When using small text in web graphics in Photoshop, you may notice that your text looks blurry at small point sizes (usually, anything below 12 to 14 points). Running a sharpening filter over rasterized text only serves to make it look worse. To clean up the blurry text, try increasing the tracking (kerning)amount of the text using the Character palette. By increasing the tracking amount it lowers the effects of anti-aliasing, thus making the letters appear sharper/cleaner.
Category: Photoshop
Align guides to ruler tick-marks in Photoshop
Ever have difficulty getting a guide to line up with a tick mark on the ruler while working in Photoshop? Or see that it appears to line up, only to find out when you zoom in that it really doesn’t? Fortunately there’s an easy way to do what you want. Hold the Shift key down while you drag a guide to exactly the tick mark you wish. The guide will “snap” to each tick mark on the ruler.
Snap Photoshop palettes to screen edge
Snap your Photoshop CS & CS2 palettes to the nearest screen edge by Shift-dragging them or Shift-clicking on their titlebars. This seems like a silly tip, but it drives me nuts to see palettes that aren’t perfectly aligned!
Selection options in Photoshop
You have a lot of options in working with your selections in Photoshop. Try holding the Spacebar down before you let go of a selection you are making. It will allow you to re-position your selection. Now, make a selction, go to the Select>Transform Selection menu item. Now hold down the Command key and grab the control points and move them around a bit. Starting to see the convenience of this tip yet?
Free-up more RAM for Photoshop
Every once in a while, when you’re working on a large file in Photoshop, you might want to make a trip to Edit>Purge>All – which will free up a LOT of memory. Photoshop stores your history and the clipboard in memory – which takes up quite a bit of space depending on how you work. You may also wish to experiment with lowering the amount of steps that Photoshop saves in your history palette by making a visit to the preferences. The more steps saved, the more RAM used.
Delete Photoshop layers quickly
An annoying fact when designing in Photoshop is that you quickly accumulate a multitude of layers. Even with Photoshop’s advancements in the layers arena, it gets out of hand quickly. The best thing you can do is delete unused layers. A quick way to delete multiple layers in Adobe Photoshop is to Shift+click or Command+Click the layers you don’t want, then click on the Layer Palette Trash icon. Don’t forget that you can save a Layer Comp before you delete the layers, that way you can quickly return them if necessary.
Quickly switch and select objects and layers in Photoshop
This may seem like a very basic technique, yet I see very few Photoshop users making use of it. If you want to quickly change layers. Press “V” to select the Move tool. Then Command + Click the object you want to work on. That’s it. The correct layer becomes active and you don’t need to navigate to your layers palette and scroll through the list to activate the layer you want to work on.
Working with History states in Photoshop
Normally, when you select a history state and then change the image, all states below the active state are deleted (or, more accurately, replaced by the current state). However, if you enable the Allow Non-Linear History option (from the History Options in the History palette menu), you may select a state, make a change to the image, and the change will be appended to the bottom of the History palette (instead of replacing all the states below the active state). You can even delete a state without losing any of the states below it! Note: The color of the horizontal lines between history states indicate their linearity. White dividers indicate linear states and black dividers indicate non-linear states. Another Note: Not only is a non-linear history very memory intensive, it can also be very confusing!
Highlight palette fields without dragging in Photoshop
Did you know you can click on palette field titles in Photoshop to highlight / select the contents of the field and to turn checkboxes on or off.
Force image grayscale while in RGB mode
Press Shift+Command+U to remove all the color (Desaturate) and make your image grayscale while still in RGB mode.