I’m going to show you how to open the same document into windows, but most importantly why that is so valuable. So I have this photo of this dog and I can open it up in another window by going into window arrange and selecting new window for and the name of the file. This file is titled dog dot PSD if I click on that it opens up in a new Window 
One So now I have the same document into Windows. This is not a duplicated as exactly the same document and I can go into window arrange and select either to up horizontal or two up vertical I’ll select web vertical input the documents side by side. 
So with one document I can zoom in and work on the details and with the second document. I can zoom out and see the overall image. Then I can create any adjustment that I like. So in this case, I’ll create a new layer and I’ll start using the Clone stamp tool to clone this woman out. So I’m going to hold alt option on the Mac and click and I’ll start painting her away notice how in the left window I’m working on the details in a document the right I can see. Those adjustments are affecting the overall image. So this is a great one. 
A of working when your retouching because you don’t have to zoom in to work on a detail and then zoom out to see how that detailed affected the overall image. So just zoom in work on your image, see how that adjustment affects the overall image and then continue adjusting as you see fit. Also when you’re in this view if you hold shift in the spacebar to pan you can pan on both documents at the same time by holding shift.
And the spacebar this feature could also be very powerful if you have two monitors because you can drag one tab over onto your second monitor in this next tip. I’m going to show you how to select colors from any application. Let me show you what I mean by that you probably already know that if you select the eyedropper tool you can of course click and drag and select the color so I can hover over this green and release and that color is now my foreground color and of course I can paint with that coat. 
But did you know that you can select the eyedropper tool then minimize Photoshop. So I have a second window over here which happens to be my Instagram account in case you’re interested @jrfromptc and I can just select any color that I like from this different application by putting it next to the photo shop window frame clicking inside of Photoshop and then dragging outside. Now I’m selecting. The brown color from the leaf, or I can select the red. 
From the Adobe logo or any other color that I hover over including the blue on my desktop, you will notice how the foreground color swatch changes colors as I hover over the applications that are outside of Photoshop.
When you select the color you can of course come back into Photoshop and with the brush tool selected. I can paint with that color that I selected from outside of Photoshop in this next Photoshop tip. I’m going to show you how to make the Clone stamp tool even more powerful. So you probably already know about the Clone stamp tool 
It’s hear you when you selected you can hold alt option on the Mac and click on a sample source, and then you can click and drag ideally in a new layer so create a new layer and click and drag to paint you pixels. So now she has a twin. 
But what you probably didn’t know are the powerful keyboard shortcuts that you can use. So once again, I’m going to hold alt option on the Mac to sample from her shoe. You can see the preview here on the brush and watch what happens when I hold alt shift in the greater than less than keys. 8 that’s the comma and period keys notice how I can rotate Hate the Clone Source notice. 
Our shoe is rotating. So when I paint I can now paint her in an angle. I can also hold alt option on the Mac and click on that same shoe and I’m going to rotate her back by holding alt shift and the less than key. And it rotates her again the other way, but what I can also do is hold alt shift in the right and left bracket key on the keyboard to scale the source. So now notice how her shoe is getting smaller when I paint I’m now going to paint a smaller version of that.
Nine So you can scale and rotate the Clone Source by using those keyboard shortcuts. And by the way, I should make a disclaimer. This only works with the North American keyboards. So in some parts of the world this keyboard shortcut will not work. If you’re in a region where those keyboard shortcuts do not work. Don’t worry about it. There is a panel that you can use so I’m going to go into window and select clone source, and you have that panel here. So when you make a selection again her shoe, you can see the
Notice how I can rotate the source here see that see how you can see the sample rotating there and I can also scale it from this panel. And then they can of course paint those pixels. And so remember you can use the Clone Source panel to rotate and scale the Clone stamp tool but it’s a good idea to remember the keyboard shortcuts because when you’re painting with that can be a little faster in this next Photoshop tip. I’m going to show you a powerful compositing trick with blending modes. So you may be working in a composite obviously Composites can include more than one layers. So we have this foreground which is a model and all of these suggestions and layers that
Help it make it seem as if she’s fitting into the background. And by the way, if you’re wondering how these were. Waited. I also have a tutorial on compositing I’ll place the link right below in the description. But anyway, so we have this composite here and if I change my mind and decide that I need a second model. So I’ll press Ctrl J command J on the Mac to duplicate and I decide to move her over. Maybe she has a twin now. I have to apply all these different adjustments to the second model to make it more realistic. 
There’s basically two ways I can do that. I can select them all press Ctrl J. Command J on the Mac and duplicate those layers and bring them down. Then press Ctrl. Alt G command option G on the Mac to create a clipping mask, but you can already see the problem. I’m having way too many layers just to control these two models. So that’s not an efficient way of working. I’ll delete those layers by pressing the delete key. The other option, of course is to hold Ctrl shift and click on both layers. Nails to load them as a selection then apply that selection as a layer mask. 
But then we have another problem. We have to duplicate that layer Mask two more times and we don’t have the flexibility of moving our model because the layer mask will no longer match the models. So we also want the flexibility to be able to move our layers around and one of the easiest ways of resolving this problem is by putting everything into a group. So I’m going to click on the topmost layer hold shift and click on the bottom portrait layer. Then press Ctrl G. Command G on the Mac to put all those layers into our group.
Then I’ll open up that group and I’ll remove the clipping mask notice how these three adjustment layers are clip to this layer. These damn pointing arrows are indicating that their visibility is affected by this layer. So if I simply hold alt hover over me tween the layers and click I break that link now I can simply go into the group and I can just go into the normal mop mode. 
And notice now that these layers these adjustment layers only affect the models in not the background. I know it was a little difficult to see because the color adjustments were trying to match the background color. So what I’ll do just to make it obvious it’s going back in to pass through and I’ll just make an extreme adjustment what a different adjustment layers. So I’ll make a very extreme adjustment and then I’ll go back into the group and change the blending mode to normal notice now that the Layers are only affecting the contents of the group. Sardine Tartine 
No matter where I place the contents or how many layers we have. I can press Ctrl J command J on the Mac to duplicate the adjustment layers will only affect the content of the group in nothing else. So this is a fantastic trick that you can use to keep things more organized when you’re compositing in Photoshop in this next Photoshop tip. I’m going to show you the power of the eight special blending modes the eight blending modes that are highlighted on this graphic give you more options.
Some blending than all the others. Mods and let me show you what I mean by that. 
I have this composite which is basically a background and foreground and it’s trying to replicate a window reflection effect. And if I wanted to add a specular highlight to the scene, I can click on the top layer create a new layer. 
I hear them with a brush I could paint with white. This is going to become a specular highlight. Then I can select the blending mode. They don’t make it seem as if that was a bright light. One of those blending modes is color Dodge. One of the differences between the eight special blending modes. And the rest of planning most is that the opacity reacts different the film see that you can see
Here on the edges above her shoulder. 
What is how yellow it becomes about her shoulders with Bill now. Watch what happens with opacity. You don’t get that same effect with all the other blending modes not highlighted in yellow opacity and fill give you the same result with the blending modes highlighted in yellow you get different results when you adjust fill compared to a paucity that is one of the differences the second difference in the point of this tip is that you can double-click on
Layer, and you can also get an extra level of blending by unchecking transparency shapes layers. Which what happened. 
See that that’s where transparency shapes layers checked in. This is without notice how now it looks like a much brighter highlight right on that window and I can adjust the fill to control the intensity and I can press OK click on the Move tool and move that in it looks like a bright highlight hitting that window no matter where I move it. So this is a great technique for creating specular highlights when you’re compositing and Photoshop also keep in mind that you can do the same thing with these blending modes. So try them out and see how they can help you improve your projects in this next tip. I’m going to show you a really cool tip to change the Luminosity of your images. You may already know that if you create a new black and white adjustment layer your image return, of course black and white then you can adjust These lighters to control the Luminosity of the layers. 
Essentially you’re taking the original color and making the darker or brighter and this black-and-white version. For example, this building is yellow. So if I adjust the yellow slider that building gets darker or brighter because those pixels were originally yellow But that you know that if you change the blending mode from normal to Luminosity, you keep the colors and you can change the Luminosity using these lighters. So I’ll reset the adjustment layer notice what happens when I adjust the Reds the original Reds get darker and brighter. 
Same thing with the yellows. Greens Science
Blues And magenta’s so this is a fantastic trick that you can use to change the luminance values of your image in this next Photoshop tip. I’m going to show you how you can supercharge the spot healing brush tool to give you much better results when your retouching portraits. 
So this is the spot healing brush tool here.
Can do one selected and create a new layer and make sure that sample all layers is check. That way we can work non-destructively. You always want to work non-destructively because sometimes you may make mistakes and you want to have the flexibility to come and make changes or delete the adjustments. So you may already know that with the spot healing brush tool you can click and drag to remove wrinkles and blemishes. It’s before and after and in some cases it does a great job. However in other more
Areas, like in this area here. If I were to try to remove those blemishes Photoshop will introduce problem areas instead of fixing them see that see how we created this dark patch here. And if I try to remove or blemishes, it really doesn’t do that good of a job and that’s because we’re not really targeting anything. So it’s always a good idea to think of your blemish and then Target that blemish and what I mean by that is you have to look at the blemish and think is it darker or brighter than the skin tone if it’s darker than the skin tone. Don’t like in this case then you want to lighten that blemish so you can go into mode and select light.
If the blemish was brighter than the skin tone, then you want to darken it. But in this case is darker than the skin tone. So we want to align it.
So when you select lighting and you start painting on those blemishes, you’re only targeting the darker blemishes and not affecting the brighter pixels. So you can remove those dark blemishes in these areas and not affect those tiny little hairs on his forehead because we’re only targeting the darker pixels and those strands of hair are bright so I can come in here and just remove all these blemishes without affecting the detail that we want to keep in some cases like in this area here.
We can remove the blemish but we still keep the dead skin because the dead skin is brighter than the skin tone. So in that case, I would have to change the mode to darken and then paint to get rid of those brighter pixels also notice they want to have light and selected and I paint over this wrinkle the darker pixels disappear, but we still keep the brighter pixels. We still keep that texture in that detail and that could be very powerful when your retouching her. Portraits in this next Photoshop tip. I’m going to show you how to turn a blend if blend into transparency. So I have this text layer and this layer which is a rust texture. If I press Ctrl, alt G command option G on the Mac. I can of course click that to the layer below and now I have this realistic-looking Russ later. 
But if I wanted to only keep the rusty darker areas of this texture of a need to mask them out or in this case use a better technique known as blind. If so, I can double click to the side of the layer and if you don’t know what playing this is, I highly recommend watching my crash course on blend if it explains everything I’ll place a link right below in the description but blend if basically allows you to blend layers based on Luminosity or their channels. So right now I’m good. Going to work with the grace, which is Luminosity and under this layer. The layer that I have selected. I can hide dark pixels or I can hide the bright pixels. So if I hide the bright pixels the original Green comes back. 
In the darker areas remain which is what I want. When I press OK you will notice now that my texture looks exactly the way that I want it and now the problem is that this is not real transparency. Look at the layer thumbnail here. You can still see the entire layer. There’s no transparency if I hold control command on the Mac and click on that layer notice how I load the entire canvas and not those pixels if you need transparency.
Meaning these pixels to be selectable. All you need to do is right click on the layer and select convert to Smart object. No it is the layer thumbnail now. 
We actually have transparency. So if I press control command on the Mac and click notice how I’m now selecting the transparent pixels so I can create a curves adjustment layer and only target those pixels. Obviously. I can create a clipping mask and then make an adjustment to only those pixels. So this is a really powerful technique to get transparency at a blender if in Photoshop CC. Refine Edge dialog box was replaced by select the mask. Let me click and drag on this dog and just make a quick selection. So with any selection active in Photoshop CC you can click on selected mask and this brings up the select and mask workspace and you can adjust these sliders to control how the mass flux some people don’t like this new workspace and they prefer the old one. The problem is that they don’t know how to get back to it. And this is what this trip is all about how to get back to the old dialog box in case you prefer. ER it if you prefer the old dialog box hold shift and you have a selection or
Active then going to select and click on select the mask. Remember you have to be holding shift when you do that. If you do the old refined Mass dialog box comes up and you can use that instead of the Neo select and mask workspace. 
In this next Photoshop trick, I’m going to show you a technique to create non-destructive mask. Let me show you what I mean by that in this image. I have this background layer. This gradient map is applying this color effect this rectangle and this text layer if I wanted the word winter to cut through and show the background with the effect instinctively what most people think to create a layer mask out of the text. So hold Ctrl click on the layer thumbnail. And then create a layer mask on the rectangle layer while holding alt option on the Mac to create an inverted layer mask and that does give us a result that we want. We have the cutout text showing us the background.
Unfortunately doing this will not be them. 
Most effective way in some cases because the layer mask isThen we would have to do that whole process all over again. Obviously in this case. This is a very simple thing to do but in some projects this could be a much more complicated tasks. So let me delete this layer and show you what to do instead. So I have the knockout layer which reads winter and I’m going to hold shift and click on this gradient map. Then I’m going to press Ctrl G command G on the Mac to put that into a group. I’m going to open the group and double click to the side of the knockout layer.
To bring up the layer style window from this dialog box under Advanced blending. I’m going to select shallow and nothing will happen. 
But watch what happens when I reduce the fill opacity to 0 notice now how we’re cutting through to the background. 
I’m going to press ok. Now I can double click on the layer and type the word snow but you will notice a problem that we don’t actually have the color effect. Well, the reason that we don’t have the color effect on the word snow is because the gradient layer is actually inside of the group. So we simply click and drag it out of the group notice now that the effect is supplied to the word snow in. The reason I did that was just to show you that.
Anything that is inside of this group one will be cut out by The Knockout. So anything below The Knockout will be masked out essentially. This layer is knocking out a hole through anything inside of this group to reveal what’s outside of it. And like I said, the best thing about this is that it’s non-destructive so you can always come back and edit it. If you need to in this next Photoshop tip, I’m going to show you a powerful technique to create selections a lot of times when you’re working. Get in Photoshop. You may need to Target only the Shadows or the highlights of an image. So if we were to create a curves adjustment layer, and we only want to Target their Shadows, then it could be a little difficult to do so, you can use a layer mask to just select the shadows in. How do you do that? Well, I’m going to delete the layer map that’s in I’m going to first show you what keyboard shortcut that allows you to select the bright pixels. So if I press
Alton the number do that loads the bright pixels as a selection control all to command option to on the mac 
Then if I create a layer mask and hold alt option on the Mac click, you can see what that layer mask looks like.
The bright pixels are selected which is why they’re bright and the dark pixels are not which is why they’re black. So now I can make an adjustment that only targets the bright pixels. But if I wanted to select only the darker pixels I can then just click on invert and then this will allow me to Target only the darker pixels of the image notice how I was able to make these darker pixels on the outside. 
Much darker, making her much brighter and stand out before and after all and after an extreme adjustment so that you can see so I made this extreme adjustment with the curves adjustment layer in my intention was to change the Luminosity of the layer Luminosity see that Luminosity only changes the luminance values with normal. You also lat saturation. 32
So change the luminosity and then make your adjustment. So I’ll reset the layer and I’ll make the adjustment like I did before and that looks much better because I didn’t adjust the saturation of the image only the luminance values in this next tip. I’m going to show you how to change photo shops Auto color correction algorithm to give you better results. So we have this image here that obviously has a color cast and you can use the curves adjustment layer or
The levels adjustment layer to fix this image. So also like curves because that’s the adjustment layer that I prefer and I can click on auto to allow Photoshop to attempt to automatically fix the image. 
In this case Photoshop didn’t do that good of a job, but you can make a change to the algorithm that photoshop uses. You can go into the flyout menu and select Auto Options which brings up this window which contains the four different algorithms that photoshop can use to attempt to auto color. Correct? This image by default enhance brightness and contrast is selected, but you can select some of the other algorithms to see if they give you better results. I prefer find
Art in light colors Not if it’s not this algorithm gives you a better result. You can also check snap neutral mid-tones to try to find a neutral gray and notice how this makes the image much better. 
Then you can click on save as defaults so that photoshop remembers these settings and it applies them every time you click on that auto button. You can press OK and next time that you create a curves adjustment layer photoshop will use that algorithm when you click on the auto button, but is it that’s much much better than the default algorithm. Is algorithm doesn’t work. I also have a color cast in this image, and I’m going to create a curves adjustment layer and click on auto.
Much much better than the default algorithm. I’m also going to show you what to do when this algorithm doesn’t work.
In this Photoshop tip, I’m going to show you another great use for the auto color correction options in both curves and levels in this case instead of color correcting an image. We’re going to color match an image in compositing one of the greatest challenges to making things look realistic is getting both images to have the same color theme or the same color temperature, but with the curves adjustment layer and Auto Options, you can make that task whole lot easier. Let me show you how to do that. I’m working with two layers here. I have this background layer, which
Is called and it has a cool color cast in this model that was shot in a studio. I’ve already Master out if I hold shift and click on her layer. You can see the background is just simply a white background.
And if we wanted to make this composite more realistic, we have to color match the images. So one way of doing that is by creating the curves adjustment layer clipping into the layer below by clicking on this icon. This simply means that the visibility of the model layer control the effects of the curves adjustment layer, in other words anything that we apply on. This curves adjustment layer will only affect the model and not the background. And before you do anything else. You have to make sure that the focus this white outline is on the curb.
So make sure you have this white outline here 
Then hold alt option on the Mac and click on auto that also brings up the auto color correction options one important thing is that you have to make sure that you uncheck snap neutral mid-tones. Now, you have to tell Photoshop what color the Shadows are and what color the highlights are. So you can click on shadows and the Color Picker opens up and just click on a dark area in your image. You may need to click and drag to make it darker or brighter the depending on what color you’re selecting.
So I’m just going to select a darker blue which is close to the color that I select it and then press okay. I’ll do the same thing for the Highlight. So click on highlights and then click on a highlight color in this case. Maybe I’ll click on the white on the flag here and that might be a little dark. So I’ll click and drag up to brighten it up just a little bit and that applies those colors onto this image. Then I can press OK and press know in most cases. You do not want to make these your default colors then I can use. Is the curves to adjust the Luminosity of the foreground too much. The background is the Black Point controls the darkest pixels the white Point controls the brightest pixels the curves actually really simple to understand if you click and drag up you add light to make things brighter if you click and drag down you reduce light to make things darker much like a dimmer switch.
So what I’m going to do now is just click here and drag down to add a little bit of contrast and I’m going to click and drag this point up because I don’t want the darkest pixel on her Lair to be completely black notice that there’s no real pure black in the background. So I don’t want there to be any pure black in the foreground as well. So maybe right along here.
I can click and drag this point up to make the highlights brighter and that alone makes this composite much more ballistic. Of course, you can keep fine-tuning the image but these are the basic steps to color matching images in Photoshop with this fantastic technique.