Photoshop Ninja

I often see Photoshop files where the background is filled with a flat colour. The simple way to do this is to simply select all and fill with the desired colour - but what if you change your canvas size… back to step one because your left with a rectangle filled with one colour surrounded by your background colour! There is a simpler, more flexible way of-course!

This is an easy little tip to remember - instead of the long winded way detailed above, simply create a solid fill layer - its on the adjustment layers menu at the bottom of the layers palette. Once in place, get rid of the layer mask that is automatically created.

You have now created a flexible background that will fill any dimension of canvas (if you remove the layer mask as detailed above). It is much quicker to edit the colour - just double click on the colour chip in the layers palette. It also takes up less memory, and applies much quicker than selecting a large canvas and filling it with colour. The final advantage is that it takes up less memory, which is always an good news when you are working in Photoshop!

• Karma Kula

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Techniques - Layer, Techniques - Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.