The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

Hey... I know it's been a while since you've gotten a tip. My schedule has gotten pretty full (I'm speaking at FotoFusion in Florida right now) and the Tip of the Week seems to be morphing into the Tip of The Month. I'll make a deal with you...if you can put up with my unpredictable schedule and irregular tips, I'll continue to send out tips whenever I'm able. Deal? O.k? Good! Let's get going with some new stuff, all having to do with how to avoid the most common annoyances in Photoshop

When Adobe came out with Photoshop 6.0, they added the Slice tool (it looks like an X-acto knife). If you ever mess with that tool, you'll find that Photoshop puts a gray rectangle with a "1" in it in the upper left of all your documents. To get rid of that annoying rectangle, just choose View>Show>Slices.

If you ever find that all your tools show up as crosshairs when you move over your image, then either the Caps Lock key is on, or the settings in the Edit>Preferences>Displays and Cursors dialog box got set to Precise.

Whenever you remove an object from a light colored background and place it on another, darker background, you might end up with an unsightly white halo around the edge of the object.. To get rid of that halo, make sure you don't have a selection active, and then choose Layer>Matting>Defringe and use a setting of one.

Before you change the settings applied to type (size, color, etc.), you'll have to drag across the text to select it. But when you do that, Photoshop always reverses the color of the text and puts some annoying highlighting around it which makes it difficult to see how the color of the text looks on the underlying image. You can hide that highlighting without unselecting the text by typing Command-H (Mac), or Ctrl-H (Windows).

You might have noticed that you can't apply type warping to any text that uses Photoshop's fake bold style. So, if Photoshop ever complains about it, just select all your text and then turn off the Faux Bold setting from the side menu of the Characters palette.

Well, I think that's enough for this week. Next time we'll continue looking at how to prevent Photoshop from annoying you. In the meantime, be sure to point your browser to http://www.design-tools.com/willmore/ There you'll discover my favorite publication -- the only one I read every month, cover to cover. It's called Design Tools Monthly and I convinced the publisher to offer you a $50 discount. You can also request a free sample issue there. Go check it out -- I think you'll like it.

-Ben Willmore