Learn to paint graffiti without a risk of being arrested
See how easy it is to create a graffiti effect on a wall in Photoshop. The video shows you how to use a graffiti font to create graffiti writing and how to use styles and colors to format the test to make it look like real graffiti. Then see how to use the Vanishing point filter to place the graffiti text onto a wall in a photo. Finish the effect by blending the text with brushes, blend modes and textures all created using layers and masks so that the effect can be edited in future.
If you have thousands of images to add a copyright watermark to, you can use Lightroom to do this very quickly. This video shows the workflow to use to import thousands of images into Lightroom and how to export them and create your own watermark to add to them. This is a minimalist workflow designed to process a lot of images very quickly.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can copyright in bulk the images as you export them from Lightroom. One of my blog readers recently contacted me and asked me how easy it would be to add watermarks to a series of images that they had. And so this video is for them and for anybody else who’s considering applying a watermark to a lot of images all at once. And my suggestion is, and she had something like two and a half to three and a half thousand images, is that Lightroom is the tool to use.
So I’m going to get started and I actually have a folder of images that I am going to import into Lightroom to show you exactly how it will work. So I’m going to click on Import and then I’m going to select the folder that contains the images that I want to import in. So this would be the folders that contain the two and a half thousand or so images that this particular reader has. So I’m just looking for my particular set of images. And I know they’re here. So all I’m going to do to start off with is just to select the folder of images. And it’s these Cornwall images that I’m going to import. Now I’m going to add them to Lightroom. And in this case because I want to do this very quickly because all I want to do is to add watermarks to them, I’m going to select Minimal as my previews because that’s going to render everything very, very quickly. And because I want lots of images I’m going to deselect Don’t import selected duplicates. So all I’m going to do at this stage is now to click Import and bring those all into Lightroom.
Now the images are coming into Lightroom and I can start getting ready as soon as they’re in to export them with their watermarks. Now some of these are portrait orientation and some of them a landscape. That may or may not be an issue. I’m going to select the first image and Shift click on the last so that we can export them. I’m going to Right click and choose Export and then Export again. And this takes me to the Export dialogue. So the first thing I need to do is to determine where I want to export them to. So I’m just going to put them into a folder in my My Documents folder. And I’m just going to create a brand new folder for them. But I’m going to select My Documents as the location, and I’m going to put in a subfolder called watermark. And then I will check if I want to rename my files. I don’t want to rename them. The idea of this is to get in and out as quickly as possible.
I can convert them if they were not JPGs and I could select the quality for them. Again 85 percent quality might be sufficient. If you’re that particular reader 100 percent quality might be your preferred quality. I can resize them or not. So if I want to leave them at the exact same size I just deselect everything.
What we’re most concerned about here is this Watermark option. So I’ve got it selected, and I’m going to click it, and I can choose Edit Watermarks. So this means that I can now create my own watermark. So I’m just going to delete what’s here. I’m going to press and hold the Alt key as I type out 0169 on the keyboard because that gives me the copyright symbol, and I’m going to type my copyright text. And I’m going to do two lines. And it’s Helen Bradley, projectwoman.com. And you can see it up here and it’s up there because that’s where I’ve got it positioned right
now. Here’s the anchor. If I wanted it down the bottom corner I could place it there. And then there’s an inset which is inset off that option.
So I could push it further down into the corner if I wanted to or not. It looks like it’s also centered right now. And no it isn’t. It’s right justified. So we could left justify it or center it if we wanted to. And we can also resize it either by dragging on its sides or we can drag it just to make it bigger if we wanted to. So I’m going to inset this a little bit horizontally and a little bit vertically. But you could see that we have a lot of power in where we place it.
Its opacity is 100 percent. And I always suggest that you do apply a shadow to your text because the shadow will help its readability if it’s over a lighter background. So I would normally put a very, very small shadow. And you can change the angle so that you can make the shadow come from whatever angle that you want it to come from. I prefer mine to come from about 30 to 45, something like that, so it’s coming in from this angle here. And if you’re happy with that that’s all you need to do. So you click Save. And we’re going to save this. And we’ll call it test watermark, you can call it whatever you want your watermark to be called, and I’ll click Create. And it’s now being selected as the watermark for my images.
I’m going to select to after export to show in Explorer. But literally at this point we could have two and a half or three and a half thousand images selected and they would all be ready for export. And all I do is click Export and now they’re going out. They’re exported out of Lightroom. And when they appear in that folder in My Documents, which we’re going to see in a minute, here it is now, they’re all going to have the watermark on them. So if I double click on this image we’re going to see that the watermark is in place.
So that’s how easy it would be to apply a watermark. If that were all you wanted to do and you had thousands of images to do it with, that’s all you need do to watermark your images. Bring them into Lightroom, don’t even bother rendering big previews, just use the minimal, select to export them, click and create your watermark and then just click Go and Lightroom will just go and do it all for you.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Please if you have any questions feel free to pose them to me. I’m quite happy to make videos to answer questions. Look out for more of my videos on this YouTube channel. And follow me at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, tricks and tutorials for Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator and a whole lot more.
Create a cancelled postal stamp watermark to use in Photoshop and Lightroom. See how to use the path tools to create the watermark and then save it as a png image with a transparent background so it can be used over your images.
This is the video explanation of the blog post on the same topic which you can find here:
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a postage style copyright stamp that you can use on your images. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a copyright symbol like this which is a couple of concentric circles and some wavy lines and text. And it’s got an overall texture to it.
This is a tutorial that I created for digital-photography-school.com when one of my readers there was having a bit of difficulty following along. So that’s why I’ve created this as a video tutorial. And because of this I’m going to be doing it step-by-step as I did it for that particular tutorial on the Digital Photography School site. And you’ll see in the comments here just below the tutorial I’ve given you a link to that site if you want to follow along.
So the first thing that I did in that tutorial was to create a brand new image. So I’m going to do that now. I’m going to choose File and then New. And I’m going to do a letter size image, landscape. So it’s 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall, and it’s 300 pixels resolution, RGB color and the background contents are white. So I’m just going to click Ok. And here’s our starting image.
Now we’re going to add a new layer so I’m going to have my layers palette visible. So if you don’t have it visible choose Window and then Layers so that you can see it. And we’re going to add a new layer and we do that by clicking this little icon here. It’s the Add New Layer icon. It looks like I clicked it twice. So I only want one new layer here. And we’re going to draw our circles using the Ellipsis tool. And it’s here in the toolbar so let’s just have a look and see what we’re looking for.
We’re looking for this tool here. It’s the Ellipsis tool. And when you choose it you want to choose Paths from the tools option palette. Now the options are a little bit different in earlier versions of Photoshop. There are three icons here and you want to make sure that you click the icon that says Path when you mouse over it. They’re the exact same options. They just deliver differently. And this is Photoshop CS6’s version so I have Path selected.
I’m going to drag to draw an ellipsis, but you can see that this is going to be a sort of oval. I want it to be a circle so I’m going to hold Shift as I draw it. And if it’s not in the correct position before I let everything go I’m going to hold the Spacebar and move it into position, let go the Spacebar and just make sure that I have the outermost of my circles created. And when it’s dead right, I’ve still got the Shift key held, I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button.
So now I have a circle the shape of this outer circle that we’re going to use. Now this is now going to be colored in and we want to stroke this circle. And we do this by going here to the Paths palette. Now the Paths palette you get to by choosing Window and then Paths. And the topmost path is going to be called your work path and that’s the one that you’re working with. This is this circle here. We want to stroke the circle with a brush so we’re going to go and select a brush to use.
So I’m going to click on my Brush tool and then I’m going to select the kind of brush that I want to use. And I’m going to use a hard sort of brush here. So I’m going to select that brush. It’s a hard brush. And let’s just check and see from the original tutorial just how big it needs to be. And apparently it needs to be 40 pixels. So let’s just take it up to around 40 pixels. That’s 39, but that’ll be fine.
I’m going to set black as my foreground color. So I’ve set my brush and my foreground color and what I want to do now is with this path selected I’m going to choose the option that says Stroke Path with Brush. So that’s this icon here. So I’ll click it to stroke the path with a brush. Now I’ve got a funny sort of stroke here and the reason is that my stroke is set to something I don’t want it to be set to. So let’s just wind that back with Edit, Undo.
Then I’m going to right click on this Path option here and choose Stroke Path. And I want to disable this option here, Simulate Pressure. I just want to stroke it with the brush so I’m going to click Ok. Now it’s working the way I want it to. So now I have my path stroked, well at least the outside stroked. Now I need to use the outside to make the inside because it’s going to be really easy to make a concentric circle. To do that I’m going to click on this tool here. It’s the Path Selection tool.
This is the one I want and it shares a position with the Direct Selection tool. But it’s the black one, the Path Selection tool that I want, and I’m going to click on my path so it is selected. Now I want to transform this. And the transformation handles have not appeared so I’m going to press Ctrl T to make them appear. I want to drag in on this handle. But I want to make sure that I don’t lose the circle and I want to make sure that I don’t lose the fact that it needs to be concentric. So I’m going to just hold down both Shift and Alt as I drag in on this handle. So let’s Shift Alt and drag inwards. And you can see that what I’m doing is making a concentric circle. It has the exact same middle as the original circle. I’m going to let go of my Left Mouse button and then let go of the shift and the Alt keys. Now my work path here is a much smaller path so I’m just going to click the checkmark here.
Now I’m going to do exactly the same thing. I’m going to select my brush and I’m going to stroke it, make sure black is my foreground color, and I’m going to stroke this path with the brush. And I get the exact same effect. Now what I need to do is to make a path for my type. And it needs to be a little bit bigger than this inside circle. So again, I’m going to click this Path Selection tool. I’m going to press Ctrl and T to show my handles, I’m going to hold down Alt and Shift, that’s Option and Shift on the Mac, and this time drag out just a little bit so that I get a path for my type, let go of the Left Mouse button, let go the rest of the keys and click the checkmark. Now I’m going to add my text. And to do that I’m going to select my Text tool and then select my type. And I want to use Myriad Pro.
So I’m going to go down here until I find Myriad Pro. And I think the type that I suggested in the article that we used was about 24 points so I’m going to click that. I have black as my type color. So everything looks pretty good. I’m going to hold my mouse over the line, over this path that is still selected, and when I do you’ll notice that the I-beam pointer changes from this I-beam to an I-beam with a short of squiggly line. That means I’m typing on the path. So I’m going to click to do that.
Now the first thing I need to do is to add my copyright symbol. So I’m going to hold down the Alt or Option key and type out 0169 on the keyboard because that gives me copyright, and now 2013, and I’m going to type my copyright details. And I think I’ll do this all in capitals. And I’m using Helen Bradley, projectwomam.com. And I think actually I just want to put a www in there so I’ll just arrow back and make that change.
Now so far my type hasn’t quite stretched all the way around my words. So the next thing we need to do is to stretch it just a little bit more. And I’m going to do that using the Character Spacing tool. So first of all, I’m going to make sure that all my text is selected and then I’m going to choose this dialogue here which will get me to the Character Spacing dialogue. Now this is two dialogues.
There’s a paragraph and a character, and we want the character. And what we want is this tool here, this VA tool. And it’s a scrubby slider so all I need to do is to adjust it a little bit. And can you see that the text is getting bigger every time I drag on it? And I think I’m going to wind that back just a little bit because I could probably add a trailing dash to this. And that’s now all the way around that shape. And let’s just up that to bold because I don’t think it’s really quite dark enough for me. And if I’m using bold I’ll going to have to wind back up on my character spacing a little bit. And so now I’ve created my text on a circle.
Now the only thing that I’m a little bit concerned about is I think that this circle could be a little bit smaller. So I’m going to reselect my text layer here, and again with Alt and Shift selected, I’m going to drag inwards just a little bit to resize that circle path that the text is on because I just think it was a little bit on the big side. So I’m a little bit happier with my text now.
So we’re ready now to go ahead and to create the wavy lines. And we’re going to do that by clicking on the Custom Shape tool here that shares that toolbar position with the Ellipse tool that we used earlier. But this time we want Custom Shape. And from the Shape dropdown list here what we’re looking for is this wiggly line wave shape. Now this is shipped with Photoshop so you will have the wave shape. If you don’t have it in your collection you can click this little fly out arrow and choose All to add all the shapes or append all the shapes to your shapes collection. But this is the one we’re using.
I’m going to drag the shape onto my image and then use the Path Selection tool to just move it into position. Now at the moment it’s a series of closed paths and I want to open these paths. And I’m going to do that by clicking here on the Add Anchor Point tool. Unfortunately you can’t just delete points in Photoshop to open up these curves.
We first of all have to add a point in here that we can then go and delete to open it up. It doesn’t work otherwise. It’s a bit of a nuisance. But this is how we’re going to do it. So I’m going to click once with this Add Anchor Point tool on the ends up all of the shapes. And now I’m going back to the Direct selection tool. And I’m going to make sure that I’m selected on this point that I just added, so it’s black and everything else around it is not, and I’m going to press the Delete key. And that will just break that path in two. And I’m going to repeat that for each of these points.
So select it and press Delete, select it, press Delete, select it, and press Delete. Now if Photoshop is running out of memory if you’ve been using it quite a bit, you might find as I just did earlier that that was not working. Every time I pressed Delete the entire path was going. So I just closed down Photoshop and reopened it and went back to where I was working and it’s working perfectly. So now I have my lines. And you’re probably beginning to see a pattern here because this is just another path. And we can stroke it because we have our tool that we can stroke it with.
So I’m just going to go back and make sure my brush is selected. The same brush is selected, black paint, click on the work path so that I have it selected and now I’m going to stroke it. And that is giving us our lines. And so if you wanted to leave it at this point you could because everything is in place. But I’m going to go ahead and add a Grunge effect to it.
Now we’re ready to create our Grunge effect. And to create that, first of all what we need to do is to flatten the image. But in flattening it I need to remove the white layer from the flattened version. That is because later on when I will put this copyright image over my photograph I want the background to be transparent. So I want to keep this white layer out of the action right now. So I have two visible layers. I’m going to click on the topmost layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to create a new flattened version of this layer. So this is the version that I’m going to use. And now I’m going to bring in a texture layer.
So I have a texture image open here, and I think it’s a really nice texture to use. So I’ve got the texture open. And to add the texture to this particular layer I’m going to select the layer and click the Add Layer Mask icon because that adds a layer mask to the image. And now this texture has to be made the exact same size as this image so I’m going to choose Image and then Image Size. And I want to resize it to the exact same size as this one.
So I can do that by just clicking Window and just pointing to the image whose size I want to borrow. And that’s apparently the size of this image here so I’m just going to click Ok. And because it’s a texture image it doesn’t matter that I’m skewing it a bit out of proportion because nobody really knows what a scratch is supposed to look like. Having done this, and it’s critical that you resize the texture to the exact same size as this image or you can’t use this next technique, which is to apply the texture as a mask.
So I’m going to click on the mask, and I’m going to choose Image, Apply Image. And if you don’t have the texture file the exact same size it will not appear here. So it does obviously appear here so that’s exactly what I want. I want to apply the texture to the image. And at the moment it’s set to Multiply blend mode. But I can test other blend modes and I can even test inverting the layer. So I’m just going to look for the best effect that I can get here.
In fact in the tutorial I suggested that we use Hard Light. So that looks like the one that we’re going to use, Hard Light. So I’m just going to click it and click Ok. And that gives us the sort of texturize look to our shape. And again, I was going to create this as a new layer so I’ll click on this layer and again press Ctrl Alt Shift and E to gives me a newly stamped layer. Well it’s not appearing to work right now. So let’s just add a new layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift E because that will work. And then we’re going to save this as a PNG image. But before I do it I think it’s going to be cropped because I think it’s a bit too big at this stage.
So I’m just going to crop down to get rid of the bits of the image that I don’t want and click the checkmark. And now I’m going to save this but making sure that I have this background turned off because I want it to be a transparent image. So I’m going to save it as a PNG image. So I’ll choose File, Save as, and I’m going to call this HB copyright, black, and PNG. And I’m going to make sure that I select PNG from this list here. And here’s PNG. So I’m going to select it and just click Save and click Ok. And that’s now saved as a PNG image.
Having done that I then want to make it white. So I’m going to choose Image and then Adjustments and then I’m going to invert it so what was black becomes white. And now if I just test this with a black filled layer behind it, you’ll see that it’s now a white image. So we could use that to go over the top of for example a very dark image.
So having created that I’m going to turn off my background because I want this to be a transparent image, and I’m going to resave it this time as a PNG. But this time I’m going to call it white. So again, this is going to be HB copyright, and it’s going to be white, PNG. I’m going to save it as a PNG image, and Ok. And so this is now the copyright image that I can use on my images in future.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. And look out for more of my tutorials both on digitalphotographyschool.com and also on my own website at projectwoman.com.
You have four import options for your photos – Copy as DNG, Copy, Move and Add. In some circumstances, not all these options are available – for example, you may choose Copy or Copy as DNG when importing from a camera card but you cannot select Move or Add when you are importing images from a card.
When you select one of these options that choice may affect the other options you have. For example, if you choose Add to add images to the catalog from a folder, you cannot choose to back up your files at the same time. You can also not convert RAW images to DNG if you are adding them to Lightroom.
So, if you want to convert images, or back up, or rename images as you import them, it is best to import them direct from your camera card. Copying them into a folder on your disk before adding them to your Lightroom catalog diminishes your options when working with your images.
Understand the limits of the Photo Stream and how to save images from it so they aren’t removed from your iPad or iPhone
Sometimes you may know that you had some images on your iPad or iPhone but suddenly you find that they’ve gone.
This happens to me when I drop some images into my Photo Stream on my Windows PC that I want to use on my iPad. I drop images into the Uploads folder on my PC and, via the iCloud, they are synced automatically to my iPad. I know the images got there safely – I put them there months ago and I know that I saw them on my iPad but suddenly today they aren’t there. Confusing? Happened to you? It probably has and here is the explanation as to why they disappear and how to stop them from doing so.
The issue is the Photo Stream. The photo stream on the iPad and iPhone only store the last one thousand images – if you shoot lots of images and, say have your iPhone and iPad synced then you’ll run out of space pretty quickly. When you do then images are knocked out of the Photo Stream to make room for more recent ones.
The issue doesn’t happen on your Mac or PC because they have plenty of space so photos in your Photo Stream folders there are always there – it is just a protection against junking up your iPhone or iPad with ‘stuff’.
So, what do you do when you want to keep some of the images from your Photo Stream permanently and you don’t want to lose them? The answer is to move them to an album or to your Camera Roll. The images in your camera roll and in albums are there to stay. And just to clarify, you don’t have to move images from the Photo stream that you captured with that device – because images you capture on the iPad for example are in the Camera Roll and stay there. The images you want to save are those that get synced to the iPad via iCloud from other devices such as your iPhone or PC or Mac – they are the ones that only hang around for a short time.
How to move images from your Photo Stream to an album
So, to move a lot of images to an album (an easy solution for lots of images that you want to save to somewhere that isolates them from all your other images), tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream.
You should now see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Then tap Edit.
In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now tap Save and choose to Save to an Existing Album or Save to New Album.
I have an album for images I want to edit and play with on the iPad called Editable Pix so I typically tap that to select it. This lets me store those images so they are isolated from all the other images in my Camera Roll.
How to move images from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll
It is also possible to save photos from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll. The advantage of this is that they are in the Camera Roll itself and in some situations that might work best for you.
To do this, again tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Again tap Edit. In this mode you can now tap the images that you want to save – each of them should have a blue checkmark on them. Now, tap the Share button in the top left of the screen:
And choose Save to Camera Roll. (It is very confusing that these two processes that really are so similar are handled so differently in iOS6).
How to save one image from your Photo Stream to your Camera Roll
Now, if you just want to save one image from the Photo Stream to the Camera Roll, tap Photos, tap Photo Stream, tap My Photo Stream so you see all the thumbnails of images in your photo stream. Tap the one image that you want to copy to the Camera Roll so it is showing full screen. Now tap the Send to button that is a box with an arrow coming out of it in the top right of the screen and choose Save to Camera Roll from the menu.
Now you will never again lose images off your iPhone or iPad that you really want to keep.
See how to upload images from your Mac to your iPad or iPhone
Sometimes you will get images on your Mac that you want to share with your devices such as your iPad or iPhone. To do this you can add them to your photo stream and they will be synced automatically next time you are connected using a wifi connection.
To do this, from inside iPhoto, click the image(s) to add to the photo stream then click the Share option on the toolbar, click Photo Stream > My Photo Stream. The images will be uploaded to your photo stream and then downloaded to other devices when they next update via a wifi connection.
Of course, for this to work the images have to be in iPhoto. If an image is not, for example, it is on the desktop – you can add it to iPhoto by dragging and dropping it into iPhoto and then add it to your photo stream.
Of course if you have your iPhoto set up to automatically send all new images to your photo stream the very process of adding images to iPhoto will add them to your Photo Stream. To do this in iPhoto, choose iPhoto > Edit Preferences > Photo Stream and, under My Photo Stream (which should already be enabled), check Automatic Import.
When you need to translate a documents to another language, Google Docs can do it for you.
When you need to quickly translate one of your documents to another language, Google Docs can instantly create a new, translated copy in any of Google’s supported translate languages.
To do this, open your document, and click Tools > Translate document…. A dialogue will open up in which you select the language you want to translate to, as well as the name of the new translated document. Click “Translate” and a new tab will open with your translated document.
Keep in mind that, although it is improving constantly, Google’s translate feature will still only provide a rough translation. While understandable, it will be grammatically imperfect, and therefore it should not be used for official translations.
Smart Objects are a great tool for working with images in Photoshop but did you know there are two ways to make copies of them. One way you duplicate the Smart Object so every instance of it will always be the same image and the other way you copy the Smart Object but unlink it so you can change out one image without changing the other.
Here’s how it works: Start with a new Photoshop document and add an image as a Smart Object – my favorite way to do this is to choose File > Place and place the image inside the file. This gives you one image as a Smart Object in the Layers palette. Now, the first way to duplicate a Smart Object is to right click and choose Duplicate Layer. This makes an exact copy of the layer so anything you do with the Smart Object on this layer will be done to both layers. Here I double clicked on one of the layer thumbnails and opened the actual image on that layer. I converted it to black and white then closed and saved it and this is what I have now in Photoshop. The two Smart Object layers are both changed. The alternative is to right click the Smart Object layer and choose New Smart Object via Copy. You get the same result as the earlier option with one exception – the two images are separate and they can be altered individually. Here I did the same alteration as before, only this time the image on the top layer is changed an not the one on the bottom layer. If desired you can change the image on the layer. To do this, click the layer to select it and choose Layer > Smart Objects > Replace Contents. Locate a different image to use, click it and click Place. Here I have resized the placed image so you can see they are different. If I had done this with the Duplicate layer then both images would be replaced. Which of these options you use really depends on what you want to do with the image. Sometimes you want two of the same image, sometimes not.
When you’re using layers in Photoshop for photo editing and composting you can speed up the process of working with them if you know these cool layer tricks.
1 Unlock the Background
You will already know the Background of any photo is locked and you can’t do anything much with it until you unlock it. The quickest way to unlock a background layer is from inside the Layers palette. Drag the lock icon to its right and drop it in the Trash and the Background layer will be automatically converted to a regular layer.
2 One click add a Layer
To create a new layer above the current layer click the Add New Layer icon at the foot of the Layer palette.
To add a new layer directly below the current layer Ctrl or Command Click on that icon. Both options add a layer but without displaying the Layer dialog.
3 Merge Everything to One Layer but Keep the Layers too
To merge all the current layers in the document to a single layer and at the same time to keep all the layers intact below it, click the topmost layer of the document and press Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E (Command + Option + Shift + E on the Mac). In case you are curious – it’s called Stamp Visible.
4 Select the Content on the Current Layer
To select everything on the current layer Ctrl + Click on the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette.
5 Copy a Layer to Another Document
To copy a layer from one document to another drag the layer from the Layers palette in one document and drop it into the other document. If you hold Shift as you drag the layer will be centered in the middle of the second document.
6 Quick Layer Moves
To quickly move a layer up the layer stack press Command + ] and to move it down, press Command + [.
7 Instant Delete a Layer
To instantly delete a layer, click the layer and press Delete.
Bonus Layer tip
To fill a layer or a selection with the foreground color press Alt + Backspace (Option + Delete on the Mac). Use Control + Backspace (Command + Delete on the Mac to fill the layer or selection with the Background color.
So, over to you now… what are your favorite Layer tips and tricks?
Learn how to create a Kaleidoscope in Photoshop. Video includes tips for a shortcut for copying and rotating a layer.
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Transcript for video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create quick and easy kaleidoscopes in Photoshop. Before we begin let’s have a look at the sort of thing that we can create. This is the kaleidoscope I created earlier from the image that we’re actually going to use. And as you can see I’ve layered various copies of the same kaleidoscope on top of it, changed some of the colors to create an even more distinct pattern effect. This was my original kaleidoscope. This is a second version of it on top and this is another version of it in the middle. So let’s get started with our image. This is an image I shot at the Neon Bone Yard in Las Vegas. The first thing I’m going to do is to convert this background layer into a regular layer just by dragging and dropping the lock icon into the trashcan. Then I’m going to move this image. So I’m going to first of all zoom out a little bit so I can see where I’m going. Then I’m going to select the Move Tool and I’m going to start transforming this shape. And what I want to do is to transform it through 60 degrees, some sort of 60 degrees, minus 60 plus 60. And what I’m going to do is drag this shape over the edge of the image here. I can resize it if I want to but I want it to only go over two edges of this image because I want to use the 60 degree angle that we have. So I’m going to save it. That’s good because I’ve got some nice texture in here and I’m just going to click the checkmark. So if we had a really good look at this we would see that there’s some anti- aliasing down here on this edge. So to get rid of it I’m going to click the Magic Wand Tool here. I’m going to click on this side of the image. And you see perhaps even on the video that there’s a little bit of a gap between the selected area and the image itself. So I’m going to choose Select Inverse to inverse the selection so I have only my corner piece selected and then I’m going to bring it in by choosing Select Modify Contract. And I’m going to bring it in one pixel and that should make it just a little bit smaller. And then so that I get just that piece I’m going to choose Image and then Crop. And this is the piece that I’m going to use to create my kaleidoscope from. So we have it on its own layer. But we need a bit more area to work in. So I’m going to select the Crop Tool. And if you didn’t know that you can do so you’re going to find out now that you can actually crop in a negative direction. So you can use the Crop Tool to add space to your image. So I’m just going to add a little bit of extra space around my image so we have a bit of a better area to work with. I’m going to select my layer with my shape and I want to flip it. So I’m going to choose Layer New Layer via Copy. And with this shape I’m going to transform it. So I’m going to choose Edit and then Free Transform. And I want to transform it around this side. So I’m just going to click on this side so it’s anchored here so that when I flip it over it doesn’t move. And I want to flip it over so it’s exactly mirrored which means that it’s negative 100 percent. So I’m just going to make that negative 100 percent and then I have an exact duplicate of this shape. And this is the piece that I’m going to rotate around to create my kaleidoscope so I’m going to merge these two layers together. I can do that by selecting both layers and choose Layer Merge Layers or Merge Visible, either of those would work. So too would Flatten Image or I could just press Ctrl E. But let’s choose the menu option. Now that we have our basic shape I’m ready to rotate it. And I’m going to do this the smart way so I don’t have to do every single one of them. I just want to do it once, Layer New Layer via Copy, Edit Free Transform. I’m going to anchor it at its bottom center point. And I’m going to rotate it around 60 degrees, and I’m going to click the checkmark here. And having done that once I’m now going to get Photoshop to do it automatically for me. And all I need to do to do that is to press these keys, Ctrl Shift Alt T, and that’s Command Option Shift T on the Mac. So I’m going to press all these keys and every time I do it Photoshop duplicates the layer and rotates it. So with four keystrokes I’ve now got the rest of my kaleidoscope. Again I’m going to select all these layers and Ctrl or Command E to merge them into one. And now I’ve got one layer I can make a duplicate of it. And then I can size it as we saw earlier. If I want to size it around its center point I’m going to hold Alt and Shift as I resize it. And now I can also rotate it. So I might rotate it for example 15 degrees. And then I might make another duplicate of this and do something similar to this duplicate layer, again holding down the Shift and Alt so I’m rotating or sizing around the middle point, place my shape in and then rotate it. This time I might choose say let’s go 30 degrees. And then for each of these I could add a hue/saturation adjustment. And that will allow me just to recolor the shape and perhaps get a more interesting effect in doing so. I’ll do that and just click Ok. So there is the basics of creating a kaleidoscope in Photoshop. Now you could use a different measurement than the 60 degrees that I used. You might want to try it with 30 degrees to get a more complex kaleidoscope. But basically once you get your flipped shape and you merge it you can get Photoshop to do all the copying and rotating work for you. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more of my Photoshop video training on my YouTube channel.
