Tips & Tricks

The GIF format was introduced in 1987 and contains one eight-bit channel of data giving it the ability to reproduce up to 256 colours at any one time from a palette of 16.8 million. This means that although a GIF is no good for saving continuous tone imagery such as photographs, it is extremely well suited to images that contain large blocks of  colour such as logos and line art. The advantage of saving so few colours is found in the sharpness of detail and the ability to keep file sizes low.

Spell checking is more commonly associated with word processing and desk top publishing programmes such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign, but did you know it's possible inside Photoshop as well. Here's how it's done-

If you're worried about you or somebody else messing around with some of your most complex or valuable actions then it's worth taking a look at the button mode. If you know you're actions, then you'll know that it's the little things that can cause the major headaches. If a step gets accidently deleted, or a minor setting gets changed, then  it's easy to spend hours trying to find a fix. The button mode is capable of keeping danger at the door by switching out the live editable actions complete with all your steps for a simple button.

By default Photoshop allows you to switch between tools of a specific group by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing the letter that represents the tool. So for example, the Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools can be activated by pressing the letter ‘O’ on the keyboard, and then to move between the tools, use the SHIFT +O combination. So if the letter ‘O’ activates the Dodge Tool then pressing SHIFT + O will activate the Burn Tool, and pressing it again will activate the Sponge Tool, you get the idea.