Wasn’t it a gorgeous weekend! Finally. In honour of these fabulous few days I want to tell you about the spring in Photoshop CS4.
Yes, CS4 comes spring loaded, and if you’re a Photoshop artist, or you do a lot of Photoshopping, you’ll love this little known addition in CS4. Simply, all your keyboard shortcuts are now spring loaded. Probably the best known example of this concept is the activation of the Hand tool by pressing the space bar. In previous versions of Photoshop, this would allow you to pan your image as long as the space bar was depressed. As soon as you release the space bar, you’d pop back to the tool you were using. It was – and IS – a super effective workflow enhancement.
So now you can do the same thing with the rest of the tools. Try it. Oven a new canvas. Use your brush tool to brush on a few large strokes. Now you’ll erase some of them. Just hold down the "e" key (e is the keyboard shortcut for erase, remember?). While you have it held down, your paintbrush tool becomes the eraser. Erase your strokes. And release the "e" key. Now it instantly springs back and you’re instantly using your brush once more. I love this. This can be used for just about any tool in your tools palette.
Now you can speedily move from tool to tool without all that mousing around. I suspect it will minimize all the repetitive strain injuries we’re sucseptible to from using computers so much!
But forget about computers for now. It’s infrared shooting season. Be sure to check out my new infrared tutorials guide book – it’s a complete program of creativity and learning for post-processing your IR images.
ok, gotta go now! Have a great SPRING loaded day.
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