Personal Folder

Me and friends are trying entrepreneur things by starting a herbal and book store this month. One of my jobs is designing brochures, advertise our products to consumer. One of the results:



Thanks to Arif Maulana, a friend who introduce me photoshop at the very beginning. I also learn image editing in printing and publishing purpose using Macromedia Freehand from him, but I think I will need a lot of refresh on Freehand since I’m not used to use it nowadays.

We were not going to detail, but here I try to mention some tools, actions, shortcut I work with photoshop at most:

• Shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Click to zoom-in photo editor.
• Shortcut Alt + Shift + Click to zoom-out photo editor.
• Press D to set background and foreground color to default value (black and white).

• Doing selection by Marquee Tool, Magic Wand Tool, or Lasso Tool. Marque tool have a set predefined shape to choose such as rectangles, ellipses, and 1-pixel rows and columns. Magic wand is good in selecting area in the same consistent color. While Lasso tool is good in selecting area with edge detection, custom polygonal selection, or custom freehand selection.
• Ctrl + A to select all image area.
• While selection action is on the way, press Shift to add selection area, or press Alt to subtract it.
• Ctrl + D to deselect (after doing selection things).
• Shift + Ctrl + I, while selection action is on the way, we want to select the un-selected area (select inverse).
• Crop tools to crop image.
• Clone stamp tool to take sample of an image and apply it to another image. I mostly used it for image correction.
• While in some tools such as brush, press “[“ or “]” to increase or decrease brush size.
• Eraser tool to erase some part of the image.
• Paint bucket tool, to fill an area in the same color to a new color.
• Gradient tool, to fill an area in gradient. Especially used with layer mask and black & white gradient, creating a blend between many layers with consistent gradient (that’s why I use Ctrl + D oftentimes).
• While in the selection mode, choose menu Edit > Fill to fill the selection with a new color, or choose Edit > Stroke to paint colored border around the selection.
• Choose Edit > Transform > scale, rotate, skew, distort, etc to transform image.
• Image > Mode > CMYK, grayscale, etc. Converting image between existing color mode. I used it mostly to convert colorful image to grayscale one.
• Image > Adjustment > Level, Contrast, Color Balances, etc. Mostly used to enhance color sharpness of the image.
• Image > image size, to reduce or increase image size. This command will reduce/increate the image and the canvas.
• Image > canvas size, to reduce or increase canvas size. This command will reduce/increase the canvas only (while the image size is the same before we reduce/increase the canvas).
• Layer > new, duplicate, delete layer.
• Layer > Merge Visible, Merge Linked. Merge all visible layer or
• Select > feather to round sharp edge of the selection.
• Select > modify > border, smooth, expand, contract.
• Filter, giving special effect to the image.
• Click the eye icon on the layer window, to change layer visibility.
• Click chain to link between layers. Linked layer will act as a whole when we edit it.
• Right click on layer > we can create new layer via cut or copy, delete, add layer style and blending option, or create layer mask.