This document provides 8 tips for using Adobe Photoshop more efficiently. The tips include using keyboard shortcuts for multiple undo and color sampling, creating and manipulating guides, copying layer styles between layers, centering elements using transform controls, temporarily hiding layers, customizing font tracking, and instantly selecting layers by clicking on elements. The tips are designed to save time and improve precision for tasks like layout design, image slicing, and logo creation.

1. 8 Killer Adobe Photoshop Tips For Designers

2. 1. Undo, More Undo Please
I totally believe that we designer are very addictive to undo
something, even until when we made a mistake on sketching, we
tend to ‘undo’ it.Well as you might know by pressing Ctrl + Z in
Photoshop you can undo the previous action you made, but when
you press the same key combination again, it will redo the previous
action. This is quite unnatural and troublesome as you always need
to undo multiple times to get to the state you want.

3. Believe it or not, Photoshop has a specific button for multiple undo, and
it is Alt + Ctrl + Z. Yes, by using this key combination you can undo
multiple times, according to the value of History States you set in Edit >
Preference > Performance.
If you’re used to common Undo’s key combination which is Ctrl + Z, you
can simply press Ctrl + Shift + Alt + K to access Keyboard Shortcut
panel and change Undo’s key combination under the Edit section to Ctrl
+ Z.

5. 2. Sampling Color, anywhere!
Stumbled upon a nicely designed website and wondering which
exact colors is it using? This happens very often when I’m seeking
inspiration during the time I’m doing site layout in Photoshop. For
me I will launch a color picker, pick the color and get its hex
number, then click on the color palette in Photoshop, then input the
hex number then get the color, pretty annoying isn’t it?
Well you don’t really need to suffer like that, you can actually just
click on Eyedropper tool or pressing I to activate it, then click on
the Photoshop’s work screen and drag the Eyedropper icon to
anywhere on the monitor screen to get the color you want. Yeah,
it’s really that easy.

7. 3. Flexible Guide
Tip #8 is actually combination of 2 tips, I hope you don’t mind about
getting more tips. As web designer we have to deal a lot with guide to
position an element correctly, in other words is pixel perfect.
How do you create a guide? Click on View, New Guide then decide it’s
horizontal or vertical guide, input its position and click Enter? Alright,
you can save these works by just pressing Ctrl + R to activate the Ruler
tool, click on the tool and drag it down to create a horizontal guide, or
vice versa.
Besides instant guide creation, here’s another useful tip for you. While
dragging a guide with Move tool which can be activated using V key,
press and hold Alt key to change the horizontal guide to vertical guide,
or vice versa. Now you can probably consider yourself as professional
on using guide.

9. 4. Fun Layer Style Cloning
Layer styles are very entertaining when you can just apply them to make,
let’s say, a social media icon looks pretty charming and unique, but it will
be very tiring if you want to apply same layer styles to all social media
icons which usually come in multiple pieces.
Have you ever realized that there’s an fx icon beside your layer? Well
everything exists for a reason, if you press Alt and drag the fx icon to
another layer, it will copy first layer’s styles to the one you dragged to,
convenient isn’t it?
Also if you are interested about the common use of that fx icon, it allows
you to move a layer’s styles to another and all you need to do is simply
drag the icon to another layer without pressing Alt key.

10. 5. Element Centering Made Easy
In order to achieve a pixel perfect design, we oftenly have to position
element to exactly where it should be. This seems easy as you can
just create some guides and snap the element to those guides, but it
will be daunting if you want to absolute center an element in certain
area, which requires a lot of guides, measurement and focus.
In fact you have a way to make this entire process a lot more easier,
click on the element’s layer which you want to absolute center, then
press Ctrl + A to select the entire document. After that, fire the Move
tool and you will see some icons beside the option, Show Transform
Controls. Click on the 2nd icon to vertical center the element, then
click on 5th icon to horizontal center the element, there you go, an
absolute centered element.

11. You can not only absolute center the element in entire
document’s area, but also absolute center it in certain area.
Let’s say I want to absolute center an element in footer area, I
can simply select the footer area by using the Selection tool
which can be activated by pressing M key, then absolute
center the element in that specific area.
You can study other alignment options beside the Show
Transform Controls option, they are very useful for aligning
your elements in a wide range of situations.

14. 6. View Selection, One At A Time
Often in designing a layout you need to check how an element looks
exactly by its own or by few elements, for example in website layout
below, I want to check slider’s buttons to confirm that they do not
have transparency so they look exactly the same with or without
slider’s image.
In past I have to turn off the visibility of slider image’s layer, slider
background’s layer and even content’s background layer, but now I
can just simply hold down the Alt key, then click on the ‘eye’ icon
beside the button group to turn off all layers’ visibility so that I only
view those buttons. After I checked them, I can just repeat the trick
again to bring all layers’ visbilibity back.
This trick is also extremely useful while it comes to image slicing.
You want to slice slider’s button without any other element like
slider image, so you can use this trick to turn off all layer’s visibility
to just slice the button, then repeat the trick to recover all layer’s
visibility so it saves a lot of time wasted on turn on and off layers’
visibility.

16. 7. Customize Font’s Tracking, Anytime
This particular tip shows you how to increase the font’s tracking in
certain part of the type easily, so it might only be used on certain
specific situation like logo or button creation, but it’s a professional
tip that can save lots of time on finding fonts with suitable typography
for your logo or button creation.
Alright, let’s say I want to decrease the tracking of the type, ‘360’ so
my logo’s type looks unique that visitor remembers it easier. I can
select ‘POLO360’ by using Type tool which can be activated by
pressing T key, then hold down the Alt and press < button to start
decreasing the type’s tracking, which will bring the result above.
You can use this trick to tackle tracking issue of some artistic fonts, so
there’s no worries about tracking next time you want to find graphical
fonts for your logo creation!

18. 8. Instant Layer Selection = Win
Layout design is an exhausting job as we have to tackle lots of issues
such as typography, spacing and graphic, but it will be overwhelming if
we want to find a specific element’s layer from hundreds of layers.
Let this trick makes your designer’s life easier. Activate the Move tool
using V key and hold down the Ctrl key, then click on the element and
you will automatically select the element’s layer. It’s really that simple
but keep in mind that if you put elements into a group, then by using
the same trick you will be selecting the group’s folder that contains the
element you clicked, as shown above.

20. Contact with me:
Skype:mazharul.islam4522
Email:remonmia22@gmail.com
For hire me as a Graphic Designer:
https://goo.gl/pwqYM7