By now you may have heard that Adobe plans to add a Content Aware Crop tool feature to Photoshop CC with the next update. You may be thinking that they already have that feature available, and you would be somewhat correct. You can already do what the video above shows manually, but the new tool will simplify the process.
Tagged: Photoshop
Integrate Google Fonts into Photoshop quickly, easily and free
The good folks at MadeBySource have released Fontea, a plugin for Photoshop that allows you to apply one of 700 Google Fonts with a single click via a native panel. It’s quick and easy, and works quite well.
Manipulate 3D images right inside Photoshop with free plugin
The short video above should tell you all you need to know about what PixelSquid does. Manipulating images as 3D objects right inside Photoshop without the hassle of knowing how to use 3D tools is a concept I’m surprised more companies haven’t tried to tackle.
PixelSquid offers quite a decent-sized collection of 3D images, including a few nice collections like the Apple Collection—which features over 50 Apple objets from yesterday and today. I also liked the Money collection.
The plugin is free, though you do have to sign-up for the service.
10 Photoshop alternatives
Affinity Photo is one of the few image editors outside of Photoshop that supports the CMYK color space, so it’s the only one of these apps that I would call a true Photoshop alternative for designers. The $49 price tag ain’t too shabby, either. Of course, if you’re a web designer or photo hobbiest, you have a ton of options—including the excellent Pixelmator.
How to export InDesign layers as a layered PSD file
InDesign Secrets shared this excellent InDesign script that converts your layered InDesign file to a layered Photoshop file. Mike Rankin takes you through the simple steps in the article, but I’ll tell you from experience that this is the sort of thing that is best left to designers who are obsessive about details like naming and organizing their layers, regardless of what program they’re working in. And as Mike points out, this is something that is best left as the “final” step—as you won’t know (or have a whole lot of control over) what remains editable after the conversion.
Photoshop CC to add Artboards (pages) feature
Free dark Photoshop patterns
Some really nice dark seamless patterns for use in Photoshop. Click the image for a closer view of the fabric pattern. Also included are wood, suede, and concrete.
Getting to know Photoshop’s Content Aware tools
Adobe Photoshop has some powerful tools for moving, cloning and extending your image in the form of it’s Content Aware tools. If you’re unfamiliar with them, take a look at these two brief video tutorials from Adobe.TV. These are some fantastic tools I use quite often.
Using Content Aware Patch
Using Content Aware Move and Extend
Photoshop Smart Objects: linked vs. embedded
Using Photoshop Smart Objects is a great way to work non-destructively. You can embed a Smart Object directly in a Photoshop file or link to a separate file and update it and reuse it in multiple projects.
I recently had a co-worker ask what they were and why I use them. I had a difficult time explaining it, so when I came across this video tutorial, I quickly fired-off a link. It’s a great walk-through for those who’ve never used them.
Feathering the edges of a selection along the edge of a document in Photoshop CC
In previous versions of Photoshop, if you selected an area of an image that included an edge area and then chose Select>Modify>Feather, the Feather would be added to the entire selection. While this might be desirable in some instances, in the majority of cases, it would be ideal if the feather was only applied within the image (and not to the edges). As a result, in the current version, the engineering team has changed the default behavior so that they feather is not applied at the edge (the canvas bounds) of an image.
Julieanne Kost enlightens us about this feature that I’m sure most people don’t even notice is there. Be sure to check out all her other awesome posts while you’re there, she has a lot of great information and tutorials.