Terrific Tuesday Photoshop Tip: Auto-Selecting A Layer

May 17, 2011

Note: starting today “Manic Monday Photoshop Tips” is moving to Tuesdays and will now be called “Terrific Tuesday Photoshop Tips”.

Hello! Today’s tip features a quick way to auto select a layer: with the Move tool (V) selected, click-and-hold the Control (Mac: Cmd) key and click on that layer in the image. And yes, it’s just that easy!

Marcie

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Fonts

May 9, 2011

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Fonts!

Today’s Photoshop tip is about fonts. I love fonts and I’m like a kid in a candy store when I start browsing through font sites. Fortunately for me there are lots of free font sites to use.  A couple of my favorites are www.dafont.com, www.urbanfonts.com, and  www.fontsquirel.com. Professional fonts can be expensive and I can usually find a free alternative but if I need to buy a premium font I use www.myfonts.com. Here’s my tip for finding fonts that look similar to professional fonts: go to a free font site that has a space to let you enter sample text and enter a few letters or numbers that are unique to the font.  Select the category or theme for the font you are looking for. In the example below I’m looking for a font similar to Bodoni (I’m obsessed with those cool numbers) so I start with the serif category, type in the numbers 123 as my example and click the search button. As I scroll through I’m quickly able to spot the font John Hancock as a very close match to what I’m looking for so I download it  and I’m done.

Here’s a list of some of my current favorite fonts…

Typewriter font: VT Portable Remington

Bold: Old Sans Black

Script: Honey Script (it has a cool retro feel)

Serif Font: John Hancock

Dingbat:  WC Rhesus (cool splats!!)

Fonts are great tools to use in digital scrapbooking. What are your favorite fonts? 

See you next week,

Marcie

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Type Tip—Visually Adjust Kerning

May 2, 2011

Manic Monday Photoshop Tips: Type Tip—Visually Adjust Kerning

Sorry PSE users but this tip will only work in the full version of Photoshop. Today we’re going to look at keyboard shortcuts that will let you visually control the spacing of the letters in your type. To set the tracking tighter (decrease the space between letters in a word or group) highlight the type with the Type Tool (T), then press Alt-Left Arrow (Mac Opt-Left Arrow) to tighten. Press Alt-Right Arrow (Mac Opt-Right Arrow)  to increase or add more space between a selected group or letters or words. To adjust the space between two individual letters (this is called kerning) click your cursor between the two letters and use the same keyboard shortcuts as mentioned above.

Now I want you to go type a word in Photoshop and use the shortcut to track an entire word and then use the shortcut again to kern the space between two letters. Go on…I’ll wait. Back? Good! I realized that I know a lot of shortcuts but if I don’t use them I forget them so I’ve made an effort to use them every day and I’ve noticed I’m working much more efficiently by using the keyboard shortcuts. Try adding one or two shortcuts a day into your workflow and before you know it you’ll be a pro at it!

Marcie