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

Have you ever noticed that the Edit>Fill dialog box doesn't have a keyboard shortcut listed? Well, you can type Shift-Delete (Shift-Backspace in Windows) to access the Fill dialog box.

Not only that, but you can type Option-Delete (Alt-Backspace in Windows) to fill an area with the foreground color, or Command-Delete (Ctrl-Delete in Windows) for your background color.

You can even preserve the empty parts of a layer (they show up as a checkerboard in the Layers palette), by adding the Shift key to the above keyboard shortcuts!

If you'd like to lower the opacity of just a portion of a layer, make a selection, type Shift-Delete to get into the Fill dialog box, set the blending mode menu at the bottom of the dialog box to Clear, and then set to the Opacity setting to how much you'd like to lower the opacity of that portion of the layer.

To fill the empty areas of a layer (the areas that show up as a checkerboard in the Layers palette), press Shift-Delete and then set the blending mode to Behind.

The last three tips I mentioned will not work when the Background layer is active.

See you all next week.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery

PS. I screwed up last week when I said "If you've opened an image that is buried deep in the folder structure of your hard drive, you can quickly navigate to that folder by Option-clicking on the name of the file at the top of the document." I should have told you to use the Command key. Shame on me. I hope it didnít cause you too much trouble.