Photoshop How To

Lately we’ve been sharing basic image-editing primers designed to help you get up to speed with Photoshop and Lightroom. In this installment, you’ll learn how to work faster and more efficiently by customizing your workflow with tool and brush presets.

Unmesh Dinda is one of our favorite image-editing instructors, and his goal with this tutorial is to limit your time behind the computer by speeding up the editing process. He does that by demonstrating how to customize any tool to your liking with just one click.

You’ll see how to easily create time saving presets for the editing tasks you use often. Say you frequently do a bit of “painting” to enhance the tones in landscape or wildlife images. With the proper presets at your fingertips, you’ll be able to immediately access your favorite brush size, colors, exposure adjustments, and other modifications without digging into the menus.

As Dinda explains, presets can be applied to virtually every tool in Photoshop. In the video below, he demonstrates how to set up presets for Photoshop’s Text tool. And once you understand the process, you’ll be able to use the same method to create presets to accelerate any task you desire.

In this example, you’ll see how easy it is to save a complete package of text settings, from your favorite fonts, tracking, type size and weight, to orientation and a number of other variables. And remember, you can do exactly the same thing for every tool you use.

There are more helpful tips on Dinda’s YouTube channel, and in the recent primer we posted, with everything you need to know about color correcting photographs.