These days, the popularity of visual content is higher than ever before. Memes, gifs, videos and, of course, pristine photography are leading the engagement race. Each and every online project is in some way intertwined and made better by high-quality visual content. 

Photoshop has been a trusted ally to many over the years since it first came out and it kept improving with each new version. It has become an essential industry standard. If you are just getting into using this piece of software, here are some powerful tricks you can use to improve the quality of your photographs.

1. The healing touch of the healing brush

If you are having problems with skin discolorations, pimples, moles, or even some background distractions, this tool is the right option. You need to be precise when using this brush, but it can really make a difference for headshots, landscapes, sports background tweaks, and so on. 

2. Raising the history states memory

A common problem for starting Photoshop users is that they end up having to go back a lot of steps to fix a mistake, more than the program remembers by default. You can change how many save states Photoshop makes of your project by going to edit > preferences > performance menu and setting the desired number of saves. You can set this option up to 1,000 states, but apply with respect to your requirement; this can impact the performance if you aren’t running on a high-end PC.

3. Quick switch to move tool

By holding down the Ctrl button (or command on some keyboards) you can quickly switch between whatever tool you may be using at the moment. It really saves you a lot of time and frustration.

4. Navigating with ease

Editing a photograph requires a lot of zooming and moving the photograph around. If you don’t use shortcuts, this can be a big waste of time. Use Ctrl (command) and +/- to zoom in and zoom out and use “space” to access the hand tool on the fly, so that you can move around with ease.

5. Cropping with less finality

The problem with cropping can quite big, especially for novice Photoshoppers. In order to avoid destroying the original and having to start all over again because you cropped poorly, you should use the hide option. Now, you can simply adjust the crop at any point, but be aware that you will need to make the background layer editable in order to do this.

These are just some simple tips to help you on your way towards developing professional Photoshop skills. If you need to do some advanced work, we strongly recommend hiring professional photoshop Services to do it. After all, this is a complex tool which requires knowledge and, above all else, experience. Without those two, it can be very hard to get professional results and you need those for a lot of situations.

We hope these tips helped you on your way to developing your skills, removing the time wasting rookie mistakes which do nothing but frustrate you.