What's Your Favourite Photoshop Trick?

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God I love content-aware fill. At Lifehacker I frequently want to illustrate a post with an image that’s not wide enough (like above). So I throw it into Photoshop, I expand the canvas size, I select the new blank parts on the sides, and I hit cmd+option+F.

That opens up the content-aware-fill dialog, so I can preview the result and make sure it doesn’t give someone a third arm. I can tweak a bunch of options. It’s much better than my old workflow, where I’d select the area, right-click, dig around menus, get no custom options. (You can also reach the content-aware-fill dialog through Edit > Content-Aware Fill... on the menu bar.)

My other favourite Photoshop tricks include the custom keyboard shortcut cmd+option+Y to crop an image down to my selection. Combined with the selection marquee tool’s Fixed Ratio mode, I can crop any image to the 16:9 ratio we use on Lifehacker’s top-of-post illustrations.

What’s your favourite Photoshop trick? What’s a custom shortcut you’ve built in, or a feature most people don’t know about—especially one that replaces another, worse feature?

Shoutout, of course, to the classic educational comedy series You Suck at Photoshop.

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