Hiding the palettes

Pressing the Tab key will remove all the palettes from our screen, allowing us a clear and uncluttered view of our screen and images. Hit the tab key again to restore the palettes.

Snap to guides

Hit Ctrl+R at any time and rulers appear around our screen. Click inside the ruler and drag out guides, either horizontal or vertical. After dragging guides in from the rulers we can go to View > Snap to guides.

Straightening horizons or verticals

Click and drag guides from the rulers (Ctrl+R) to ensure that verticals and horizontals are perfect in your image. Rotate the canvas or use the transform tools to square up, but don't forget the measure tool command as well.

No Short measures

Go to Edit > Preferences > Units & Rulers and we can set up how we require Photoshop to display measurement. For example we can choose inches, millimetres, or other measurement ways.

Backtrack on palettes adjustments

To reset any changes we make to palettes such as the hue and saturation palette, hold down the Alt key and the cancel button will change to reset. Click the reset and all our changes are returned to normal ready for us to have any go. This is useful if our changes go wrong and we want to start again without closing the palette.

Purge the System

Go to Edit > Purge to free up some of Photoshop's ram use. Better still create an action and apply it to a function key so that a simple press of, say the F2 key purges all. Be aware that this will undo the last command you gave and erase your history palette steps and anything you have on Photoshop,s clip board waiting to be pasted.

Spell Checker

Photoshop can now help you with this. Go to edit > check spelling from the menu bar.

Find a recent Project

Go to file > open recent and Photoshop will list our latest masterpieces and they can be retrieved by clicking the file name. This is a great option when you inadvertently save a file to the depths of your computer by mistake.

History lesson

If we go to Edit > Preferences > General we can select the amount of History States we require. History states are the number of jumps backwards we can make to retrace our steps in the history palette. 20 is the default, but if we want more we need to be aware that these history stages are RAM hungry.

Escape

If a process has gone wrong or we have changed our mind after hitting the enter key, the process can be stopped via the Escape key.

Make multiple prints on one page

Go to file > automate > picture package and we have many ways we can lay out images on a page. Select the folder that contains your images and apply the layout option you want. It saves time and paper if you want a selection of prints to show people or even to print a panel of images for display.

Automatic web pages

Place all your chosen images into one folder and let Photoshop automatically build a web photo gallery for you. Go to file > automate > Web photo gallery.

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