Every photo manipulation application offers a gradient tool. But Photoshop’s is special. Not only can you paint a soft transition from black to white, you can also soften the transition from one image to another. The gradient tool fades, swipes, and more.
Be they pits, pock marks, or pimples, we all suffer blemishes that we wish we didn’t. Or so we would were it not for Photoshop’s Healing Brush. This amazing tool grafts good skin onto bad–and heals the seams in between.
If you use the Magic Wand tool, stop what you are doing and switch to Color Range. This outrageously useful command lets you select an image as easily as the wand, but with more flexibility and much better results.
Where luminance correction is concerned, no feature gives you greater control than Curves. This one command lets you rein in highlights, open up shadows, and reveal all points in between. Curves takes a bud of an image and makes it blossom.
You may know that you can add to a selection in Photoshop by pressing the Shift key. But you can also press keys to subtract and find an intersection. Better yet, these tricks apply to layers, channels, and paths. They’re a power user’s dream.
Photoshop offers two tools that paint with luminance: The dodge tool paints in brightness, the burn tool paints in darkness. Crazy useful, and they’ve gotten so much better in Photoshop CS4.
Since the first daguerreotype, photographers have cropped their images to hone in on the details that matter most. The crop tool does that, as well as straighten and more. Check it out.
Hue/Saturation not only spins colors and intensity values, it lets you modify one color independently of all others. And it does so in such a credible way, you would never know it was there. Perfection.
The modest brush tool is one of the deepest, most versatile tools in Photoshop. It’s not only a terrific painting tool, but it is also invaluable for masking, as this video demonstrates.
Many folks select images in Photoshop with the likes of the Quick Select and Magic Wand tools. Highly automated, but these tools rarely work accurately. Experts use the Pen tool. Using the Pen tool is an art form worth learning, because it always works.
