Do you find that you often make the same typos over and over again? You can increase your typing speed and accuracy with Google Docs and Word’s automatic substitution tool.
To start, if you are using Google Docs, go to Tools > Preferences and ensure that the box next to “Automatic Substitution” is checked. If you are using Microsoft Word, go to File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options > AutoCorrect tab and check “Replace text as you type”. The rest of the process is the same for both word processors.
This is the automatic substitution dialogue in Word
Now you simply insert any potential typos into the “Replace” table and place the corresponding corrections in the “With” table. For example, if you tend to type “wiht” instead of “with”, you can add “wiht” and “with” to a row on your substitution table. Every time you type “wiht” it will be automatically corrected to “with”.
You can also use this tool to quickly type long strings of text. If you find yourself writing out your email address repeatedly, you can create an automatic substitution for it. Create a short phrase such as “em#” or “email#” for the Replace field, and put your email address in the With field. It is important that your phrase include a special character, such as the number sign at the end, so that the substitution will only occur when you intend it to. If your phrase were simply “email” you would never be able to write the word itself without the substitution taking place!
Learn how to link Smart Objects so, when one changes, they both change and how to un-sync them so they are separate. I’ll also show you how to replace the contents of a Smart Object with another image. Useful for wedding photographers and for creating albums in Photoshop.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to work with smart objects in Photoshop. In this video I’m going to show you how you can use smart objects to assemble complex images, and you can do it in a way that harnesses the value of the smart objects. For example, I’m going to create a smart object for this background and then a smart object for this couple. This will allow me to go to this smart object and choose Replace Image. This will allow me to go to this smart object layer, right click and choose Replace Contents. And I can then replace the contents of that smart object with any of the images from that album. And so I can quickly and easily create images for an album with a background in place. But there is a catch and you’ll want to use the right tool for creating these smart objects so I’m going to show you that too.
Let’s just hide this away and let’s go and get our starter document. I’ve already got a vignette that I’m going to use, but we’re going to put in here the original background. So I’m going to choose File and then Place because that’s a way of getting an image in as a smart object. Here’s the portion of this image that I want to use as my background. I’ve already extracted it as a separate image so I’m going to click Place. And I know that this needs to be enlarged a little bit so I’m just going to enlarge it to 75 percent and then click the checkmark. So it’s now in place and it’s a smart object. It has a special little smart object icon. And I’m just going to show you that you have this vignette which is separate and it just goes over the top.
Now we want to create another smart object, but we want this smart object to be unhooked or unlinked to this one. So I’m going to right click and I’m going to choose New, Smart Object via Copy. And what that does is makes a copy of the existing smart object as a separate layer, but it is not linked to the original layer. So now if I go into this and resize it, I’m just going to link these two together, this gives us a new smart object layer in the image which is not linked to the background layer although the two share the current image. I’m just going to add a drop shadow to it. So if we were creating a bridal album we could use this as the starting point for our album. I’m just going to get a slightly nicer drop shadow here and pull that vignette down so that it’s over the top of the background and not the image here. So having created this, this could be the first image in our album. And we can then go ahead using the same background image and just change the smart object out without having to recreate this document, right click, choose Replace Contents.
This time I’m going for an image of the bride and groom, and here they are in place. They’re a little large so I’m just going to choose the transform tool with Ctrl or Command T. I know they need to be taken down to about 10 percent so I’m going to scale them down to 10 percent and just move them into position. You can see that the drop shadow is still in place, the background is still in place, the vignette is still in place, and we’ve got another page of our album already created. If I right click and choose Replace Contents I can go and select yet another image to go in here. And again, the border and everything are already on that image. So it gives me a smart way of creating an album very quickly.
I’m just going to discard that for now and let’s have a look at what you might want to use and which would be a bad choice in this situation. And that would be to right click and choose Duplicate Layer. Now that would give us on the face of it exactly what we had before, a smart object with a second smart object layer over the top. Let’s just go ahead and select that and let’s add our drop shadow to it. Let’s position it where we want it to be above the vignette. And here’s what we had, an image over the background. And we’re ready to print that out.
But look what happens if we go to replace the contents of this image with our bride and groom. Not only do we replace the contents of the image with our bride and groom, and we can scale them back down to the 10 percent size that we were using before, but let’s just link that so that it’s going to be 10 percent in both directions. But look what’s happened to our background. These two smart objects instead of just being a duplicate of each other are in actual fact an exact copy of each other. And so anything that happens to this background smart object is also going to happen to this one and vice versa. If we change this one we’re going to change this one. So if we want the ability to create a smart object from another one but to unlink it so that they’re no longer the same image each time, we need to right click and choose New Smart Object via Copy.
But if we do want two smart objects that are linked and they’re always going to be the same image even if they’re different sizes of the same image then we would simply use Duplicate Layer. Smart objects are a really good tool to use when you’re assembling an album like this because it gives you the ability to create a background image and a smaller image on top and to easily replace that image and create an album very quickly.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this YouTube video tutorial. If you liked the tutorial please like it and feel free to add comments to the video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my video YouTube channel. We release videos twice a week at the very least and you’ll be alerted to the new video releases. And don’t forget to visit my website at projectwoman.com. There you’ll find more tips, tricks and techniques for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and lots of other programs.
A reader recently emailed me a couple of photographs of her children. Unfortunately, as often happens with small children, one image had two of the three children looking at the camera and smiling and the other image had the exact opposite combination – only one child looking great. Her question was – could she take the good face from one of the images and paste it into the second image.
The answer is yes, and here’s how to do it in Photoshop without any need to cut and paste:
Step 1
Open both images in Photoshop. Drag the background layer from one image onto the other – in my case I dragged the background layer from the image with two out of the three faces correct and dropped it into the image that has only one good face.
You will have an image with two layers – the top has two good faces and the one below has the other one. Close the other image.
Step 2
Select both layers in the image that you’re working on and choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers and select Auto.
Photoshop will now align the two layers so that the faces in both layers will be aligned on top of each other. To do this you need to have two images with very little difference between them and this image lined up pretty well as a result.
Step 3
Click on the topmost layer and add a layer mask to it by clicking the Add Layer Mask icon at the foot of the Layers palette.
The mask is filled with white by default which means that the entire contents of the top layer is visible and the bottom layer not visible at all.
Step4
Select black as your foreground color and choose a soft edge brush. Target the mask by clicking on it so you’re painting on it and then paint over the child’s face in the image to reveal the face from the layer image below.
Step 5
You’ll need to make some small choices about how much of the layer below you reveal with the mask – if you take too much you can paint back on the mask with white to reveal the top layer again.
I made some small adjustments around the child’s collar to hide the fix. The red portion of the image shows the mask – I turned this on – it won’t typically be visible to you as you work.
Step 6
Finish by taking a critical look at the final image and, if necessary, adjust the mask or add a new layer and clone elements from the layers below to fine tune the image.
I had to do a small amount of cloning of the little girl’s shirt to fix a small problem and then I cropped the image and it was complete.
The entire process took all of around ten minutes.
Photoshop Elements
You can get similar results in Photoshop Elements 7 and above by opening the two images and choose File > New > Scene Cleaner and follow the instructions there.
This is the automatic substitution dialogue in Word
