Photoshop® CS3 for Dummies®

Chapter 18. Pete's Top Ten Favorite Photoshop Tips and Tricks

In This Chapter

• Playing with artistic and creative tricks

• Exploring a few useful tips

I have literally thousands of Photoshop tips and tricks to share with you, but space here allows for only ten. Actually, just about anything you do that doesn't use Photoshop's default values or presets could be considered a tip or a trick. However, you're likely interested in creative and productive shortcuts rather than something like this: Save copies of your custom brushes, styles, and other such bits and pieces somewhere other than the Photoshop folder so you don't lose them should you ever need to reinstall the program. (Oops! I snuck in an extra tip, didn't I?)

In this chapter, I present ten of my favorite creative and useful techniques. Some of these tricks I developed while helping solve problems in my role as Help Desk Director for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), and others are tried-and-true helpers that have been around for years.

Adding Artistic and Creative Effects

Surely you'd prefer to read Fill a layer with brown, use the Add Noise filter (Gaussian Distribution, Monochrome), and then apply a Motion Blur filter to create a wood grain effect rather than If you need to apply a grayed-out filter to a CMYK image, apply it to one channel, and then the other three individually using

Smoothing skin perfectly ...