Kens Photoshop Blog

Here’s a little quickie that many people don’t think about.
If you like to use your current brush and erase with it, it’s annoying to have to switch to the eraser and then pick the same brush from the brushes palette, or create duplicate of all your brushes set to erase.

Hey hey, more Autohotkey goodness for CS3 users, brush resize on the fly, CS4 style!
First download a free copy of Autohotkey

Ever wanted to create hotkeys in photoshop but you couldn’t because photoshop didn’t allow that hotkey combination? Or wanted to use the TAB key for something else?
There’s a free program that allows you to use keys such as TAB, numlock, scrolllock, printscreen or the break key and map it to something usefull. That program is [...]

Here’s a little trick I came up with that’s so simple I smacked my forehead when it occurred to me..
Go to your mouse control panel and turn on mouse trails. Adjust the trail length to the maximum.
Now to back to your drawing program and without actually pressing the draw button (With a pen just hover [...]

Tired of the hardcoded shortcut keys in photoshop? Want to change the TAB key into something else? And what the hell is up with not being able to bind stuff to single letter shortcuts?
No matter. Go download the program Autohotkeys, it’s free and awesome.
Autohotkey allows you to trap keys before a program gets control and [...]

I can draw straight lines and ellipsis quite well on paper. When I got my wacom tablet I practiced a lot but could never get straight lines and good ellipsis using the wacom tablet.
Until one day a light-bulb went of… That plastic surface on the tablet that you rest your palm on is not paper. [...]

If you want to draw in perspective in photoshop you need to draw perspective grid lines to establish your view. You can draw your own lines sure, but what if you want to tweak the view after you’r done drawing all those lines? Then you have to start all over.. what a drag!

In Photoshop you can create a path with the pen tool and then go to the paths palette and select Stroke Path to hit the path with whatever tool is selected.
By default this just strokes the path with a shitty little 1 pixel harsh pen.

When I show people something in photoshop, the thing they are most amazed by is not whatever technique I show them. It’s that I don’t use a keyboard to control photoshop, I use my wacom pen to issue mouse gestures almost exclusively, only touching the keyboard for the most obscure and rarely used commands.
Peaked your [...]

I love shortcuts, you could say I was fanatical about them. The only thing I use my Mouse/pen for in Photoshop for is editing, everything else is keyboard shortcuts and I know them all like the back of my hand.
Not everyone likes to use shortcuts, in fact some hate them, tis ok, everyone’s different.
But there’s [...]

Smart collections is an awesome feature of Lightroom that I use the heck out of to help me stay organized. There are so many things you can do with smart collections so if you haven’t digged into them yet you are missing out bigtime.

Here’s one for the newbies.. How to create rounded corners, hey we all started somewhere.
New photoshop users are stumped by this, there’s no way to create rounded shapes, where’s the rounded corners tool? Well, there is none, this is photoshop not Corel Draw.

I do a lot of organizing into folders in Lightroom because I sometimes need to view images outside of Lightroom so having a nice hierachy is an advantage.
If you want to do the same but are wondering how here’s how to change foldernames and add folders and subfolders in Lightroom:

By default Lightroom will show you images in subfolders even when you have selected the top folder in a hierachy. This wreaks havoc if you like me, like to import a bunch of photos from a flashcard, then organize them into subfolders. I do this because I sometimes want to browse images outside Lightroom, then [...]

Still using image/canvas size to resize your images?
The canvas size dialog is fine if you know the exact dimensions, but what if you want to recompose an image and want to visualize your resizing?
Enter the photoshop crop tool.
First make sure you change the background layer to a normal layer, just hold down the ALT key [...]

Let’s get one thing straight. Lightroom does NOT backup your photos when you do the scheduled backups, only the Lightroom database, thumbnails, develop changes and so on. You have to backup your photos yourself.
The easiest way to backup your photos in Adobe Lightroom is to use the Export function.

This technique requires the photoshop plugin Nik Color EFX Pro, a bit spendy but this plugin is massive and contains a closely guarded secret tool that can create images that looks insanely sharp with no haloing or other artifacts.

So you’r working in Lightroom, and when you export to photoshop you get a bad color cast? (Or the other way around, open photoshop psd in lightroom=cast)

Here’s a new one that’s gonna come in handy, you can mirror the photoshop clone tool.