Custom button, by default the selected color swatches are the PANTONE Solid Coated set. However, Photoshop comes with a host of other color sets built right in. To choose a different color set, click-and-hold on the Book pop-up menu and you’ll find a list of color sets to choose from.

Photoshop’s Glass Filter

If you’ve ever tried to use Photoshop’s Glass filter (found under the Filter menu, under Distort), then you’ve already found that it doesn’t work worth a darn (and that wording is overly kind). It just shouldn’t be named "Glass." It should be named something like "Mess up your image" or "Junkicizor"–something more indicative of the real effect it has on your image. There’s one instance where you might consider using the Glass filter, and that’s when creating a Glass effect on type. You start by creating an Alpha channel of your type, blurring it a pixel or two, and saving it as a Displacement Map. Then when you use the Glass filter, choose "Load Texture," and load the map you saved; it applies a glassy look to your type. It almost looks decent. It doesn’t look like glass, mind you, but it looks decent.

Layer Set Tip

If you have a bunch of layers to which you’d like to apply the same Blend Mode (or the same Opacity setting for that matter), link them all together, then choose "New Set from Linked" from the Layers palette’s drop-down menu. All the linked layers will be put into a folder (Adobe calls it a Set) within your Layers palette. That’s no big deal, but the big deal is that whatever Blend Mode or Opacity setting you choose for your Set is applied to all the layers automatically, as long as they remain in the Set. Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it?

Importing artwork from Adobe Illustrator

There are at least five different ways to import artwork created in Adobe Illustrator but frankly, there’s only one good way to do it. In Adobe Illustrator, save the file as an EPS, switch to Photoshop, open the document you want to import your artwork into, and go under the File menu and choose Place. Choose your saved EPS Illustrator artwork and click OK. A bounding box will appear with a preview (if you saved it with a preview), and you can scale the image to any size you’d like (it’s still EPS vector artwork at this point). When you get it to the exact size you like, press the Return or Enter key, and only then will it rasterize and become a pixel-based Photoshop image. When it rasterizes, it takes on the exact resolution and color mode of the document it was imported into. That’s all there is to it.

Controlling your tracking

Tracking is the space between a group of letters or words (kerning is the space between just two letters). To visually (rather than numerically) set the tracking tighter (removing space between a group of letters), take the Type tool and highlight your text, then press Option-Left Arrow to tighten. Press Option-Right Arrow to add space between a selected group of letters or words.

Canvas Size lies!

Okay, this is really more of a half-truth. Here’s the scoop: When you shrink the Canvas Size of your document (basically, you’re cropping down the image without using the Crop tool), you get a warning dialog that reads "The new canvas size is smaller than the current canvas size; some clipping will occur." If you go ahead and click the "Proceed" button, your new smaller, canvas size will appear. Here’s the thing: Let’s say you had a Type layer with the word "Washington," on it, and when you took 3 inches off your Width in the Canvas Size dialog, all that was left on screen is "shingt" (it clipped off the left and the right side), you’re really not as out of luck as Photoshop’s warning dialog makes you think. That’s because although you can’t see it, the rest of the word was not deleted–it’s just hidden from view. Grab the Move tool and drag your type left (or right) and you’ll see the rest of your supposedly "clipped-off" word.