6. Essential Photoshop Tips and Tricks

The biggest speed boost you can give to Adobe Photoshop is to accelerate your own productivity. If you get paid by the hour, rather than by the amount of work accomplished, you may want to skip this chapter. If you want to realize the full potential of Photoshop as a lean, mean, pixel-processing machine, read on! You’ll learn how to break the habit of choosing tools by clicking on their icons, and avoid those lengthy mouse voyages up to the menu bar.

If you’re upgrading from Photoshop CS3 or earlier, you’ll want to review this chapter because you may be encountering, for the first time, the sweeping revisions Adobe made to the user interface back in Photoshop CS4. Many of the changes were made possible because Photoshop now gets help from the graphics processing unit (GPU) on your video card to take a load off of the central processing unit (CPU). Photoshop uses the GPU to drive many of the navigation tips that have been added since Photoshop CS4, such as smooth interactive zooming. You can review video card requirements in Chapter 1.