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

As I write this, I'm flying home after spending a week at FotoFusion at the Palm Beach Photographic Workshops. My lecture sessions proved to be so popular that I'm going to turn this week's tip into a crib notes version of my "How Photoshop 6 Changes Your Workflow" class. I've covered some of these ideas in previous issues, but I think they deserve revisiting.

First off, in Photoshop 5.5, you could use the bracket keys (][) to cycle through all the brushes at appear in the Brushes palette. In 6.0, you'll need to use the comma and period keys (they also have the greater than and less than symbols on them, which makes it easier to remember). If you use the bracket keys, then you'll just be changing the size of the brush that is active (this only works on round and oval brushes). You can also hold the Shift key and then use the brackets to change the Hardness setting of your brush. To access the Brushes palette while painting, hold Shift and Control and click on your image (Macintosh) or Shift-right click (Windows).

Here's something that's going to be an issue with 98% of all people who upgrade to 6.0. In previous versions, you double-clicked on a layer to change its name, but in 6.0 double-clicking a layer will bring up a dialog box that doesn't offer a way to change the name. In 6.0, you'll need to hold the Option key (Macintosh), or Alt key (Windows) and then double-click on a layer to change its name.

When creating a selection using the Marquee tool, you can choose Fixed Size in the Options Bar and then specify a width and height for your selection. When you did that in 5.5, the width and height was always measured in pixels, which was very inconvenient. In 6.0, you can type a few letters after the number that you choose to specify the measurement system to be used (px=pixels, in-inches, cm=centimeters, pt=points, pica=picas, %=percentages).

You'll also find four new options for the Marquee tool on the left side of the Options bar. The first one will make 6.0 act like 5.5 did when creating selections. The second option will allow you to add to a selection instead of replacing it. The third choice will all you to take away from a selection and the last choice will allow you to specify which area of the current selection you'd like to keep. In previous versions of Photoshop you'd have to hold down a combination of Shift and Option (Macintosh), or Shift and Alt (Windows) to achieve the same results.

When working with text in 6.0, you can click on the name of a typeface in the Options Bar and then use the up and down arrow keys to cycle through all the fonts that are available on your system. I also like to click on the Size setting and then adjust it using the up and down arrow keys. You can also hold the Shift key and use the up and down arrows to change the size in larger increments.

Adobe made a very useful change to the crop tool in 6.0. After you click and drag across your image to create a cropping rectangle, you can turn on the Perspective checkbox up in the Options bar, then you can move each corner of the cropping rectangle independently. For example, if you get all four corners to line up with four corners of a building at was photographed from below looking up, then Photoshop can straighten the building to correct the perspective distortion. Once you have all four corners placed correctly, you can use the side handles to extend the cropping rectangle out so you can keep some of the background.

At the top of the Layers palette in 6.0, you'll find four checkboxes. The first one will lock the checkerboard for the layer that is active (look at the Layers palette to see the checkerboard… it only shows up if your layers contain transparent areas). This will prevent you from painting across the checkerboard and can be useful if you'd like to fill the contents of a layer with a gradient, or limit your painting to the areas that already contain information. The second checkbox will allow you to lock the pixels on a layer. That will make it so you can't change the appearance of the pixel (no painting, filters, or adjustment will work). The third checkbox will lock the position of the layer, and the last one will lock all of the features we just talked about.

Well, I think that's enough for this week. Look for more tips in seven days.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery