Unknown Illustrator, Photoshop & inDesign tricks

…Alt key for Windows… :slight_smile:

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Not sure how useful this is, but I use it form time to time, if you have two same sized images open in Photoshop and you’ve made a selection in one, you can hold down shift and drag the selection from one of the photoshop windows to the other and it will appear in the exact same location of the other photoshop file.

And another one that I just showed to a friend yesterday, if you are using the magic wand tool, the first thing to note is you can draw straight edges by holding down option (alt on PC) However, if you have a selection already drawn, usually you would use Shift to add to the shape or Option (Alt) to remove from the selection. So, if you want to force straight edges AND remove from a selection, hold down option, click with your mouse (and hold) release option and then press option again. Its hard to explain. Ha, but once you try it you’ll see.

I recently found out about this one and feel like a fool for not knowing it all of these years.

Photoshop, when using the polygon lasso tool or magnetic lasso tool - while in the middle of making a selection, you can press the delete key to ‘undo’ clicks you’ve made if you messed up.

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Ever wanted to select all Guides in InDesign? Here’s how;

  • To select all ruler guides on the target spread, press Ctrl+Alt+G (Windows) or Command+Option+G (Mac OS).
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In Photoshop- If you have a crooked scan, use the measure tool along the skewed side of image : Image>Rotate>Arbitrary, it will straighten it out.

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So this is more of an all-around adobe trick.

If someone sends you a file (this will work with many types of files) that doesn’t have the font embedded or is otherwise giving you problems, and you absolutely have to open it. (Or don’t want to deal with clients)

You can open the file in Adobe Acrobat:
Click on watermark - add.
In the text field, put anything. Make the size really small (so it’s easier to deal with).
Set the opacity to 0%
Hit okay.

Then find flattener preview
Select “Convert all text to outlines”
and “Convert all strokes to outlines”
Then hit apply.

Then export as an EPS.
When you open the file, make sure you find/remove the “transparent” watermark that you’ve added.

There may be color accuracy issues, but this process has saved me so much time/trouble in the past.

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My god I could have used this thousands of times!

In InDesign, when you Option+drag to make a copy of an object, the X and Y values become the default values in Step + Repeat.

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Yes, they are captured for that, and for Transform Again.

I’m learning graphic design from the couple of months by help of UDEMY & YOUTUBE as well and learned more than my expectation but about 3D design tricks, I learned accidentally, How make a 3D object like a pro with easy steps.

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Horizontal Scrolling - this works in InDesign, PhotoShop and (for some reason reversed direction) Illustrator. Simply hold down the Option key (Windows key on PC) when scrolling.

To zoom in / out with scroll hold down the Command key (Alt key on PC).

this reminded me of the MacOS shortcut for zooming in/out across the OS… which is Cmd Option + or -

You can make amazing kaleidoscopic patterns in Photoshop with the help of a keyboard shortcut. Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T lets you duplicate a layer and repeat a transformation in one go. First, make an initial rotation by pressing Cmd/Ctrl+T and turning slightly, then hit Enter to apply. Next, press Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T repeatedly to create a pattern.

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so I have a trick I’m trying to figure out. I read an article about a designer who forced themselves to learn the hotkeys for working in Illustrator and I was curious how you set a text path using keyboard shortcuts if it’s possible.

Well, “learning the hotkeys” is very useful, but don’t interpret that as though it implies you can operate every feature using only the keyboard.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean by:

?
To set text on a path, you’d need to draw the path. While you can make all the tool selections and so forth, you can’t really “draw” with only the keyboard; nor can you perform the requisite click to set a live insertion point with the Type on a Path tool.

In Indesign and Illustrator, Space+period will give your selected shape a white to black gradient fill (or stroke depending on which is active.) Not particularly helpful but just in case you’ve wondered where it came from.

The other common keyboard mistake is wondering where all you control handles and text highlighting went. Hitting command+H instead of command+G for group will make all your bounding boxes invisible. To fix, hit Command+H again.

The text flattening thing Obsidian wrote above doesn’t always work on outlined fonts (ie strokes but no fills. Be sure to check your letter shapes don’t go wonky or grow horns. Same holds true for placing a PDF in Illustrator and telling it to flatten transparency (which is a two-step process to Obsidian’s post, but only works with PDFs, and sometimes Illustrator files with the PDF save option turned on.)

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So yeah, I was trying to figure out how you’d perform the requisite click to set a live insertion point but when messing with my mouse sensitivity settings I found the section for Windows 10 where you can control the mouse with the keyboard so I assume it’s control + directional keys but I didn’t go too much into it other than noting the settings were there.

Maybe record an action of placing a text path, and assign the action to a shortcut key?

Amazing!! Very new and cool stuff for me will definitely practice this.

As I am new in Photoshop, I didn’t knew about that one before.
I think this trick will help me a lot.