Photoshop® CS Timesaving Techniques For Dummies®

Book excerpt: This guide will probably change your image of Photoshop. Many users tend to use it to do certain things in certain ways and don’t even explore additional features and capabilities. Photoshop cs Timesaving Techniques For Dummies gives you more than 60 timesaving techniques that will speed up the way you do the things you do now and inspire you to do lots more. You’ll discover how to: Install and use peripheral devices such as digital cameras, scanners, tablets, and printers Customize Photoshop to fit your needs with custom keyboard shortcuts, a color management system, presets, and more Create custom palette groups and workspaces Use a drawing tablet and stylus to easily double your output Create sketches, water colors, and silkscreens and paint with oils Create professional-quality separations for high-quality offset printing, including using the CMYK prepress settings, soft proofing, adding printer’s marks and more Create action sets so you can perform repetitive tasks that would take an hour in seconds Organize, color code, and lock layers and create layer sets Use Blending Modes (there are more than 20 to choose from) to enhance images Written by Phyllis Davis, a writer, graphics and Web designer, teacher, and graphics software expert , this guide features a Color Insert so you can see the results of many of the techniques explained, and a companion Web site (www.dummies.com/go/photoshopcstt) where you can download many of the images and follow along and experiment. You’ll discover how to get results like a pro as you experiment with: Creating great effects with layer styles, using the five types of bevel and emboss, inner and outer glows, blending, and more Using the Brush and Pencil painting tools and the Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, Burn, and Sponge editing tools Enhancing photos, creating montages and panoramas, recoloring, retouching, and more Creating shadow type, knock-out type, liquid type, metal type, and more Creating GIF animations, hotspots, and rollovers for the Web You’ll save steps and discover exciting new possibilities with these 60-plus timesaving, image-saving techniques.