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!

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.