As a visual designer, I was paired with a very talented developer on an iOs project for one of our clients. As we were working together, I showed him a few very basic tricks in Photoshop for making selections and working with transparencies (I love PNGs.) If you live and breathe inside Photoshop like most designers, these might seem very basic. However, he was shocked at how much time some of these little tips would have saved him over the life of many projects. If as a developer or anyone that only uses photoshop when necessary, I hope this helps. By the way, I think the idea of developer shortcuts for designers would be a great blog post as well. Hint. Hint.
1. Activate the rectangular marquee tool
-Just hit the M key (While not in the type tool)
2.Set the foreground to black and background to white in the color selector
-hit the D key
3. Swap the foreground and background colors in the color selector
-hit the X key
4. ⌘+shift+c
This will take a snapshot of every visible pixel of your photoshop document.
Then ⌘+v to paste the layer into a new document or the same for composting purposes.
If you have a layered PSD provided by a designer that contains transparency, then you can disable your bottom most layer so that you can actually see the transparent pixels. See screenshot.
-Remember that it captures what you see, so you need to actually disable the background layers so that you can see the transparency grid.
-This one trick shortcut really is a time saver when it comes to selecting just the non-transparent pixels.
5. Lock the transparent pixels in a layer
-By locking the transparent pixels you can easily fill it with the currently active foreground color by hitting the option + delete keys at the same time
6. A simple trick for making a selection from non transparent black and white artwork.
-If the color mode of the image is RGB then convert the document to grayscale by going to the main navigation and selecting Image > Mode > Grayscale
-Make sure you can see the channels viewer by Window > Channels
-In the channel viewer hold the ⌘ key down while clicking on the thumbnail of the gray channel. See screenshot.
-Hit ⌘+shift + i to select the inverse of the selection.
-Then copy ⌘+c and paste ⌘+v it to a new layer with a transparent background.
