What’s Your Favorite Photoshop Trick?
God, I love filling with content. On Lifehacker, I often want to illustrate a post with an image that is not wide enough (as shown above). I drop it into Photoshop, increase the canvas size, select new blanks on the sides, and press cmd + option + F – my own shortcut for Edit> Content-Aware Fill.
This opens a content-aware fill dialog so I can preview the result and make sure it doesn’t let anyone down. I can tweak a bunch of options. This is much better than my old workflow where I selected an area, right clicked, dug in the menu, didn’t get any configurable options.
My other favorite Photoshop tricks include the customizable cmd + option + Y keyboard shortcut to crop an image to my selection. Combined with the Fixed Ratio mode of the selection tool, I can crop any image to the 16: 9 ratio we use in the illustrations at the top of the Lifehacker post.
What’s your favorite Photoshop trick? What custom shortcut have you built in, or what function most people don’t know about, especially one that replaces another, inferior function?
Thanks, of course, to the classic educational comedy series Sucks in Photoshop .