Photoshop

• You can sample colors outside the current image, even pick up colors from the 'chrome' of Photoshop, by choosing the eyedropper tool, click in the image and hold the mouse button pressed. Now move this tool anywhere around your screen. Click and sample! Of course, with Option / Alt pressed you sample for the background color...

• Clicking with Option / Alt on the little 'eye' of a layer in the Layer palette will hide or show all other layers.

• Be sure to have removed the standard Welcome screen in Photoshop when doing a droplet batch command and Photoshop is not opened yet. If you don't, the droplet will be hindered by it and will not continue!

• To change the presets of all the tools in Photoshop: click on the Tool Presets pallet (CS2: in the Palet source ). Open the palet menu and choose 'Reset All Tools'.

• Compare the menu items in the Dutch and English versions of Photoshop / Vergelijk de menu's van de Nederlandse en Engelse versies van Photoshop:
http://www.techzine.nl/tutorials/227.

• In Photoshop you can move a selection while making it by pressing spacebar and dragging the selection with your cursor.

• It is possible to crop an image in Photoshop very close to the document frame by moving the handles of the crop box and keeping Cmd / Ctrl pressed.

• You can activate a layer in Photoshop by right-clicking on the pixels in the layer.

• The best CMYK workspace color profile can be downloaded at ECI.
Here it is: ECI_Offset_2007.zip. Unzip this file and place the file ISOcoated_v2_eci.icc in your color profiles folder. Then you can adapt the Color Settings of your programs to use this profile for the CMYK workspace.

• Change a horizontal guide into a vertical one and vice versa by holding Option/Alt while dragging a guide from the ruler.

• It can be handy to work with images that have a size which is a multiple of 285 px wide and 285 px high. The standard grid then fits exactly.

• Change the dimensions of the ruler by right-clicking in them.

• Always do a scan with the highest optical resolution of the scanner! That's the best the scanner can do. Later you can change the resolution in Photoshop.

• Windows: click in the grey area of your Photoshop workspace and you can open documents!

• Most dialogues in Photoshop can be resetted by pressing on the Cancel button while holding Option / Alt.

• With the command File > Automate > Fit Image you can change the dimensions of an image without distorting the width / height ratio. Very handy for batch commands! If you want each image to be no bigger than 750 pixels on the long end, for example, type "750" into the width field and "750" into the height field. This will ensure that each image you process is no larger than 750 pixels wide or high, regardless of whether it is a vertical or horizontal image.

• Getting rid of any color cast is very easy when you include a neutral grey piece of paper in your scan or recording. In Photoshop go to Levels or Curves and click with the little grey eyedropper on the color of the piece of paper. Finish!

• The Single Row and Single Column Marquee tools are very handy for making perfectly straight lines: just press Delete or Backspace with the right background color present!

• Photoshop tips.doc (NL)

• 304Photoshop6Tips.pdf (EN)

• sneltoetsen.html (NL)