10 Time-Saving Photoshop Shortcuts

Adjust brush size. With the Brush Tool activated, rather than accessing the dropdown menu on top of the screen, press the best bracket key, ], to increase how big the brush along with the left bracket key, [, to decrease.
Adjust brush hardness. Along with size, brush hardness frequently has to be adjusted. Holding shift + ] (right bracket key) increases the hardness with the brush while holding shift + [ (left bracket key) will reduce the hardness. Now you can maintain the brush tip where it belongs, in the heart of your image, instead of making frequent trips up to the properties bar.
Copy to a new layer. Again, keep the pointer around the artboard. Duplicating a layer is actually pressing CTRL + J (PC) or Cmd + J (Mac). This will build a copy with the active layer within the layers palette. It will also copy an engaged selection onto a brand new layer, leaving the existing layer intact. Also, pressing CTRL+ Shift + J (PC) or Cmd + Shift + J (Mac) will cut the actual active selection from the active layer and paste it onto a brand new layer. If you name your entire layers, simply adding the ALT (PC) or Option (Mac) critical for either of such combinations will open the New Layer dialog box so you can name the new layer for the fly. You can also adjust the opacity and blend mode of the new layer right within the New Layer dialog box, saving you an additional vacation to the Layers Palette.
Fill the layer or selection with color. Press CTRL + Backspace (PC) or Cmd + delete (Mac) to fill the layer with the present foreground color. Press ALT + Backspace (PC) or Option + delete (Mac) to fill the layer with the present background color. These same commands may also be used to fill some. Bonus: To change the foreground and background colors time for the default colors (black for your foreground and white for the background) simply press the D key.
Undo. No need to look at the History palette. CTRL + Z (PC) or Cmd + Z (Mac) will undo a stride. Pressing this combination again will redo (or rather, enable you to get time prior to undoing). Need to go back further than the last step? Simply hold CTRL + Alt (PC) or Cmd + Option (Mac) and press Z. Every time you press the Z key, you are going to move backward one more step.
The Hand Tool. Forget the scroll bars with the edges with the document window. To quickly navigate across the image, hold around the spacebar to temporarily activate the Hand Tool. Click and drag with all the Hand Tool to advance the document. To deactivate the Hand Tool, release the area bar.
Favorite Tools. Learn the keyboard shortcuts to your favorite tools. For example B = Brush Tool, V = Move, J = Spot Healing Brush. As you become familiar with these, you may notice that teams of tools all share a similar shortcut key. For example, the Spot Healing Brush, the Healing Brush, the Patch Tool as well as the Red Eye Tool all share the identical shortcut key – the letter J. By pressing J, you’ll activate the last used tool in the group. To cycle, although other tools inside the group, hold Shift + the letter for that group of tools, along with the active tool will cycle to another tool within the group.

If you’re continually using a command that does not possess a keyboard shortcut, you can easily assign one. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts. Find the command on the list and assign the true secret combination you desire to use. If you try to assign a previously used combination, Photoshop asks if you want to reassign that key combination. This dialog box is also a good spot to learn what keyboard shortcuts are allotted to all commands.

Layer Opacity. To quickly change the opacity in the current layer, simply press a number key. Pressing 5 = 50% opacity, press 3 = 30%, etc. To narrow the opacity to some percentage more specific when compared to a multiple of 10, press both numbers quickly. For example, pressing 5, 5 in quick succession set the opacity to 55%. (To get returning to 100%, quickly press 1, 0, 0.) Please note, this shortcut won’t work if one with the tools inside the second group is active.
Zoom in and out. To zoom into a graphic, press CTRL and + or Cmd and +, and also to zoom out press CTRL and – (PC) or Cmd and – (Mac).
Scrubby sliders. Most settings in Photoshop give you a slider to adjust to your liking.

Click and drag on the name of the setting to activate the Scrubby Slider. Sliding to the left or right will adjust the setting value up or down without needing to open the slider. You will know that a Scrubby Slider can be acquired whenever your cursor turns into a little pointing finger with arrows left and right.

Unfortunately, there is not any shortcut once and for all, old fashioned practice, but once you’ve memorized these shortcuts, you will be on the right path to finishing projects in record time! As anybody who sells their stock photos knows, you need to get the maximum revenue in each and every way possible.

Design Considerations For Animated Web Sites

Bandwidth, which is the transfer rate of internet data for the user’s browser, has hindered the creation of websites with multiple media effects and enhancements.

Many techniques and option is available to help to keep website graphics and animation download time for it to a nominal amount and can include the usage of tables, colour reduction and optimization of graphics, use of thumbnails, reuse of images, optimal placements of scripts, and collection of fast loading type of web browsers including Firefox.

Several online web software tools are offered to perform various tests on your sites, like internet site garage, sites can survey, pehtoori (HTML validation service), link alarm, and site inspector.

Bandwidth Issues

It has not been in the past that this norm was the 56K modem. Today, many users (appr 55%) still utilize the 56K modems for surfing, so bandwidth must be a problem for website designers. However, with technological advances like fast cable modems, TI lines, etc, bandwidth can become less of a problem later on. However, today you have to still design websites with bandwidth in mind.

Many techniques and choices offered to assist in keeping website graphics and animation download times to a nominal amount. The following tips will help you create websites that load as fast as possible:

Use tables for putting graphics together to cut back the size of gif animation. Depending on what your animation is much like, tables will help reduce its overall file size. For example, you could have a picture you need to animate, but only a small part of the image will actually function as the animation. You can manually chop up the image into different pieces employing a program like photoshop, or automatically, using a special utility like Ulead SmartSaver Pro. If you use photoshop, you should place the resulting graphics back together again within your HTML editor using table cells. Programs like SmartSaver create the HTML file while using graphics already within the table cells. By slicing increase image into sections, the small part with the image that animates can be in a table cell on its own. The rest from the image inside other table cells won’t end up part of the actual animation itself, thus reducing file size.

Reduce the colour palette of one’s gif animation. You can decrease how big your gif animation by reducing the number of colours in the colour pattern. For example, when you have a 256 colour image and decrease its colour’s to 64, how big the animation is going to be significantly smaller. However, an excessive amount of colour reduction could possibly have an effect on image quality. Obviously, some complexities exist for animated gif creation. Fortunately, several software option is available that assist with palette and overall gif animation optimization, such as Equilibrium’s Debabilizer, Digital Frontier’s HVC ColorGif, Ulead’s gif animator, as well as online gif optimizing services, like gif wizard, and gif cruncher.

Reuse images in a website. Reusing images, whenever possible, is an additional way to decrease download time because of the browser downloads and places the images within the pc’s cache. For example, the use of an image on your webpage then use the same images on four other pages from the website, the style has got to download just once. Thus, download time is kept to the very least since one image downloads as opposed to five separate images.

Specify Height and Width with your web coding on your animated gif images. You should always specify height and width within your HTML page to your animated gif images. If you do not specify height and width inside your HTML page, then your browser will wait for the graphic to load before loading the text. You should also remember that setting the height and width with your HTML page with a size less space-consuming than the graphic will not reduce download time since the style’s file size will remain just like it absolutely was before.

Specify a decreased-res image to display as a high res image loads. You can create a minimal -res variation of a jpg or gif image to appear while expecting the high definition image to complete downloading. When you try this, the page appears to be load faster towards the user. In reality, the additional image actually adds to the total download time. To add a low-res variation, simply add an attribute for the image tag like the following:

IMG src=”” lowsrc=””>

Be guaranteed to use jpgs for colorful photographic images. While you could compress your photographic images as gif images, jpeg compresses colourful images with generally better results, since jpg images offer 24-bit colour in comparison with gif images’ 256 colours.

Substitute thumbnails for larger images over a webpage.

Use interlaced jpg and gif images. You can save your images as interlaced jpg and gif images that can display a preview with the images because they load.

Alright, now go and CREATE!

Web Design Is A Snap With These Techniques

Do the best you can when you are designing a website. You will see in this piece that this mindset is of utmost importance. You can also see some great web design tips that are easy to follow.

Although it is common to see the www. at the front of a website URL, you should try to make sure that you can access your site whether you choose to include it or not. This will make it much easier for anyone to access regardless of how they type it.
Use a style sheet to stay consistent. There is almost nothing more disconcerting than being sent to a page that looks at nothing like the site you were just looking at, even if it is concerning the same subject. Style sheets help with saving your formatting, so each page looks similar to the rest.
To help your website visitors find their way home on your site, always include a link to your homepage on each page of your site. Having a home page link that is visible allows your reader to easily make their way back to the starting point. If you do not have a home page link then your visitors might get frustrated and leave your site altogether.
Keep your topics separated. If your site has multiple topics, give each its own page. This ensures that no one ends up confused and leaves as a result. Search engines will also have an easier task of ranking specific pages.
If you have several pages on your website, use a navigation bar at the top to help visitors find the information they need right away. Include contact information, so they can speak with you if they’d like. Headings should be clear and visible, and paragraphs should be concise as well as easy to read.
Make sure your website uses a consistent font throughout. Some websites change fonts willy-nilly without any design reason to do so. This makes the content difficult to process for visitors. Most websites, especially business websites, will do just fine sticking to basic fonts like Arial, Veranda, or even Times New Roman.
To help your website function the way it is intended to, make sure all your links are working. If you have broken links then your visitors may get frustrated when they try to click on something that interests them. Frustrated visitors is not something you want because they end up leaving your site mad.
Check link integrity on a regular basis. Do this from time to time, before uploading it to the server. This is very important because visitors will be put off if they repeatedly click on broken links on your website. To maintain your site integrity, test it every time you make a change.
Selecting the right server to upload your files, is important for site design. You want a file server that is reliable, secure, and fast. The pros go with FileZilla because it fits the bill in terms of speed and reliability. You can choose this or something similar; what’s important is that you have a reliable file server.
Make sure that you do your homework when it comes to web design. You will gain new knowledge or just be refreshed on what you already knew.

6 Secrets to Photoshop Mastery

The excitement that comes from downloading your digital photos can dissipate quickly as you discover the shots you took were not so great after all. But then, that’s what Photoshop is for.

But if you haven’t mastered this powerful digital image editing software yet, you’re in for a bumpy, if not totally frustrating ride ahead. With so many options to choose from in Photoshop and procedures that require you to follow “the rules”, it’s easy to get lost. It’s easy to spend hours tweaking and re-tweaking your photo only to find you have to scrap the whole project anyway because you just can’t figure out how to do what you want to do.

So where can you turn for help?

Google

I think at this point in time, Google is everyone’s first choice when they want to find information. Simply type into their search box whatever you are trying to do, for example: “photoshop how to remove red-eye”. I just tried that phrase and got 380,000 possible ways to remove red-eye and it only took .22 seconds. The only problem with that is, I will spend the next hour clicking on and trying different methods. One sure thing about Photoshop, if you ask 10 people HOW to do something, you’ll likely get 10 different answers.

YouTube

The greatest thing about YouTube is you get to see someone actually do what you want to do. They have a search engine there, so again I type in, “photoshop how to remove red-eye”. This time I get 51 possible choices. 51 videos to watch and learn and try for me. Again, the same problem as the original Google search only with fewer options to try. With all the different versions of Photoshop and all the different skill levels displayed on YouTube, I know I can succeed in removing the red-eye, but it could still take quite a while to watch 51, 5-minute videos.

Online Courses

Many online “gurus” are offering programs to teach you Photoshop. You buy their books on PDF, follow along with their videos, or receive their CD or DVD in the mail. While it beats sitting through an adult learning course at your local school, you’ll still be investing a lot of time and money in learning “stuff” you may never use. Why endure the expense and time required to learn a lot, when you can get just what you want more simply? Ultimately, without good notes, you still won’t find the information you need, when you need it, although you know you have it somewhere.

Local Library

Your local library will no doubt contain several books on mastering Photoshop. Only trouble is, you’ll have to read and return the book. Photoshop is one of those things where if you don’t use it, you lose it. It’s hard to remember all the steps and procedures if you only use them infrequently. You could buy the book at the bookstore, but really, how many times do we open a book these days for reference? See #1.

Forums

There are millions of photographers on this planet. One thing for certain is they all want to know what everyone else is doing. We’re constant learners, always looking for that next great tip to make our shots easier or more creative. A quick Google search of “photoshop forums” nets me 494,000 possible forums to look at for answers to previously asked questions. While I might meet a group of photogs I’d like to hang with long-term, it’s likely there are better places for getting my photo fixed before bedtime tonight.

Tip Cards

Tip cards are my favorite resource when it comes to getting fast results. For hundreds of years, folks have used recipe cards to turn a bunch of kitchen ingredients into a delicious finished product. Isn’t that essentially what we’re trying to do with Photoshop? Aren’t we trying to take a bunch of computer commands and turn them into a great finished photograph? Yes, we are! The great thing about these tip cards, or “photoshop recipe cards” is they sit right beside your computer for easy reference. You know what you want to do, you pull that cards from the deck and get to work. In just minutes you’re finished. You can find a lot of TIP CARDS on our website!

Nothing beats the feeling you have when you finally rescue your hum-drum photograph from Dullsville and turn it into something great. Having the right Photoshop tools and tips at your disposal can make all the difference between photographs that proudly hang on your wall, or pictures that never get printed at all.