Adobe Photoshop Tips
February 9, 2007
This evening I had my friend Tiffany over for a movie night and she got talking about her career as a graphic designer and the things I do with regards to her expertise. I was explaining a few of my main uses for PhotoShop and she provided me some really good tips that I wanted to pass along to you. You may not use PhotoShop but if you do, you’ll more than likely find these tips extremely helpful (if you don’t already know about them…)
(1) Actions
Did you know that you can setup an action within PhotoShop for any sort of repetitive task you perform? Think macro if you’ve set up repetitive events in Microsoft Excel. For my blog entries, I take stock photos, resize them all to the same size and then I add a white border around them so that the edges don’t touch the text. It makes them look pretty on my site!
She showed me tonight that I can simply record an action in PhotoShop so that when I want to run the same action on a whole batch of photographs, I can do so - with the click of a mouse. To do this, you need to:
(a) Open Photoshop -> Go to Actions Palette
(b) On top right, click triangle –> Pick New Action…
(c) Enter a name for your action –> Click Record
(d) Go through the functions you want to record –> Click on the stop button when finished
Once you have the action recorded, put all of the files / photos you want to perform the action on into one specific folder. Then follow these steps:
(a) Go to File, Automate, Batch
(b) Choose the action you wish to perform
(c) Choose the folder where your files are located
(d) Change the destination to folder and pick where you want the new files to go
(e) Click okay and watch the magic happen!
(2) Matching Colors Perfectly
I often have a client e-mail me with a request to make a button or a graphic a specific color. It could be something they see in their Microsoft Word application, another website, etc. Matching colors perfectly is difficult because monitors skew colors, each program may have its own color settings, etc.
After speaking with Tiffany tonight, she told me about Pantone color (aka PMS) and Pantone is a universal color system. When you choose a Pantone color and I load that same color into PhotoShop, it will always be the true color - regardless of what monitor you look at.
A great link that I wanted to share (especially for my clients who use me for such services) is a link to the Pantone color wheel. You can choose a color from this list and send it to me (or your own graphic person if you’re just reading this as a visitor) and you know that they will be using the color that you’ve selected in its true form.
I hope these tips have been helpful. I’m going to get with Tiffany in future to see if there are other PhotoShop or graphic tips that she can offer. I love what she was able to do for me tonight - she saved me at least ten-fifteen minutes of graphic creating time!
Erin Blaskie is The VA Coach, a virtual assistant coach who assists individuals wanting to become a virtual assistant get their businesses launched successfully and efficiently. Erin is also the Owner of Business Services, ETC (A Virtual Assistance Company) that serves business owners around the world. You can visit her on the web at http://www.thevacoach.com or http://www.bsetc.ca.Â
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