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Did you know that you could increase and decrease a brush size with "{" and "}" comes in handy!

] = increasing brush size
[ = decreasing brush size

if you hold shift it will edit the brush hardness:

} = harder
{ = softer

thanks Fez

No need to keep selecting the brush menu (which could be sluggish at times)

Another thing, you could easily zoom out and in the document using CTRL++ and CTRL+- very easy and saves time.

Hopefully these tips helped improve your workflow!

Regards,
Aziz

When underlining text in Photoshop it can sometimes look slightly blurred at smaller sizes. You can fix this by adjusting the font size slightly. Usually going up/down .25 or .5 will make the underline nice and neat.

Here are a few:

1. Hold down the command key and click on a layer in the layers palette to make a selection based on that layer's transparency (that's on a Mac - not sure what the Windows key command is)

2. If you want to reduce the opacity of a layer that's using a non-"normal" blending mode (e.g. Multiply, Color Dodge, etc) changing the Fill percentage in the layers palette often gives better-looking results than changing the Opacity percentage.

3. Use vector shapes and layer styles whenever possible - then when you need to edit the size or shape of an element you can scale without things getting pixellated, and the styling (drop shadows, glows, etc) will automatically scale or reshape as well.

This is a technique I recently discovered for reducing glare:

1. create a selection using the lasso tool around the area of high glare
2. use the shadows/highlights adjustment and reduce shadows to 0% and increase highlights to the desired level

For cases of intense glare this may need to be repeated a few times.

Note - this technique doesn't work in all situations. I tried this out on six designs and it worked perfectly on 4 of them, but didn't work at all on the other 2.

The Photoshop scratch disk is similar to virtual memory. For the best performance, you should set the scratch disk to a defragmented hard disk that has plenty of unused space and fast read/write speeds (rather than a network drive or removable media such as a Zip drive). Photoshop requires at least 1 GB of free hard-disk space, but more is recommended. If you have more than one hard disk volume, you should specify additional scratch disks.

Note: Adobe recommends that you set the primary scratch disk to a different hard disk than the one Windows uses for its virtual memory or paging file.

To set the scratch disk:

1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Performance.
2. Select the Active? box for each hard disk you want to contain a scratch disk.

Note: Unless you have a drive that has considerable space open, and is defragmented regularly, choose more than one drive, if one or more is available.

3. Click OK.
4. Restart Photoshop.