| Adobe Photoshop is one of the most robust and effective tools you can choose for creating, editing, and managing images. While its interface is intuitive, and its tools easy to use, it can take a while to master all of Photoshop's features. This article looks at three particularly useful capabilities you might not be familiar with that can make your image editing more successful and more efficient. Create effects with Layer Styles
Layer Styles, known as Layer Effects in Photoshop 5.0 and 5.5, allow you to apply one of several pre-defined affects, like drop shadow, bevel and emboss, and pattern overlay, to an entire transparent layer in your image.
Each Layer Style has its own set of properties that you can tweak. For example, a huge dialog box with options controls the Drop Shadow Layer Style.
- Choose a Blending mode and the opacity of your shadow.
- Click on the black box to bring up the color picker and choose any color you want for the shadow.
- Select the direction of the light source and even specify that every layer that uses the Drop Shadow layer effect will use the same light source.
- Specify how far the shadow is from the object.
- Intensify and blue the shadow.
In Photoshop 6, you can create and save your own custom layer styles to use repeatedly. As you become more familiar with layers, be sure to take some time to practice with layer styles and see how you can use them to quickly apply affects to your image, as well as create and reuse your own custom effects.
Take snapshots of a work in progress
Most images evolve from a rough picture to a final masterpiece. Along the way you may want to save a particular iteration of the image so you can go back to it and start again if a particular effect or editing technique doesn't produce the result you're looking for. Did you know you can use the History pallet to make taking snapshots of a work in progress that much easier?
The History palette gives you multiple levels of undo options, allowing you to step back through the changes you've made to a Photoshop file, undoing one or all of them until you reach the state you want. By default, the History palette supports 20 undos, or states. You return to the state you want by clicking it in the History palette, and your image is updated to reflect the state you've selected.
While your History pallet can support as many states for each image as you would like, each state takes up some space in your computer's RAM. If you want to take advantage of history states, but don't want to eat up all of your RAM in the process, use the snapshot feature to capture and save a state of your image in a separate file.
Creating a snapshot of a state is easy:
- Select the state you want to save.
- Click the Create New Snapshot button at the bottom of the History pallet, or choose New Snapshot from the History drop-down menu.
With the History pallet and snapshots you can keep a record of the your image as it develops and quickly revert back to a previous state.
Be more efficient with actions and batch processing
If you regularly prepare images for a particular media, such as print or the Web, you'll find that there are certain effects you apply and actions you perform to get them to a final format for a given media. Photoshop's Actions and Batch Processing features allow you to complete regular and monotonous tasks with ease.
A Photoshop action is similar to macros you find in Microsoft Word and is as easy to create. The Actions pallet gives you the tools you need to record, save, and edit your actions so you can use them repeatedly with the click of a button. To create an action simply start recording, perform all of the activities associated with that action (changing color pallets, reducing file sizes, applying effects, etc), end the recording and save. When you run that action on another file, Photoshop does all of the work for you.
Batch processing allows you to apply an action to more than one file. Say you need to convert a large number of images from 300 dpi to 72 dpi and don't want to spend all day doing it. Simply create an action and then batch-process all of your images using that action.
The Batch dialog box, accessible from File > Automate > Batch, will help you setup and run a batch process. You specify an action, a folder of files to batch process, an output folder for the processed files and a naming convention. Photoshop does the rest.
If you regularly apply the same effects to images, or you need to work with a large number of files to prepare them for a particular media or publication, then actions and batch processing can make your work more efficient and consistent.
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