So, what we have here is a small handful of great working practice tips for Photoshop that I published during 2005 – the first year that Photoshop Ninja was running. It’s nostalgic reading some of the archives – technology has moved on considerably just in four years, what with Mac Pro 8 core + 32 gig of Ram + 4 terabite drives possible from a machine I could go into town and buy right now (admittedly, it wouldn’t be cheap… but it could be done)… let’s not get into that tech nostalgia thing now!

Although posted quite some time ago, these tips are just as relevant today, so enjoy and maybe pick up a few new techniques for working smarter and faster in Photoshop!

Isolating layer transparency with another layer

Keyboard shortcuts for Photoshop filters

More layer shortcuts

Zooming to reveal free transform handles

Editing multiple layers of type together

Showing and hiding layer masks quickly

All Photoshop tool shortcuts

Selecting colours quickly

Creating your own custom brushes

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Many of us have spent a-lot of time painstakingly recreating logos in vector artwork (usually in Illustrator), often due to the client not having access to proper logo artwork (but they have this great 10k JPEG that got off the website – that’s ok for you right?!). Sorry client – I hate to tell you this but that 150 pixel wide, highly compressed image is NOT going to look too pretty when printed, especially on that 20ft banner you just briefed me on!

Firstly, there are some great vector logo resources on the Internet – but they can be a little hit and miss and generally seem to contain larger global brands – but they are a good place to start to try and find vector logo artwork:

Brands Of The World

Web Chantier Logo Portal

No luck here – not to worry… I’ve got a couple more tricks up my sleeve yet to save that 2 hour logo redraw!

The next step is an obvious one, but maybe not so obvious to some! Open up Google and start searching for things like ‘<your brand> vector logo’ or ‘<your brand> EPS’ – sometimes companies will provide hidden away areas of their sites that hold logo resources. If you can’t get access, try using the Google cached version – you may get in the back door that way!

Still no luck – ok we need to get a bit more clever then! This is a little trick I discovered years ago when Illustrator started getting friendly with the PDF file format.Open up Google and start searching for things like ‘<your brand> PDF’, ‘<your brand> Company Report’, ‘<your brand>’ job application, ‘<your brand> press release’ – you can start to get the idea right? Often, design agencies are engadged to produce things like company reports and they will almost always use the vector version of the logo. Download the PDF, flick through the pages and see if you can locate the logo you want in the document. This can take a-little time, but it’s worth it in the long-run, especially with complex logos.

Once you have located a PDF with your logo in, zoom right in – 500% or more… does the logo still have clean lines or is it going pixelated? If it’s going pixelated that means it’s a bitmap version of the logo and is no good… onto the next PDF! Once you have located a PDF with a VECTOR version of you logo in, remember the page it is on in the PDF and then simply open the PDF in Adobe Illustrator. You will be given a choice of which page you wish to open – put in the page with the logo on.

Then simply seperate out the vector artwork for the logo from the rest of the document (outlines view is VERY usefull for this!) – I find it best to copy it into a new document to ensure you are not carring any strange spot colours and layers into future artwork. Check over the colours and save it down as an EPS or Illustrator document – there wasn’t that easier than redrawing it!!

If you can only find your logo in a Flash movie – don’t panic! Locate the Flash movie in the source code of the web page (view source) and directly copy the link and paste it into your browser. Now save this file and open it in Flash – it is probably vector, which means you can copy and paste it straight into Illustrator! If you are getting stuck with the Flash thing, one other technique is to print the Flash movie as a PDF and then open that in Illustrator… where there is a will, there is a way!

This is not really stealing – if you are producing a legitimate piece of design work that features a company logo I’m sure they would want to ensure that it is produced at the very highest quality. This technique SHOULD NOT be used to produce any sort of counterfit goods or to steal logo’s you don’t have the rights to use.

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Simply hold down shift+alt (option) as you open a file and you will be asked if you want to read the composite data. Click ok and your layered file will open as a merged file (no layers) – and much quicker too!

I’m pretty sure this shortcut only works if you have the ‘maximise compatibility’ option selected when you save your PSD file, I will check this out and update this post.

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Changing layer opacity quickly is important when using Photoshop – but it’s really annoying having to go over to the slider at the top of the layers palette. It’s so much better to just keep an eye on the image and use keyboard shortcuts!

Just use the normal number keys – used individually they alter is 10% increments. So, for instance 5 = 50% and 3 = 30%. If you type two numbers together quickly you can get precise figures – ‘45? gets 45%. This also works with brush opacity, so it’s a great little shortcut to remember!
If this doesn’t work, I’ve found that switching to the move tool by hitting V always seems to make the layer opacity shortcuts work.

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If you are working on a very complex document, sometimes it can also be tricky to work out which layers you want to merge and which you want to keep intact – which I’m going to clear up in this post.

As always in Photoshop there is a number of ways to quickly merge layers. Which technique you choose depends on how you have your layered document setup.

The easiest way is to link together the layers you want to merge and select ‘Merge Linked Layers’ off the layers palette sub-menu, just make sure you haven’t got any rogue layers linked that you don’t want to merge! A quick way to find out if you have rogue layers you don’t want to merge is to switch to the move tool with one of the linked layers active and move it – you should then be able to identify if there are layers that shouldn’t be merged Just hit undo, and go ahead!

Another technique is (if you have been organised with your layer sets!) is to put all your layers you want to merge into a layer set and select ‘Merge Layer Set’ from the layers palette sub-menu. These two techniques suit complex documents with lots of layers.

To avoid merging the wrong layers, sometimes it easier to hide the visibility of all the layers you want to keep intact just leaving the layers you want to merge visible. Then select ‘Merge Visible’ from the layers palette sub-menu. This is good if your layers are all over the place order-wise.

Other times you just want to merge a couple of layers simply and quickly – for this we have the ‘Merge Down’ command – I couldn’t write a tip and not include a shortcut or two! Apple+E merges visible layers down, retaining the name of the layer you have selected.

Finally, for users of Photoshop CS2 and above we have the powerful ‘group into smart object’ command, which offers very flexible resizing due to the original grouped layers data being linked to rather than permanent rasterisation at a given size. I will write all about this in another post.

A final bit of advice is to save your document as a new ‘merged’ version – so if you ever need to get back to the individual layers you have merged you can always pull them out of an older document.

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