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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.
Here are 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 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 you can tweak. You can also create and save your own custom layer styles to use repeatedly as preset styles. 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.
Take snapshots of a work in progress
Most images evolve from a rough picture to a final masterpiece, and along the way you may want to save an image version so you can go back to it if a particular editing technique doesn't produce the desired effect. Using the History palette, you can easily take snapshots of a work in progress.
The History palette gives you multiple levels of undo options, allowing you to step back through the changes you've made until you reach the stage you want. 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.
If you want to take advantage of history states, but don't want to consume all your computer’s 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.
1. Select the state you want to save.
2. Click the Create New Snapshot button at the bottom of the History palette or choose New Snapshot from the History drop-down menu.
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 easy to create. The Actions palette 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 colour 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. 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 set up and run a batch process. Just specify an action, a folder of files to batch process, an output folder for the processed files and a naming convention.
For more information on product features and functions that can make your work easier and more efficient, visit the Adobe Photoshop website.
Adobe Photoshop is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
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