Photoshop Lessons

Here are eight Photoshop Tricks I have found to be very useful

1. When working with layers, if you're using a transparent background in your layers, then try locking the transparent pixels on a layer before bringing out the air brush or other drawing tools. This makes a fast and easy way to play with the colors in a layer without adding any more pixels than is already there.
2. When selecting a circular or retangular area, use the Feather Selection option to soften the hard edge of the selection. This will give you an interesting "crop" of the image if you cut the selection out and clear the rest of the picture.
3. When selecting lots of detailed areas, if they are largely made up of the same color, then try selecting a few of the areas you're interested in with the magic tool, then choose Select Similar Areas to automatically grab all the rest of the areas composed of similar pixel colors.
4. A sense of perspective can be had by selecting the area you want to distort and choosing Select Edit.Transform and then choosing either skew, distort, or perspective to modify your selected area.
5. A great text option is the Small Caps option which displays small-letters as smaller versions of the capitalized letters of a font. This comes in handy especially when designing logos or rollover text buttons.
6. If you want to give your image some cool 3-D effects, then right-click on the layer you want to adjust up and choose "Blending Options." There are many interesting options to choose from and they can all be combined for some very interesting end-results.
7. When working with text objects, don't rasterize unless you absolutely have to for special effects. The text facility has some pretty powerful features for doctoring the text and display, including spacing between letters, colors, changing fonts mid-sentence, paragraph alignments, and so on. Also, when an image is resized, if the text-object is still present, it will automatically resize with the image without introducing a jagged look.
8. Work in layers! Learn to think in layers as though you're dealing with stacked sheets of glass. You'll be able to apply different effects to different layers to truly fine-tune your final results. If you need to keep items together that reside in different layers, then link the layers together. You'll be able to select and move as though the multiple layers were one.