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Adobe Photoshop CC - Advanced Training

Weird Adobe Photoshop Features & Easter Eggs

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, this video is full of random stuff, that's not going to help Photoshop, but I think you need to know if you're going to be advanced, you need to know how to make things like your Color Theme turn into Toast, how to make random bananas appear, how to change the background color to pink, and this one actually might be that useful. We can change what appears down the bottom here to be something more useful. Probably more than how many layers you have. But probably not much more. This is an advanced person's right of passage video. Let's go. 


First up, let's look at a kind of strange, kind of useful thing in Photoshop. So let's open up any image basically. I'm just going to use the 'Image 4' from our '03' folder. From the photographer Alexander Andrews. Just want something open. Why? Because this start screen's kind of, doesn't have a lot of the parts. If you don't like this start screen, you can go to 'Window' and go to 'Workspace', instead of being on Start just be on 'Essentials'. And you go back to kind of how Photoshop used to be in the good old days. Regardless, let's have our 'File', 'Open'. I'm going to look down the bottom here. 


By default this little setting here that you've probably never clicked on, you've probably seen the file size, maybe down here, but there's a few of the things you can change it to, that might be helpful for you. Say you are really hard core on your profiles, your color profiles, sRGB. You just want to always look down there and go, sRGB, or CMYK or whatever you're using. Other useful ones, Document Dimensions is kind of cool. It shows you that it's 2000 x 2000, and it's 72 ppi. 


Another little thing is, doesn't really matter which one of these you've got selected, any one, if you click on it, and click and hold it, it tells you the kind of basics. So Width Height, how many Channels it has. You can see, it's 8 bits per channel, that's what the 8bpc means. We'll talk about bits later on. You can also see the resolution. So that might just be easier than going here, and then go into Image Size. 


Let's have a look at a couple other ones, so Measurement Scale, good if you're dealing with-- doing kind of retina stuff. Scratch Sizes, Efficiency is a weird one. Efficiency is at 100%, it means that Photoshop is running as good as it can, giving it the resources you've given it. What I mean by that is, remember we had, in Preferences', we went to 'Performance'. And we said, here you go, have this much RAM, or have this much RAM. We've given it this much RAM, what you can do is you can see down here how efficient, how well it's working. If I try and stress it out-- we're going to stress it out, to try and do something like this, hit 'Enter'. Let's get it to change, it's working fine. If you find it drops below 100% for a lot of the time, it's trying hard but it can't work as fast as it could. So then just might be useful, you might be like, "Man, is my machine slow?" Maybe it is, maybe it's not. 


This will tell you whether it's just Photoshop going through its motions, or whether your machine's holding it up. You can go back to kind of like, speeding up Photoshop video, if you need to kind of upgrade things. Can't really change it down much, but hey, you might find it useful. Timing, I still haven't worked out how this-- what that actually does, I think it's for the task that you've given it. 0.2 seconds. Current Tool's not that handy, I want the Move Tool. 32-bit Exposure, we'll look at that when we do 8, 16, 32 bits later on. Save Progress, how many Smart Objects you have, how many Layers you have. For me, often it's Document Size, which is what it started out with. This way, it's in this kind of random video. But this is the Advanced Course, right? We need to learn advanced stuff. 


Now let's get on to the Easter eggs. So what is an Easter egg? Basically it's just a bit of code that developers of Photoshop, the guys at Adobe who kind of sneaked things in, to see if they can sneak things in. Like little surprises, like Easter eggs. Now in this version of Photoshop there's a couple. There's a banana and some toast, they do absolutely nothing except-- what I find them useful for is changing these things on people's computers that are away for holidays. When they get back, I've messed about. 


Now the best one, and most obvious one is, see this little three dot here, the Edit Toolbar. Hold it down, click on 'Edit Toolbar'. And if you just hold down the 'Shift' key, either Mac or PC, and just click 'Done', you can see, what changed over here, there's a banana. Does nothing, except it's kind of funny. It never turns off either, well you can turn it off. So if any of you decide, that's not a good idea. Click and hold it down, go back into here. And if you hold down the 'Command' key on a Mac and click 'Done', or 'Ctrl' key on PC, to turn it off, I'll turn my back on. I love having that on. Hold 'Shift ', click 'Done'. 


The other one is Toast, this one's a little bit more hidden. And it's just fun to know, like if there's a Photoshop party, and you're there, and you don't know about the Toast, you're going to be asked to leave. So on a Mac, go up to 'Photoshop', go to 'Preferences', now remember, on a PC it's under 'Edit', and way down the bottom here, 'Preferences', and I want to be in the one that says 'Interface'. And it's just this thing along the top here, normally, just its job is to kind of change the interface color. You might like this, just because. Good old days of Photoshop used to be this, like white color, now it's in this kind of moody broody dark color. 


Now the trick here is to hold down 'Shift', and on a Mac hold down the 'Option' key and click on this. It kind of fires it into like Toast mode. If you're on a PC, it's 'Shift', hold down the 'Alt' key and give it a click. Now that it's Toast, it does the same job, just toast. You can also do, once you're here, so do that first step first which is, 'Shift', and either 'Alt' or 'Option', and give it a click. Now you can hold down 'Shift' and hold 'Command' down on a Mac, or 'Shift Ctrl' down on a PC, and you can toggle between coffee colors and toast colors. 


If you go to a Photoshop conference, you'll see these little guys on t-shirts and stuff, like you're in the know, wink wink, secret handshake. Does absolutely nothing but you need to know the Easter eggs. One other little thing I'll throw in here is this background, because we were looking at interface colors it kind of just got me thinking. This dark Grey in the background is fine. You might not like it, you can right click it, and say I want it to be black. You saw the interface changed the old background, but not this kind of like pasteboard area. So right click it and dark gray's the normal, but you can go through and pick. 


The other thing you might do when your friends are away, or your buddy at school's away, is go to 'Select Custom Color', and just put it at something awful. There you go, they want to know how to change it back. They go bananas, I've got a pink background, which is hurting my eyes. So I'm going to go back to dark gray. So that is the weird features and Easter eggs video. Let's get into the next section now where we start fixing images. No more settings and work flow techniques, we've got those out of our system. We are now ready to be super efficient, and learn more advanced things. Let's do it