Tag: Friday Freebies

Friday Fab Five

Jason5 Comments

For something new here on the blog, I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop.  The idea here is that people will share their top five in the comments area and we can get an idea of many more keyboard shortcuts than we ever could have found out on our own (unless of course you are some Photoshop guru like The Photoshop Guys and the trainers/instructors of the world that do this for a living and already know all the shortcuts.)

So, anyway, here’s my Friday Fab Five Photoshop shortcuts and what they do:

  1. CMD/CTRL+J = duplicates your existing layer
  2. CRTL+ALT+SHIFT+E = Stamp Visible  This takes all your visible layers and merges them onto a new layer.  Increases file size, but very cool
  3. CMD/CTRL+’ = (yes, that’s apostrophe) – it activates the grid in your preferences.  Since my grid is set to every 33.33% and one subdivision, it basically shows a Rule of Thirds grid overlay on my images – very handy for compositional cropping
  4. Left and right brackets – decrease and increase your active brush, whether it’s for clone stamp, healing brush, eraser, history brush – whatever
  5. Alt+Eyedropper = you can drag the eyedropper outside of Photoshop to sample a color in another application (great for color matching)

So, those are my five for this friday – what are yours?  Sound off in the comments!  In the meantime, have a great weekend and happy shooting! I’ll leave you with my favorite What the Duck cartoon of the week:

wtd732

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Five Friday Freebies

Jason2 Comments

It’s fun to share resources that can really help you save time and money in pursuing your photography goals, and because there’s not a lot of really high quality resources out there, posts like these are few and far between.  However, I do have a few resources that may prove useful to wrap up the week:

  1. Online Price Calculator – So many people ask “How much should I charge for…”  Well, here is a good starting point.  For something more serious look FotoQuote
  2. Free Stock Photos – So many stock photo sites out there, yet none seem to offer up imagery completely for free.  You do have to register, but well worth the 10 seconds…
  3. Free CS Tutorials – Yeah, I know, there’s tons of sites out there that do this stuff, but Erik stands above the crowd in his technique and approach.  Well worth the time to peruse his library of Adobe tips and tricks
  4. B&H Photo has a handy resource that shows compatibility for some TC’s.  The one linked is for the Canon 2x TC
  5. The Online Photography Test – hosted by yours truly, and with the Beginner and Intermediate tests completed, is an great resource for evaluating and improving your knowledge base across many areas of photography

And, to close out the week, be sure to stop over at What The Duck!  My favorite one this week:

Happy shooting, have a good weekend, and we’ll catch you back here on Monday!