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Photoshop Tip: How To Expand Rectangular Selections & Keep Them Crisp
If you make a rectangular selection in Photoshop, and you find it’s not big enough you COULD make it bigger by using Select > Modify > Expand. This will work if you only need to expand by about 4 or 5 pixels, any more than that and you’ll notice that the corners start to become round.
So here’s a better way to expand;
1. Make your selection.
2. Press Ctrl+T (win) or Cmd + T (mac) to bring up the Free Transform bounding box.
3. Simply click and drag one of the bounding box handles and pull your selection to the required size. Press Enter or Return to complete the transformation and voila! Nice crisp corners on your expanded selection.
You can transform any selection of any shape in this way. I’d love to hear your selection tips, any you’d like to share?
8 Tips For Speeding Up Your Navigation Around Photoshop
I haven’t really written too many list posts, not sure why really, but here’s one today. These are 8 easy ways to speed up how you move around the interface in Photoshop. A keyboard press here, a keyboard press there and you will be flying around your workspace. Most of these I use without even thinking anymore so I hope you find them useful.
1. Press Tab to hide your toolbox, options and palettes. This gives you much more room in your workspace and is a handy way to get an uncluttered view of your work. Roll your cursor over the edge of the left, right or top of the screen to display them again, roll your cursor away and they’ll hide again.
2. To keep your toolbox on the screen but hide the palettes, hit Shift + Tab.
3. When you’re working with large documents or are zoomed in closely, the Page Up and Page Down keys move you one full screen up or down one full screen.
4. Press Ctrl/Cmd + Page Up to move one full screen left, press Ctrl/Cmd + Page Down to move one full screen right.
5. Press the Home key to jump to the top left corner of your image. Press the End key to jump to the bottom right corner.
6. If you have more than one document open, press Ctrl/Cmd + Tab to cycle through each one in turn.
7. When you have one or more documents open, you can match their magnification or match their location. To do this choose Window > Arrange to Match Zoom, Match Location or Match Zoom and Location.
8. Hold Alt/Option + click on the info area on the bottom of the document window to quickly get more information about your open image.
What other tips do you have for speeding up around the interface? Or for speeding up your workflow in general, I’d love to hear your tips.
Chocolate Heaven!
Earlier this year I worked on a great project designing and developing a website and blog for Chocolate Heaven, a lovely chocolate shop in Athlone, run by Sylvia and Nicola. As well as providing wonderful chocolate treats to their shop customers, the ladies also provide chocolate fountains for weddings and other events, as well as chocolate gift boxes for hotels and restaurants.
The site has more information about their services and has an online chocolate store – perfect for making Christmas gift purchases – you really can’t go wrong with chocolate, can you? Nicola has been blogging a lot over the last couple of months and you’ll find everything posts on everything from white chocolate mousse recipes to the history of chocolate making.
I think I can say in all honesty that this was the only design project I’ve worked on that I have literally drooled at my keyboard!
Irish Web Awards
Congratulations to the everyone who won or took part in the 1st ever Irish Web Awards. The awards were organised by Damien Mulley and took place in the Radisson Hotel in Dublin last night. The awards were open to anyone who wanted to enter and I think this was a wonderful start to what will hopefully be annual awards. The organisation last night was top notch and the venue was great.
On a side note, although I’ve spent several weeks working on my dance routine in preparation for the disco afterward, I had to leave early because someone crashed into the back of our car on the way to the awards and I had a distinctly stiff neck about an hour into the ceremony. In fact, I’m tapping away now feeling as if I’ve spent all day yesterday bench-pressing 200 pounds with my neck. (But that’s another story).
Anyway well done to everyone involved.
Photoshop Training : Total Training Goes Online
Total Training are now offering their full range of courses online. Their videos cover everything from Print Design to Web Design to Communication and Development Tools. In the past I’ve bought their videos on Photoshop and Illustrator and found them to be entertaining and incredibly informative. It’s a nice way to learn, looking over the instructor’s shoulder.
They currently have a deal where if you buy $150 worth of their instructional DVDs, you will get ONE YEAR’s access to their online library. That will give you access to over $1000 worth of DVDs online.
The full range of Total Training Videos can be viewed here.
6 Lovely Dark WordPress Themes
Here’s a small sample from the literally thousands of dark themes available from wordpress. These templates are mostly black or very dark grey and yet they stand out because of their elegance and look that little bit different from the rest of the mob. Some of these themes you may have come across already and a couple of them are fairly new.
