Tagged: Photoshop

Photoshop CC to add Content Aware Crop

By now you may have heard that Adobe plans to add a Content Aware Crop tool feature to Photoshop CC with the next update. You may be thinking that they already have that feature available, and you would be somewhat correct. You can already do what the video above shows manually, but the new tool will simplify the process.

Manipulate 3D images right inside Photoshop with free plugin


The short video above should tell you all you need to know about what PixelSquid does. Manipulating images as 3D objects right inside Photoshop without the hassle of knowing how to use 3D tools is a concept I’m surprised more companies haven’t tried to tackle.

PixelSquid offers quite a decent-sized collection of 3D images, including a few nice collections like the Apple Collection—which features over 50 Apple objets from yesterday and today. I also liked the Money collection.

The plugin is free, though you do have to sign-up for the service.

10 Photoshop alternatives

Affinity Photo is one of the few image editors outside of Photoshop that supports the CMYK color space, so it’s the only one of these apps that I would call a true Photoshop alternative for designers. The $49 price tag ain’t too shabby, either. Of course, if you’re a web designer or photo hobbiest, you have a ton of options—including the excellent Pixelmator.

How to export InDesign layers as a layered PSD file

InDesign to PSD

InDesign Secrets shared this excellent InDesign script that converts your layered InDesign file to a layered Photoshop file. Mike Rankin takes you through the simple steps in the article, but I’ll tell you from experience that this is the sort of thing that is best left to designers who are obsessive about details like naming and organizing their layers, regardless of what program they’re working in. And as Mike points out, this is something that is best left as the “final” step—as you won’t know (or have a whole lot of control over) what remains editable after the conversion.

Photoshop CC to add Artboards (pages) feature

Check it out. Illustrator users will be familiar with Artboards, for those who aren’t – think of them simply as pages. I’m not sure why Photoshop Artboards are necessary with Layer Comps already available, but it looks cool!

Photoshop Smart Objects: linked vs. embedded

Using Photoshop Smart Objects is a great way to work non-destructively. You can embed a Smart Object directly in a Photoshop file or link to a separate file and update it and reuse it in multiple projects.

I recently had a co-worker ask what they were and why I use them. I had a difficult time explaining it, so when I came across this video tutorial, I quickly fired-off a link. It’s a great walk-through for those who’ve never used them.

Feathering the edges of a selection along the edge of a document in Photoshop CC

In previous versions of Photoshop, if you selected an area of an image that included an edge area and then chose Select>Modify>Feather, the Feather would be added to the entire selection. While this might be desirable in some instances, in the majority of cases, it would be ideal if the feather was only applied within the image (and not to the edges). As a result, in the current version, the engineering team has changed the default behavior so that they feather is not applied at the edge (the canvas bounds) of an image.

Julieanne Kost enlightens us about this feature that I’m sure most people don’t even notice is there. Be sure to check out all her other awesome posts while you’re there, she has a lot of great information and tutorials.