You can discover the little and small known ways/techniques to apply the most essential tools in your projects. And here’s the professional tip – Use simple Photoshop tools and techniques to make stunning vector shapes in your ordinary artwork. So today we have gathered the top seven most useful and essential Photoshop tools for the awesome designers out there. Productivity is an important asset of all professional designers. Photoshop is an extremely powerful software application for photo processing and picture manipulation, and yes we can make it even more powerful with the help of handy tools, actions and brushes to save time for solving everyday regular tasks.
The better our professional tool set is, the more time we can spend to focus on the actual design process rather than the tool we are using to implement it on screen.
1. Patch Tool
This is used a lot by retouchers looking to remove elements such as tattoos, dirty marks and more. Many of you will work solely in Source mode. However, when working with skin, use this mode to clean and Destination mode to rebuild skin areas. Working with both gives you more authentic results.
2. Dodge and Burn
Dodge and Burn are used for many things, mostly by creative retouchers and photographers looking to stylize photo-based images. When working with these tools, always make sure you have Protect Tones active. It’s particularly good at preventing problems with haloing and washed out colors.
3. Pen Tool
Accurate selections are the name of the game with this tool. Set this to Paths and always activate the Rubber Band setting for the most accurate application. To instantly change a path to a selection, hit Cmd/Ctrl+Enter.
4. LAYER STYLES
Layer styles can be used to create exciting effects in your images and change the appearance of layers, including shadows, glows and bevels. However, sometimes when sharing these across Smart Objects, the settings update to all duplicate layers. Resolve this problem by selecting Layer>Layer Style>Create Layers.
5. Layer Masks
Many will use a layer mask to paint out detail. However, you can invert it (Cmd/Ctrl+I) or add an inverted mask (Alt/Opt-click>Add Layer Mask) to paint elements in. You can even affect your masks using filters.
6. Healing Brush
The Clone Stamp is a big favourite when editing images, but it’s not right for everything. The Spot Healing brush is more intuitive, especially when editing out very fine elements like hair. Set this tool’s mode to Darken, paint over stray hairs with a similar-sized brush and watch them disappear.
7. Refine Edge
There are better ways to work with this tool. Always make sure that Smart Radius is active; the reason being that this will evaluate the radius for hard or soft edges separately. This generally provides a better selection than when it’s turned off, which treats the entire border uniformly.
Leave a Reply