Hot Tips for Photoshop Pt.2 | DIE Week 2 - Post 1

Following last week's post on tips for Photoshop, here are 6 more tips that I found very useful to help with the app manipulation for better image edition results. You can find more in the Photoshop User Magazine (October 2023 Edition).

MANAGE YOUR PLUGINS - by Dave Clayton
Plugins for Adobe Photoshop are supplemental software tools designed to enhance image effects or tackle tasks that the app alone may struggle with or cannot achieve. There is a vast number of plugins available for Photoshop and other Adobe apps. For nice and free plugins, open the Creative Cloud App, navigate to Stock and Marketplace on the left, and select Plugins at the top. There you can filter from Free and Paid. When you find a plugin you like, click the card for the plugin for more information, and then click Get to install it. In the Photoshop app, go to Plugins>Plugins Panel, you'll see all the ones you have installed, click on the one you want to use, and it will open on its own panel.

PROOF SETUP FOR COLOR BLINDNESS - by Dave Clayton

You can know how a color-blind person will see your design by going to View>Proof Setup>Color Blindness. There are different types of color blindness, the most common being the red-green type. People with this condition have difficulties distinguishing between those two colors, so accessing this feature is a good way to check the contrast and balance in your design.

STAY, BAR, STAY! HOW TO PIN THE CONTEXTUAL BAR - by Bret Malley

Every time you open the Photoshop app, you find the Generative Fill bar around, sometimes it can get in your way, move it by dragging the far left gray bar, but also pin the bar, just click on the tree-dot icon near the far right, and select Pin Bar Position.

ALL-IN-ONE CROP AND RESIZE - by Bret Malley

This trick is useful when you need to scale, crop, and resize at the same time, maybe for printing or digital frame optimizing. Using the Crop tool (C), change the pull-down menu up in the Options Bar to W x H x Resolution (it usually defaults to Ratio). "If you know the dimension of one side, but are unsure of the other and you don't want to crop off parts of the image, input the known side dimension and include the measurement units (such as "in" for inches). The third empty field in the Options Bar is for Resolution, so inputting 300 px/in will give you that nice gold-standard resolution for printing". If you leave a blank field for one of the dimensions, Photoshop will calculate the proportions itself.

USE GENERATIVE FILL TO QUICKLY CHANGE A BACKGROUND - by Victoria White

Select the background of an image you want to change (with your preferred selection method). In the Contextual Bar, click Generative Fill, type the text/prompt, describe the background you want Generative Fill to create, and click Generate.