Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me in Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this tutorial, I'm going to show you 3 Photoshop Hacks that you probably don't know.
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Okay, let's get started.
The first Photoshop Hack is creating templates.
I have this file here, which is a PSD--the default Photoshop format--and it's a template
that I use to create my daily Photoshop tip and it's an image that ends up on Pinterest.
So, I'm going to open it up so you could see it.
There it is.
I just changed the text and saved it as a JPG, and this is a template file that I use.
And a lot of people have template Photoshop files that they use for repetitive tasks.
It doesn't have to be social media posts.
It could be anything.
Now, I want you to notice one thing.
On the tab, you'll see the name of the file "Photoshop tip 2017 xxx.psd" and if I make
a change to this template and close it, Photoshop is going to ask me to save this original template
file.
And if I accidentally clicked on Yes, then I will have made changes to the template.
And that's not something that you always want to do because if you adjust the template,
then you have to fix it next time you open it, so that can become a problem.
So, instead, what I recommend doing is going into your PSD that you use as a template and
rename it and add a different file extension.
Instead of PSD, we're going to use a psdt.
You just add that letter on there.
Your operating system will ask you if you want to change the file extension.
Click on Yes.
Notice that the icon changes.
If we open it up now, it's going to look exactly the same, but the one difference is that it's
no longer that same file.
Now it's an untitled file.
So, that's what a PSDT does.
It opens an untitled new version of the document that you're working with so you can never
overwrite that original template.
This is actually the same format that Adobe Stock templates use, so you never work with
the original.
You always work with a new untitled instance.
This is the file format that I recommend using if you use Photoshop PSD's as templates.
In Hack #2, I'm going to show you how to use a Custom Plugins Folder with Photoshop CC.
Actually, in older versions of Photoshop, Adobe allows you to use a Custom Plugins Folder
to install all of your plugins.
Unfortunately, starting with CC, that's no longer the case.
But, there is a hack to get around that.
I'm here in my Programs folder.
If I go into the Adobe folder, you'll see all the Adobe applications that I have installed.
I'm going to open up my Photoshop CC 2017 folder and I'm going to go into the plugins
folder.
You'll see that I have a plug-in from Google called Nik Collection.
Now, this is not specific to this particular plug-in.
It will work with any plug-ins, but the only one I have installed currently is Nik Collection.
And if I open it up, you'll see there's a whole bunch of files that make up the plug-in.
Now, if I uninstall Photoshop, then the files will also be uninstalled.
If I upgrade to a newer version of Photoshop, then the files will be in this installation,
not the new one.
So, sometimes, it's best to have a custom folder where you put all your plug-ins.
What you need to do is just delete the files that are in this folder because we don't need
them anymore.
I'm going to go into a folder where I have the plug-ins.
Here we are.
And just to be clear, you will have to copy over the files from the Photoshop folder on
to a different location, but I did it before recording the video, but here it is in this
folder, which is not in the Adobe Photoshop folder, as you can see here.
And I can just simply create a shortcut or an alias if you're using a Mac.
And there's my shortcut here.
Now, I'm going to go back to the Adobe Plug-ins folder and I'm going to click and drag that
shortcut on to it.
There it is.
I have Photoshop closed and I'm opening that up now.
I'm going to create a new document and click on Create, and there it is.
And if I go into Filter, you will see my Nik Collection plug-ins are here and I can select
that and it turns on, and as you can see, it's working.
Obviously, I have a white background; it's not really doing much, but the plug-in works
and all we're using is a shortcut to that folder.
If I were to upgrade to a new version of Photoshop, all I need to do is create another shortcut
and drag it on to the new plug-ins folder or just copy this shortcut on to there.
But the plug-ins will always be there on that separate folder.
So, once again, if you're working on an older version than Photoshop CC, you don't have
to worry about this because there is an option in the Preferences panel that allows you to
select a custom plug-ins folder.
In Hack #3, I'm going to show you how to get more Lookup Tables and what I mean by that
is if you create a new Color Lookup Adjustment Layer, you have these LUT files that you can
select to apply a different look on to the image, so we can select Edgy Amber or any
of the other LUT files that we have.
If you're a member of the Creative Cloud, you can take advantage of extra LUT files
that are included in those other applications.
I'm going to minimize Photoshop and here I am in the Adobe folder that contains all the
different Adobe applications that I have installed in this computer.
If I go into Premiere Pro, then select Lemetri, inside of that, we have a LUTs folder.
We have three different folders.
We can try Legacy, for example, sort them by type.
Cube are the ones that we're going to be able to take on to Photoshop so we can do something
like this one here.
I can do them all, but I'm just going to copy one so that you can see how it works.
So I'm going to copy that, go back into my Adobe folder, open Photoshop, and under Presets,
there is a 3D LUT folder and you can paste that in there, and here it is.
Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to rename it and I'm just going to add "z hyphen"
so that it moves to the bottom of the list.
Then, I'm going to need to close Photoshop and I need to open it up again.
And the image that I was using was in my Libraries panel so I'm going to open that up and we'll
use the same image that we were using before.
I'm going to double click on it to open it, then I'm going to go into Color Lookup, click
on the dropdown, and notice here at the very bottom, we have this z-panalog4_to_linear.cube.
That's a different effect that that LUT file creates and you can come back into that Adobe
folder and you can look at Adobe Premiere Pro once again and select any of the other
files found in the Lemetri LUT folder.
Once again, not all the files would work, but if you're using Cube files, they should
work in Photoshop.
And I have an extra bonus hack for you.
This one deals with Layer Masks.
I'm going to click on the Quick Selection Tool and I'm going to click and drag to make
a selection around the sky.
As you know, in Photoshop CC, you have the Select and Mask workspace.
You can click on this button here to bring that up and you can adjust the edge of your
selection with these sliders.
The Select and Mask workspace was introduced in Photoshop CC 2015 and many people prefer
the old Refine Edge Dialogue.
If you prefer to work with it, you can actually bring it back.
Go into Select, hold Shift, then click on Select and Mask, and that brings up the old
Refine Edge dialogue box.
So, if you prefer to work with it, this is how you can bring it back.
And that's it for this tutorial.
I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something new.
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Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again soon.