Photoshop Quicktip 1: Opacity Slider

Well my initial thoughts of making a blog entry on a weekly basis have been blown out of the water with a busy end to 2007 and a flat out 2008 already. I was hoping to write a good solid photoshop tutorial to start the new year however being a bit frantic thought I would start a little section called Quicktips, most of tips will be simple nuggets of info that can improve work flow. Some of these may be obvious to you and you may use them on a daily basis, others you may not know and once tried will make you wonder how you lived without them.

I like everyone use transparencies in some of my projects and often use them just to see an item hiding on the layer below, to do this I used to use the little drop down arrow next to the ‘100%’ in the layers palette, slide down then go change it again.

Whilst this isn’t the most time consuming process in the world there is a quicker way, simply click on the word ‘opacity’ highlighted in the image above and whilst holding the mouse down slide left and right to increase/decrease the opacity.Simple as that, you’ve reduced your workflow by one whole click, this works on other features of photoshop as well that use slider bars for values. Apologies if this was blindingly obvious to you and you’ve wasted 30 seconds of your life, but if you’re just starting out in Photoshop it could be a useful little tip.