Photoshop Tip of the Day

I apologize for the gap. We went out of town and I don't think I fired up a computer at all while we were away.

Catching up for Saturday.

Tip #71. After selecting Transform, if you click on the curved window, you can warp your shape. Instead of a bounding box, a 9 square grid is drawn. There are several standard warps in the dropdown box to the left in the Options bar, or you can just click and drag on the grid. If a line with a dot at the end appears, you can also click on the dot to move the grid further. Warping is good when you have things like leaves and you want them to look naturally curled. It also works for flags. Even if you select a preset, you can further edit it. If you hate the warp, you can cancel out of it and make no changes by clicking on the ‘Don’t’ sign in the middle of the options bar.

For Sunday

Tip #72. There is a limit to how much you can make most files larger in Photoshop. Eventually, you run out of pixels. If your image starts with a high pixel count, you can make it quite large before you start getting ugly stair steps where there should be smooth diagonals, but at some point, most images will do that. This is where pixels per inch comes in. The more pixels per inch there are, the larger you can make the image before stair steps show up.

Today's Tip

Tip #73.The exception to the enlargement limit is files created with vectors. The average user rarely touches vectors unless they are converting type into vectors. If I want to perform certain actions on my type, I must convert it into a vector image. Photoshop will ask me if I want to do this before it completes the action. I don’t have to remember which ones require it. The conversion is one way. I can’t convert the vector back into type to correct a spelling error. Remember when True Type Fonts first came out? They were the first fonts that were created with vectors, so I could make a True Type Font any size I wanted. While Photoshop uses True Type Fonts, it still has to group the individual characters into a single vector image for it to carry out some actions. The grouping means I can’t edit the type any more.