Photoshop

When using small text in web graphics in either Photoshop or ImageReady, you may notice that your text looks blurry at small point sizes (usually, anything below 12 to 14 points). Running a sharpening filter over rasterized text only serves to make it look worse.

Ever try aligning a guide in Photoshop to one of the lines on the ruler and have trouble getting it exactly where you want it? Sometimes it seems like Photoshop is mocking you!

There's an easy way to do it, no matter what view percentage you're at. Simply hold down the Shift key while dragging a guide. Photoshop will automatically snap the guide to the nearest line on the ruler.

Alt-click (option-click) on the layer mask thumbnail right next to the layer thumbnail in the layer palette to show and edit the layer mask. You can use all the tools and filters to edit your mask and once you're done, the same simple option-click will revert to normal view.

Thanks to kirk for the tip.

There are many ways to create a neon sign, but I can guarantee that this is the fastest and simplest one.

Choose a bold font and type up your sign. Fill it with black on black background. At this point your sign is off. :)

Let's switch it on. Click the first icon from the left on the bottom of the Layers palette to add a layer style. Choose Stroke and follow the settings below. Make sure you choose a big number for the Size, such as 35. Select Position: Center. Fill Type: Gradient. Style: Shape Burst.

When working with the levels dialog box Alt-click (option-click) on the highlight triangle and it reveals the pixels affected by moving the highlight triangle. Same thing applies to the black/low key triangle.

This is very useful when correcting levels, because sometimes the amounts of certain colors are so low they barely show up on the graph, but they might be important parts of your image.

Thanks Kirk for the tip.

This tutorial may require a little bit of experimenting to create a realistic burn pattern, but don't get too scared. :)

I've a big fan of the Photoshopsupport blog and the other day I saw this great time saving tip.

If you need to transform a duplicate of your layer or selection just press Apple-Alt-T (Command-Option-T). Alternatively you can press Apple-J and than Apple-T.

To create water droplets you can use PS's very effective layer blending options. Pick the black color and with a sharp edged brush drop several simple circle shaped dots of different sizes on a layer. Use the key combos "[" and "]" for changing the size of the brush dynamically. Select the Filter/Distort/Wave menu and use similar values for the filter as in the illustration below to distort the little black dots to make their shape more natural.

You want to place an artwork on a t-shirt, so that it looks believable? To create the necessary distortions you can either use Liquify or Displace. Liquify gives you total control, but it's painfully slow and needs a lot of work. The good thing about Displace is that it does the job for you almost automatically.

One of my readers Mike Morper, pointed out that there is a third dimension to be explored in Photoshop. He has been experimenting with creating anaglyphs (images that you see in 3D with red/blue glasses) in Photoshop. He has created an action and posted it on his site.