Learning the New CS6

So have you upgraded?!?!  I am in LOVE with the new CS6!  Well.... after I figured some things out that is. lol  The new crop tool is the one that really threw me for a loop.   It will be great for all the newbie CS users, but will take some getting used to for us old dogs! But this old dog WILL learn to do new tricks!  LOL  

So in my travels and talking to other new CS6 users (Thanks Marcie and Renee!), here are some links I found very useful! 

If you have some more, feel free to comment here and link us up!

 

New Brush Features: http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-tips/new-brush-features-photoshop-cs6/

The New Crop Tool:  http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-tips/photoshop-cs6-crop-tool/ and http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-with-julieanne-kost/the-newly-redesigned-crop-tool-in-photoshop-cs6/

The details from Adobe:  http://forums.adobe.com/thread/984403?PID=2159997

Some great info from Prodesigntools.com

• The long-rumored darker and modern user interface
• Redesign and clean-up of all icons, buttons, dialogs – plus rich cursors
• New Content-Aware Move, Extend, and Patch Tools
• Terrific [DSLR] video editing in both Standard and Extended versions, for many formats*
• Skin-Aware Masking with Face Detection – auto-generation of skin-tone masks
• Complete overhaul of 3D in Photoshop CS6 Extended – 1 tool now does work of 14
• Some great new (and realistic) brushes – Erodible Tips and Airbrush Tips
• Brand new Camera Raw 7 technology like in Lightroom 4
• White Balance and Noise Reduction as a selective Brush
• Text/Character Type Styles and Paragraph Styles
• Adaptive Wide Angle Lens Correction to fix distortion and straighten lines
• PixelBender now built in to Photoshop CS6 for oil painting filter
• Enhanced and more flexible Brush Pose, Brush Projection, and Color Dynamics
• Rewritten vector engine, real vector strokes with Dashed and Dotted Lines
• Mercury Graphics Engine gives 10-100X faster Liquify, Transform, Warp & more
• Big gains in performance throughout due to much greater usage of the GPU
• New Gradient Map "Photographic Toning" presets and Color Lookup adjustment layer
• Blur Gallery for creating shallow depth of field, tilt-shift blur and graduated blur
• Much smarter "Auto" for better starting points and one-click corrections
• Lighting Effects is back and better than ever, with much improved controls and 3D
• Completely reengineered and nondestructive Crop Tool, like Lightroom's
• Background Save, including tunable Auto-Save and Crash Recovery
• Integrated Layer Search/Filtering – by name, effect, style, mode, or attribute
• Easy migration tool that imports/exports custom presets and settings
• New "Bicubic Automatic" default for Image Size always does the right thing
• Path snapping & anti-aliasing improvements – critical for exacting work
• Easy insert of Lorem Ipsum text from the Type Menu
• The return of Contact Sheet II and PDF Presentations in Photoshop
• A completely redesigned and enhanced Print dialog
• Refined HDR tool with better quality including Edge Smoothness option and new presets
• Ships with Bridge CS6, which now has native 64-bit support for faster performance
• Mini Bridge taps the power of Bridge in a panel, and can now run in a filmstrip

__,_._,___

And if all that is not enough for you and you prefer videos, I did a detailed search in google.  Here's your EASY BUTTON for that to find all good things CS6!

Photoshop Tip

Good morning, Sherry here - it's Thursday and time for a Photoshop tip!  Today's tip is something I learned about 6 months ago that has brought me many smiles and saved great frustration.  Here's the scenario:  I have a layout started, and I want to place another element on the page.  I open the element into Photoshop, and I use Window-Arrange-Tile so that I can see all my open windows on the screen.  So if I wanted to put my new element onto my layout, I would use my move tool, clicking on some special space that might or might not actually allow me to drag the element onto my layout.  It worked a lot of the time, but there were too many times it didn't work.

SO!  The solution!  When you are looking at all your windows through Window-Arrange-Tile, click in the tile that contains the element you want to move.  Then go to the thumbnail of that element in the layer palette and drag that onto your layout.  Works perfect, 100%, every single time.  Also, after you drag the element, the tile that is highlighted is your layout, the place where you dragged the element, so you can just maximize that window and go right on scrapping!!!

Hope this helps you as much as it did me.  I think for next week I will try to figure out a shortcut for Window-Arrange-Tile - if you already know one, please leave me a comment!

Photoshop Tip

Hi there!  Sherry here with a little Photoshop tip that will hopefully make your work flow a little easier.

Sometimes it's so time-consuming to switch out tools when you are caught up in the process of creating a masterpiece.  So if you are working away and need to switch to the move tool for a minute, pressing the Cmd/Ctrl key will do that for you, and then as soon as you let it go, you revert to whatever you were doing before.  Also, pressing the space bar will switch you to the hand tool, again reverting back when you let it go.

Try it you'll like it!

Photoshop Quick Tip

Good morning, Sherry here with another Photoshop Quick Tip!  This will allow you to easily create a selection from a layer or a mask.  By holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on a layer thumbnail, you create a selection from the contents of that layer.  How might you use this?  Let's say you have a shape in your document and you want to cut the shape out of your paper.  Ctrl-click on the shape layer, then select the layer of the paper you wish to cut in the shape, press Ctrl-shift-I to invert the selection, then Delete to delete the extra paper.  Click the eye beside the original shape layer to remove its visibility, and you will see your new shape created with your desired paper.  You could also use this to select text for the same purpose, and I'm sure you can think of other ways that this "instant selection" tip could be helpful.  Go forth and explore!

Cool Photoshop Tip!

Good morning, Sherry here - are you ready for another Photoshop tip?  This is one I learned a few months back that has saved me great aggravation.  Here's the scenario - when I had an element that I wanted to place on my background paper, I would arrange my documents as tiles (Window - Arrange - Tile, or Alt-W, A, T).  Then I would click on the element I wanted to place on my background paper and drag it over.  Sometimes that works fine, but other times not so much.  So here's the trick:  Open your background paper and your element into Photoshop. Then Alt-W, A, T to arrange the windows as tiles (you do this so you can see all the documents on  your screen).  Be sure your layers palette is displayed.  Go to the document which contains your element.  Rather than dragging the element itself into the document with the background paper, just go to the thumbnail in the layers palette and drag the thumbnail instead!  Works like a charm every single time!

Do you have an easier way to get your elements onto your background papers?  I'd love to hear from you in the comments section - my way may not be the best way and I'm always up to learn new things!

Photoshop Trick

Happy Friday!  Sherry here - I know I said I'd see you next week but I just couldn't stay away, LOL!

Here's a photoshop trick that I wish I had known ages ago.  You probably already know that you can use the eyedropper tool to sample a color within Photoshop - for example, if you want to include a color on a part of your layout that is contained in a photo that you also have open in Photoshop, that works great.  But what if you want to sample a color that shows up somewhere on your screen, maybe in your web browser, but isn't open in Photoshop?  Well, with this trick you can do that too!  To do this, you'll have to arrange your windows so that you can see your Photoshop document as well as the screen that you want to get the color sample from.  First select your eyedropper tool (keyboard shortcut letter I).  Then click inside your image and drag the eyedropper tool to the color you wish to sample, then release.  Now when you look at your Foreground and Background colors, you'll see the newly-selected color reflected there.  Pretty cool huh?  And easy as pie!

Hope this helps you - and now I really WILL see you next week!

Tips & Techniques - Using Brushes as Masks

Click on the Tutorial Preview to get the full PDF download. 

So what to do with those digi brushes and stamps?
Get artsy of course! lol
Learn how I did the masks on these photos of my Miss Bailey of the day we were playing in the art studio.

Credits:  Follow Your Art April Explore Bundle

OR you can get the template we sell for charity of this layout.

PSD Layered: Follow Your Art Explore PSD Layered Template QP for Charity

PNG Quick Page: Follow Your Art Explore Quick Page for Charity

Photoshop Tip!

Good morning, Sherry here with a Photoshop tip for you!  This is actually one that caused me huge problems until I learned that it was an intended feature, LOL!  My fingers get to flying so fast sometimes that I don't know what keys I've hit.  So I'd be working away and all of a sudden my whole screen looked different, and I had no clue why.

Here's the tricky tip - when you press the Tab key, it toggles off the display of all of your palettes, giving you the whole screen to admire your handiwork.  Pressing the Tab key again toggles them back on.

Now that I know I haven't accidentally destroyed Photoshop by accidentally hitting some random key, I use Tab often to view my documents up close and personal!

Hope this is helpful!

Photoshop Quick Tip

Hello my friends, as I promised yesterday, it's me again, Sherry, with a quick tip for Photoshop.  One of the first things I did when I got my version of Photoshop was to download the shortcut keys so I could learn them all really fast, then promptly used the paper for doodling - there was WAY too much information there for me to absorb, and I only cared about the ones that related to digiscrapping.  As I've gone along, I've picked up some wonderful keyboard shortcuts that do help save lots of time and relate directly to digiscrapping, and that's what I'm going to give you today.

In this instance I have a Photoshop document open and the layers showing up at the side.  I'd like to scroll down several layers in order to be able to work with a different layer.  I can do that using my mouse, but sometimes taking my hands off the keyboard isn't the most efficient way to move.  So!  You can scroll down your layers by pressing Alt-[ (left bracket) to scroll down in your layers panel, or Alt-] (right bracket) to scroll up.

I've found a number of instances where this was a quick timesaver for me - try it and see if it helps you too!

I'll be back again next Wednesday, so don't forget about me, LOL!

Type Shortcut

Good morning!  It's me, Sherry, again, with a quick tip for justifying text in your layout!  I tested this in Photoshop so I'm not sure if it works the same in Elements, but if you have Elements and want to test it, just leave me a comment below please!

Situation:  You've typed several lines of text and realize that it's centered rather than left-justified as you intended.

Solution:  Making sure the Text layer is selected in your Layers panel, press Ctrl-Shift-L to left justify text.  You can also use Ctrl-Shift-C to center text, and Ctrl-Shift-R to right justify text.  (If you are using a Mac, replace Ctrl with Cmd).

Hope this helps save you some time!

Tips & Techniques - Placing a photo within a framed area

Have you ever had an odd shaped frame you wanted to fit your photo within or an overlay frame and not quite sure what might be the best method?  I was asked by a "newbie" to digital scrapbooking on how to do this last week and used her question to create a new mini tutorial for Digitals Newsletter this week.

One method I did not discuss was simply erasing all the outside parts of the photo you don't want to show.  But this is what I call destructive as if you change your mind about it's placement within your frame, you have to do from scratch again.  My first choice method will always be to create a clipping mask as I show how in Method #1 in this mini tutorial.  But as with many things in photoshop, there are many different ways to come out with the same results.  I used to use Method #2 for years in photoshop and non-photoshop graphic programs.  Each has it's own purpose, but in learning each, you will think of other ways to use these skills.

Here's a preview of the PDF page 1.  View and download the whole mini tutorial here.

Off to work now I go.  Finishing up a quick page album with my CT for December's Free with Purchase gift.

And I have some exciting things to share starting this Saturday as I am the new Featured Designer at Digitals and will have free daily downloads over the following 15 days so that at the end, you get the entire kit!  So be sure and check back Saturday and each day in the shop for your free daily download!
Want a peek?  Sure you do! lol It was created from a personal Art Journal Project and it's still going, so I'm sure there will be add-ons to this kit. :)

I also re-released an updated version of my Days of December Kit and that is now in the shop at a discount of what the original mini kits sold for.  I plan on having the 22 page Album PSD templates up also this week if you didn't get it previously.  These are perfect for your December Daily albums.

Till next time,

Photoshop Quick Tips 1-4

Revising all the old tips we did into cute little tip cards to make it easier for you to save and even print if you like. :) So here's the first four and I will do more now and then too.  Soon I will be back to doing a weekly tip to share!

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Viewing

MMPST April 18, 2011

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Viewing

Here’s a quick tip for those times when you want to turn off one or more layers for quick viewing in Photoshop.  To turn off one layer just click the eye icon next to the layer you want to hide. If you alt + click (opt + click on a Mac) on the eye icon it will hide or show all other layers except the one you clicked on.

I used this tip to make the previews below. I put all the screenshots, type layers and the arrow shape into  one psd file and turned the layers off and off to make the two different previews. This allowed me to just make one file and to use the same arrow for both previews which saves time and space.

See you next Monday with another Photoshop Tip!

Marcie

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Cycling Through Layer Blend Modes

 April 11, 2011

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Cycling Through Layer Blend Modes

I love to use blend modes when working in Photoshop but I’m often not certain which one I want to use and I spend a lot of time manually cycling through the list. Fortunately Photoshop has a shortcut for this! Click on the Blend Mode list from the top of the Layers panel and select a blend mode. Now press Shift and + to cycle through the list (Shift and - cycles in reverse). Note: don’t select (highlight) a blend mode or the keyboard shortcuts won’t work; to deselect the highlighted blend mode just click anywhere on the Photoshop background.

Don’t forget to sign up for Cilenia's newsletter to get exclusive subscriber freebie coupons. Reminder that the coupons are only good for Monday and Tuesday so don’t wait to redeem yours!  You can sign up  for the newsletter at the top right of the Digital Designer Blog.

Manic Monday Photoshop & Photoshop Elements Tips: Quick Fill Commands

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Quick Fill Commands

April 4, 2011

Today’s tips will have you using the Quick Fill commands like a pro. Here are a few ways to access and use the Fill tool:

• The Fill tool keyboard shortcut is (G)
• To access the Fill menu use Shift + F5
• To bypass the menu use 
• alt + backspace to fill with the foreground color, 
• command + backspace to fill with the background color
• Using these shorts cuts you can quickly fill a selection or set the color for type and shape layers
• If you want to preserve the transparency of your selection you should first lock the transparency layer by pressing / (backslash) and then the fill command
• Or an even simpler option is to press alt + shift + backspace or ctrl + shift + backspace to fill the foreground or background with color and preserve the transparency

I hope you signed up for Cilenia's newsletter because this week's freebie is adorable! You can get coupons for freebies and see all the new products by signing up for the newsletter at the top right of the Digital Designer Blog. 

Marcie

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Function Keys Shortcuts

March 28, 2011

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Function Keys Shortcuts

It's been awhile since I posted keyboard shortcuts so here is a list of useful Photoshop shortcuts using the Function Keys. 

Function Keys Shortcuts

Function	Windows	Macintosh
Start Help	F1	Help Key
Cut	F2	F2
Copy	F3	F3
Paste	F4	F4
Show/Hide Brush Panel	F5	F5
Show/Hide Color Panel	F6	F6
Show/Hide Layers Panel	F7	F7
Show/Hide Info Panel	F8	F8
Show/Hide Actions Panel	F9	Option +F9
Revert	F12	F12

Oh, be sure to sign up for the DDS newsletter to get your exclusive subscriber freebie coupon! 

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Delete All Empty Layers

March 21, 2011

Have you ever been working on a large Photoshop project with lots of layers and wanted a quick way to delete all the empty layers? Sure you can go through and delete them manually one by one but that could take a long time. Instead go to File Menu, then Scripts and choose Delete All Empty Layers. Viola! All the empty layers are gone as simple as that. 

Marcie

Technique Thursday - Photoshop Brush Basics

I received a question this week from a photoshop user who has been creating scrap pages for over 2 years.  She was afraid it was a stupid question and I reminded her that there are no stupid questions only stupid answers.  

She asked how she can use the abr file for brushes as she had never done this before.

So this week I want to show you how easy it is to load brushes into your photoshop program.

There are several ways so let's go through them and you can decide which way is best for you.

Open your photoshop.

Option 1: 

In the brush panel, click on the little drop down box in the right hand top corner to access the menu.  

Click on LOAD BRUSHES

Browse to your .abr brush file and click on the file to highlight and click LOAD.

Now they are the bottom of your brushes in your panel.

Option 2: 

From the top menu, EDIT>PRESET MANAGER

Click on LOAD

Again, browse to your .abr brush file, click on it and click on LOAD.

Option 3:  My preferred method for CS.  I'm on a Mac, but I believe this works for PC too. 

As I am browsing my brush files in my brush folder using Finder on my Mac, I simple click and drag the .abr file I want to my PS icon to load it automatically.  Or I just double click the .abr file and it automatically loads into photoshop also.

Now if you have an older version of photoshop and you can not use .abr files don't fear, there's a solution.  

Open the png file that came with your brushes.  Most designers will include them also.

Command/Control Click on the layer icon to select everything on that layer.

In the top menu, EDIT>DEFINE BRUSH PRESET

Give your brush a name and click OK.

Now your brush is in your palette and will stay there until you remove it.

If you do several of these and want to save as a set. 

Go back to the EDIT>PRESET MANAGER

Select the brushes you want to make into a set by clicking on each of the brush icons holding your CTRL/CMD+clicking on each one.

Select "SAVE SET"

Name it and browse to the folder you want to save it to.

Done. 

NOTE: Brushes can not be larger than 2500 pixels wide or high, or just about 8" in a 300ppi canvas.  So if you are creating a brush and the Define Brush Preset is grayed out, most likely that is why.  Or you don't have your item selected. ;)  

WARNING  You can have too many brushes loaded into your palette and it will slow down your program and possibly crash your photoshop AND you WILL loose all the brushes that you created since you started your program.  I'm saying this from experience!  

I'm a brushaholic!  This especially happens when I have lots of very large brushes. And I create many many brushes to use while designing.  When there's a hundred brushes in that panel, I know I will soon bog down or crash and have to unload ones I'm not using.

I can reset and load only the brushes I want to use OR I can old my ALT/OPTION key down on each brush icon in the brush panel and delete only so many of these. 

Hope this was informative and if you ever have a question, know that we are here to help.  You can email the shop in the contact us page or ask in the help forum.  Remember, no question is stupid. ;)

Till next time,

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Accessing Tools In A Group

March 14, 2011

Have you ever  been working in Photoshop using the Rectangular Marquee tool and wanted a quick way to switch to the Elliptical Marquee tool without having to go back to the tool bar. Well, I’ve got the solution! Just press and hold the SHIFT key while pressing the group’s keyboard shortcut (in this example M is the shortcut for the marquee tools) and you can access all the tools within that tool group. 

See you back here next Monday with another Photoshop Tip,

Marcie

Technique Thursday - Changing Multiple Type Layers in Photoshop

Kathleen is leading our Technique Thursday this week with a very handy one to know!  

The team is working on some special things that are coming up exclusively for our Newsletter subscribers.  So if you receive our newsletter, you're going to want to!  It will be a new Tuesday Newsletter filled with nothing but sweets for our subscribers! YEAH!

Thanks again Kathleen!

HOW TO CHANGE MULTIPLE TYPE LAYERS IN PHOTOSHOP

By Kathleen Difato

Have you ever been working on a scrapbook page and realized that you didn’t like the font or color of your multiple layers of type?  Well to change all of them at once is quite simple.

Here I have 3 different layers of type in different colors.

I would prefer them all to be the same font and the same color.  So I click on the top type layer (Type Layer 3) and then Shift-click the bottom type layer (Type Layer 1).  Now all three layers are highlighted.  Simply, go up to the option bar and change your type attributes.

Easy peasy, all of your type layers are one font and one color!