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

I know that it's been light years since you've heard from me, but in case you haven't heard, Adobe announced Photoshop 7 on February 24th. It's not shipping yet, but you can find out about all that's new by pointing your browser to www.digitalmastery.com/7guide I've also posted my 2002 Photoshop Mastery seminar tour dates on my web site and am currently working on revising my book, seminar, videos and magazine articles for Photoshop 7. That's my sole excuse for not keeping up with the tip of the week, so please bear with me. I'm very close to resurrecting myself from the throes of Photoshop 7 and will be able to deliver the tips on a more consistent basis once I finish updating my book, which should happen by the end of April.

There are almost 3,000 new subscribers to this tip service since I've sent out my last tip. I want to welcome all the new subscribers and make sure that you know that you can browse through over 40 weeks worth of tips in the tip of the week archives at www.digitalmastery.com/tips.

And now, on with the tip! This week, I'm going to continue the theme I started with my last tip which was on how to overcome common annoyances in Photoshop. So, without further ado, let's jump in and get started.

When I'm working on a project, I usually find myself doing a lot of experimentation before I end up with the result I am looking for. Because of that, I'm a big fan of Photoshop's undo command. I'm constantly typing Option-Command-Z (Macintosh), or Alt-Ctrl-Z (Windows) to undo multiple steps. The only problem is that Photoshop only gives you 20 undos and that's not always enough, especially for you wildly creative types. So, I always choose Edit>Preferences>General and increase the History States setting (that determines how many undos you can have).

I don't know about you, but I have a recurring problem with Photoshop's color picker. I often click and drag to the upper left of the color field to choose white. If I don't make it all the way to the corner, then I won't end up with pure white, instead I might get something like 2% gray. So, I've trained myself to drag *beyond* the corner, which always insures that I end up with 100% pure white instead of a sneaky shade of gray.

I often combine multiple images together by dragging them into a single document with the Move tool. When I do that, one image is almost always way too big, so I end up choosing Edit>Transform>Scale. But then comes the problem. Photoshop puts control handles on the corners of the layer I'm attempting to transform, but those corners are beyond the edge of the document and therefore inaccessible. So, here's what I do. Before choosing Scale, I type F to get into full screen mode. Then, once I've chosen Scale, I can type Command-minus (Macintosh) or Ctrl-minus (Windows) to zoom out. Once I've zoomed out enough, then I can see the handles that appear at the corners of the active layer. When I drag the corners I hold both Shift and Option (Macintosh), or Alt (Windows), which causes the opposite corner's handle to move along with the one that I'm moving, while Shift maintains the proportions of the layer.

When I'm moving layers or selections, they always like to snap to the edge of objects. You can temporarily prevent that from happening by holding Control (Mac or Windows) after you've started to drag the object (selection, layer, etc.)

I often have to move a single layer, but find that the layer I want to work with is linked to a bunch of other layers, which causes all the linked layers to move together. You can quickly unlink a bunch of layers by holding Option (Macintosh), or Alt (Windows) and clicking on the Paintbrush icon next to the layer that is active in Photoshop's Layers palette (the Paintbrush icon shows up where the link symbol appears on other layers).

Whenever I use Photoshop's Shape tools to create a shape layer, a pesky gray outline always comes along for the ride. You can hide and show that outline by pressing the Enter key. The shape tools will continue to affect the currently active shape layer for as long as that outline is visible. Hiding the outline causes the Shape tool to create a new shape layer when you click on your image.

It seems like 98.6% of the time someone sends me an image, Photoshop complains that it's an untagged image and asks me to assign it a profile. The problem is that I don't know which profile would make the image look its best. When that happens, just click the OK button and then choose Image>Mode>Assign Profile. Then try the four profiles that show up at the top of the Profile pop-up menu to determine which one will make your image look the best. That way you can actually see the consequences of your action instead of 'working blind' by assigning a profile before the image has even had a chance to open.

Ok, that's enough for this week. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to keep up with the tips on a weekly basis, but things should get back to normal once my workload mellows out, which should happen soon after Photoshop 7 starts to ship (no, I don't know the official ship date yet).

Along with this tip, I also was also able to squeeze out another installment of my Photoshop Questions of the week. You can check it out at www.digitalmastery.com/questions

Have a great week.

-Ben Willmore