5 Photoshop Tricks in 5 Minutes: From the Banana Tool to Lens Flare Precision

Here’s a quick video from tutvids covering five different tricks that will be completely new to most Photoshop users. Did you know there is a Banana Tool? You’ll soon find out what it does (or doesn’t do).

1. The Banana Tool

The Banana Tool is not guaranteed to increase your productivity. What it does do is give you a banana icon in your toolbar. To get it, choose to edit your toolbar, then hold down the Shift key while clicking the Done button. Banana.

2. The Duplicated Transform

This one is a little more practical. If you want to repeat the same transform many times on a layer, you can easily do this with a keyboard shortcut. First, perform the initial transform. Then select the layer and press Cmd/Ctrl + Alt/Opt + Shift + T. This will duplicate the layer and repeat the initial transform.

3. Stripping out “Copy” Text

When you copy a layer, it prepends “Copy” to the layer name. To change this, you can modify the Layer Panel Options to turn it off.

4. Precision Lens Flare Positioning

By holding Alt/Opt and clicking in the Lens Flare preview dialog, you can choose where the lens flare will appear using X/Y coordinates.

5. Merge Selected Layers to a New Layer

This is a good way to prepare an image with many layers for a final export. Select the layers that you want to merge together and press Cmd/Ctrl + Alt/Opt + E. This will create a new layer at the top with the selected layers flattened into it.

That’s it! We hope you’ve learned something new here… and maybe now you have a brand new banana sitting in your toolbar.

(via tutvids via ISO 1200)