Using the Lasso Tool? Keep it Straight

We normally use the lasso tool for drawing freeform selections, but youÕll find that oftentimes, while drawing your selection, youÕll need to draw a perfectly straight segment, even for just a few pixels. You can do just that by holding the Option key, releasing the mouse button, and continuing to draw your selection. YouÕll notice that your cursor changes to the Polygonal Lasso tool and that as you move the mouse, a perfectly straight selection will drag out.

When youÕve dragged the straight selection where you want, click-and-hold the mouse button (to add a point), release the Option/Alt key, and youÕll be back to the regular Lasso tool again. Drag the mouse to continue drawing your selection.

Skip the Zoom Tool

The zoom tool is ok when you need to zoom in on one particular area, but if you need to zoom out it stinks. That’s because you have to hold the option key, and click on your image, and every time you do, it only zooms outward one step. Want to zoom in and out of your image like a pro? Instead press Command+ to quickly zoom in and Command– to zoom out (that’s the minus key for zooming out). Start using this, and you’ll only grab the Zoom tool to zoom in, and then only half as much as you used to.

Getting a Fresh Histogram in One Click

When you have the histogram palette open to monitor your tonal adjustments to an image, you may see a tiny warning symbol in the right corner of your histogram. That’s its way of letting you know that you’re looking at a Histogram reading from the Histogram’s memory cache – not a fresh reading. If you want to refresh the Histogram and get a new reading (and you should), you can click directly on the tiny warning symbol and it will refresh immediately for you.

Changing Metadata Font Sizes

If you’re older than 17, chances are you’ll find the font sizes Adobe uses for the Metadata palette way, way too small. Luckily, Adobe doesn’t have many 17-year-olds on the payroll, so they included a way to increase the font size for the metadata. Just click on the little round button on the top right side of the Metadata palette (it has a black, right-facing triangle on it) and choose increase font size from the pop-up menu. The cool thing is – you can choose this command more than once, making your font size bigger and bigger each time you choose it.

Batch Renaming Made More Useful

Adobe added just one tiny field to the Batch rename dialog in Photoshop CS. It hasn’t gotten a lot of press, and it’s not a real splashy feature, but this tiny field is worth its weight in gold if you do much batch renaming. The limitation has always been that if you added a serial number to one batch of photos (lets say you named them 1 to 54), if you added another batch of photos of the same subject, you couldn’t start with the number 55. But now you can. That little field is found in the bottom left hand corner of the dialog, and it’s called "Starting Serial #". Once again – it’s the little things, isn’t it?