Photoshop CS2: The Little Things
1. You can change opacity of a layer, and Blend Modes, while using Free Transform
This is bigger than it sounds, and its really wonderful for situations like manually stitching panoramas together, or trying to composite body parts for retouching situations, and about a dozen other instances where you forgot to lower the opacity before you entered Free Transform (or if you did remember, the amount you chose was too much or too little), or you need to change blend modes (again, like changing to Difference mode to help line up images when stitching panos). Try this once, and youll see what I mean.
(2) You can now Copy photos when Batch Renaming
In previous versions of Photoshop, if you used the built-in Batch Renaming automation, you could either (a) rename the original photo in the same folder their in, or (b) rename the original photos and move them to a new folder. Either way, you were renaming your original images. Now, in CS2, you have the choice to make a copy. What that means is, rather than renaming your original, it will duplicate each image into a different folder, and only these duplicates will have the new name, so the originals remain untouched. Sweet!
(3) They added new cursors choices
We thankfully now have two new preference choices for our cursors when working with Brushes. The first (called the Full Size cursor) makes the brush size cursor the exact same size as the pixels it will affect (where normally, the size of the brush cursor is about 50% of the area it will affect. Thats why when youre using a really large soft-edge brush when cloning, you sometimes clone over [or sample from areas] that are much larger than you think youre affecting). So basically, choosing this Full Size cursor, when using a soft-edge brush, will now show the entire area being affected by the brush. The other cursor choice is called Always Show Crosshair and basically it just adds a small crosshair in the center of your brush cursor so you always find the sweet spot where youre painting. Both of these settings are found under Preferences, under Displays and Cursors.
(4) They changed one word in the Color Picker
This may not mean as much to you, as it did to me, but it shows an evolution in how Adobe is looking at how they name things to make life easier for new users. In the color picker, since the very beginning, the button that gave you access to the Pantone color libraries and other loadable color libraries was Custom. It always made it sound like thats the button you click to create some custom color that was beyond what the regular color picker could do. But now theyve simply changed the button name to Color Libraries. This may not help you, at this point in your Photoshop career, but it will countless people who come after you. But again, this is bigger than just changing a wordits changing how accessible Adobe is making the application and I think thats a great thing.
(5) The built-in Help is much better
Ive always been a critic of Photoshops Help feature, but the newly redesigned Adobe Help Center is a dramatic improvement over any previous version and is actually useable and more often than not gives you what youre looking for.
(6) Filters dialogs are getting smarter
The dialog boxes Adobe has traditionally used for Filters have been pretty much utilitarian. If they had a preview at all, they were tiny, and they had no ability to save settings you used often, so every time you open a filter dialog, you enter to manually enter every single setting. Well, Im happy to note that the Filter dialogs (for newly introduced filters anyway, filter Smart Sharpen and Reduce Noise) are getting much smarter, as they now let you save your favorite settings and call them up from a pop-up menu with just one click. Again, its an evolution, and Im keeping my fingers crossed that Adobe will go back (maybe in CS3) and give all the old filters these slick new dialogs.
(7)They added built-in shortcuts for Image Size and Canvas Size
Its hard to believe that in all these years, theres never been a built-in keyboard shortcut for the Image Size dialog box. Well, I could whine about the past or celebrate the present, so Ill go with a big high-five to Adobe for taking a shortcut from a much more seldom used part of Photoshop (the File Info dialog) and making it the shortcut for something we use every dayImage Size. The Image Size shortcut is now, Mac: Option-Command-I (PC: Alt-Control-I). They added one for Canvas Size as well, Mac: Option-Command-C (PC: Alt-Control-C). Ahhhh, its the little things, isnt it.
(8) They added Flatten Images to the Layers pop-up menu
Heres one youll use about a bazillion timesnow when you want to Flatten your layers, you can just Control-click (PC: Right-click) on any layer and from the pop-up menu that appears, you can choose Flatten Image. No more trips to the Layers palettes pop-down menu for you, Bunky!
(9) They now let you instantly unlock linked layers with one click
If there was one thing that used to frustrate the living heck out of me, it was having to unlink 15 different layers before I could move one of them. It drove me crazy (you knew it was something, right?). Well now, you can unlink all the layers linked to your current layer, by simply Control-clicking on the Link icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Life is good.
(10) You now review two photos side-by-side
Back in Photoshop CS, if you had two photos open, they overlapped each other on screen. If you choose Tile (from the Window menu), it stacked them on above the other (which was better, because you could see at least part of each photo), but it wasnt the side-by-side review that we always wanted. Well, now you can get side-by-side reviews (perfect for vertical shots) by going under the Window menu and choosing Tile Vertically. See, I told you it was the little things.
