30+ Useful Resources for Improving Your Photoshop Efficiency

More accurately this should be called “7 Things Photoshop Does Automatically That Aren’t in the Automate Menu”, but I found that title to be a bit lengthy. Of course, Photoshop does many things “automatically”, but these are a few things I find especially useful and easy-to-use, that you may not know about yet. For the example images I’m going to use a few shots my girlfriend took during a trip to Europe using her point-and-shoot. I figure this to be the most ideal scenario for this example.

1 Auto Color

Image > Adjustments > Auto Color or [Ctrl + Shift + B]
For those of us that are professionals in the color-correcting field, this is a great feature to sometimes fix the poor colors a digital camera can capture. This isn’t a perfect fix for all photos all the time, but it can usually get you pointed in the right direction.

Adobe Flash is an excellent technology that allows developers to add interactivity and smooth animations to web pages. Its popularity is so immense that you’ll find many websites dedicated to helping developers interested in Flash.

In this article, you’ll find 12 wonderful websites that’s worth a bookmark if you’re looking into sharpening your Flash development skills. For each entry, you’ll find three tutorials from the website so that you can see what’s in store for you.

1. kirupa.com

kirupa.com is a site that features excellent Flash tutorials (as well as Silverlight, ASP.net, PHP, and Photoshop). There are plenty of well-written, detailed tutorials and articles pertaining to Flash sectioned into seven categories including Basic Drawing, Special Effects, Server-side Flash, and Game Development.

Tutorial examples:

• Simple Page Transitions
• Creating and Animating Clouds
• Falling Text

What this means for the average Flash user and their clientele is that this new advancement will uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will also provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Fun times with Flash content and search engine optimization are finally right around the corner.

If you're looking more for more info on this topic, check out Adobe's official press release.

 Keyboard Shortcuts are keystrokes used to quickly invoke a command. As well, shortcuts usually (but not always) involve a modifier key such as Ctrl/Cmd, Alt/Opt, or Shift. For example, instead of choosing Select » Deselect from the menus, you could simply press Ctrl/Cmd+D.

Keyboard shortcuts can improve your efficiency, and in some cases, they can even invoke commands that might not otherwise be available (e.g., zooming while a dialog box is open, or inserting a Select forward layer command into an action).

One of Photoshop's strengths is that it makes extensive use of keyboard shortcuts; but, there are so many that it's difficult to remember them all. So, I've created a "cheat sheet" that's organized by menu, as well as alphabetically by key. These "cheat sheets" are available in the following flavours:

You may never think about color when you design. You may just think what looks good is what is good. Well think again, because it goes much deeper than that.

This week I want to begin talking about color theory. Before I do, I want to stress that some of this is hard and true “Color Theory” as it has been written for the past 100 years. Some of it is my own personal opinion about color. As an artist we must rely on intuition as much as we rely on theory and practice. It’s like a musician; you can teach them all the music theory you want, buy you should never “train-out” their ear. That’s what makes them an artist. Let’s begin this week by talking about some really simple ideas about color and then move on later to more complex ideas, psychology and practice.