Photoshop tips from Kip

Gestural size. That's what I call the fact that most of us have a particular size at which we can best do certain tasks, like draw a circle or a straight line. Therefore, size your workspace to suit what you have to do next. Enlarge or reduce, whatever. Maybe even rotate it if you have to.

Draw and erase. I can sail right along (in black and white linework, particularly) by choosing the brush tool and keeping my other hand on the X key, which lets me switch the foreground and background colors (usually Black and White), thereby using the brush as an eraser part of the time. Draw, erase, draw, erase, draw too much, erase it down, and so on. Sailin'.

You can get rid of the blasted circle that appears when you start doing anything with your tablet (assuming that you, like I, use a Wacom tablet for Photoshopping) and messes you up, by going to the Wacom control panel doodad, and finding and unchecking the tickybox that says "use Windows ink." Found that today. I may need it again some time.

Quick color adjustment with Control (or Command) L. Learn this one! Open that menu and move the triangles on the left and right so that they just touch where the black leaves off at each end. You can also mess with the middle. If your colors are off, open your separate color channels one by one (there's a pulldown menu, and you'll notice it also tells you the keyboard shortcuts for next time) and give them a go. When you finish, you can also try goosing the middle of the curve up or down and see what looks best to you. For this you need judgement. Good luck.

Right after that, you might want to fade back. Before you do another operation, bring up the Fade window (Control Shift F, I believe), and you can hold the shift down to go in 10% increments to rein in your enthusiasm in the previous step.

Back to Control (or Command... I'm not going to say this every time) L, if you've scanned an old page of music or comic art or just anything, you can get rid of the years by taking out that big hunk of black at the right-hand edge of the histogram or whatever that thing is. Try it all at once, or color by color. When you're all done, you might want to fade back just a tad, for comics, or not at all, for sheet music.

Tip for scanning sheet music: The straighter you get it on the scanner, the less work you'll have to do straightening it out later. I don't know if that matters to you, but I'm really dippy about that.

Tip for scanning two-sided originals: Put a black sheet behind it on the scanner. The scanner lid (well, mine, anyway) is white, and that really helps it to include the stuff on the other side of the page. I have no idea why it wants to do that, though, because to me that stuff is a bother and a distraction. I made my black sheet by copying both sides of a piece of paper with the copier's lid wide open. Then I laminated it. That was fifteen or twenty years ago, and the sheet is still giving me good service. I also have one or two book of just the right size with solid black bindings that are quite useful as well.

Photos that are a little blurry or smeary can be partly rehabilitated by proper adjustment of the curves. Besides the Control-L (remember, I'm not bothering to say Command every time now) adjustment, there's also the Control-M adjustment. You can actually steal contrast from one part of a photo and give it to another sometimes. Let's say you want a face to show up better. When you're in Control-M, slide your cursor around in that face and notice where the little dot is sliding up and down the line (which is 45 degrees by default). Then add a point or two and slide them in just a tiny bit to make that part of the line slightly steeper. Do this for each color plate (same pulldown menu as with Ctrl-L). Look at the before and after when you're done by using Undo, and be amazed. Before you do anything else after that, use the Fade thing to cut back on your brilliance just a tiny bit, if (like many of us) you fear you have gone Too Far.

5/7/2020: I just drew the ventriloquist cartoon and colored it in greys. The second thing I did was the dummy's hat with the gradated grey band. I did that by making a 50% grey (zeroed out the C, Y, and M values and just put 50 in the K) and using the Burn tool to darken one side, and the Dodge tool to lighten the other. After I did that, whenever I needed a grey tone, I didn't have to make it fresh: I just reached for the Option key (still using my Mac keyboard--it's something else on the laptop's keyboard, which is far enough away that I don't reach for it) to get the eyedropper tool and selected what I wanted.

To color the areas, I made a new layer to color in. Then I selected the places I wanted to fill with a color, using the Magic Wand (one of the W tools), and expanded it by a pixel (Select > Modify > Expand), and chose the bucket tool (G), moved to the new layer, and filled the marquees there.

You probably know, but holding Shift as you press the letter for your tool, like W for the wand, or O for the Dodge/Burn, lets you cycle through the tools that the letter brings up. Dodge, for instance, cycles through Dodge, some sort of sponge, and Burn. I should probably learn how to use that sponge, and will smite myself on the head when I realize what I've been missing. Then I'll run over here to post it as a hot tip.

More if I think of it. It's not always easy to remember three decades of tippage all at once.