Summary

• Increase Undo's quickly
• Adjust Brush for quick edits
• Master the Liquefy Filter

For decades, Photoshop has remained at the apex of the image-editing world, and for good reason. Besides its robust toolkit and responsive nature, Photoshop also has an extensive amount of documentation and learning material, making it easy for beginners to get up to speed with the app.

That said, there are a ton of hidden features in Photoshop that aren’t explained properly even in Adobe’s highly detailed documentation. So, we’ve compiled a list containing ten of the most obscure facilities that are worth knowing, regardless of whether you’re a novice graphics designer or a photo-editing veteran.

10 You can increase the number of Undo’s

A solid facility for perfectionists

The Ctrl+Z/Cmd+Z combo has been the staple way to reverse your mistakes in most applications – and it’s especially helpful in Photoshop, where you may need to roll back some brush strokes. Photoshop caps the default number of Undo’s to 20, though you can kick this number up a notch if you’re as prone to making errors as I am.

To do so, click on the Edit tab and choose Performance… inside the Preferences submenu. On the right side of the pop-up window, you’ll find an option called History States, and increasing it will let you bump up the number of Undo’s available. Just make sure your system has enough RAM before you set the value in the thousand range.

9 Adjustment Brush is great for quick modifications

And it simplifies minor image-editing tasks

Although Photoshop is the de-facto standard for image editing, it’s still cumbersome to navigate its UI in search of the precise tools when all you wish to do is make some minor color corrections. Thankfully, the recently added Adjustment Brush solves this issue by letting you instantly touch up select parts of an image without resorting to multiple layers. Using it is just as easy: once you’ve highlighted an area using the Adjustment Brush, you can tweak its color balance, brightness, contrast, and a handful of other settings from the menu on the right-side of the Photoshop UI.

8 You can modify the opacity of individual brushes

The Fade brush tool is a godsend for illustrators

When working with multiple layers with different modes, it’s hard not to see (pun intended) the usefulness of the Opacity slider. However, if you’ve used multiple brushes inside a layer, using the Opacity slider will apply the changes to all the strokes rather than a single brush.

So, if you want to set the opacity of a particular brush, you can head to the Edit tab and select the Fade Brush Tool option. Once the pop-up menu appears, you can play with the opacity percentage, and the changes will be applied to just the strokes created from this brush.

7 It’s possible to create animations in Photoshop

We don’t recommend it, though

With Photoshop’s reputation as a raster-based image editor, you wouldn’t expect it to have some animation-centric features built into it. As it turns out, Photoshop lets you stack multiple layers inside the built-in Timeline, and you can choose transition effects to make the animation more fluid. To top it off, the app even lets you insert audio into the Timeline!

Unless your system doesn’t support the other apps in the Adobe Creative Cloud, we wouldn’t recommend using Photoshop for animations. That’s because Adobe Premiere Pro and Animate are much better for this task. Nevertheless, it’s still a neat little feature, especially if you want to create rotoscope animations using just Photoshop.

6 The Straighten tool is great for precise rotations

It's also something I use frequently

Capturing photos of objects in their proper alignment can be a difficult task. While rotating the image can technically help you correct its orientation and alignment, it might be a bit hard to achieve precise results with a slider.

Thankfully, the Crop tool in Photoshop houses a neat feature called Straighten. Selecting this tool after pressing clicking on the Crop icon lets you join two points on the image using a line, which Photoshop uses as a reference to rotate the images and align the two points. As someone who keeps taking photos with weird perspectives, the Straighten tool is hands-down my most-used feature in Photoshop.

5 Liquefy filter turns Photoshop into a character-creator

Just have to resist the urge to create meme faces inside Photoshop

Ever played an RPG and wished you could use the slider present inside the character creation menu in Photoshop? Turns out, it’s entirely possible to modify a person’s face using a certain pair of options inside the Liquefy tool present inside the Filters tab.

Inside the Liquify pop-up, you’ll find several brushes on the left, though what we’re really looking for is the Face-Aware Liquefy menu on the right. Clicking on the drop-down arrow under this submenu will reveal the Eyes, Nose, Mouth, and Face Shape options, and each setting bears its own set of sub-options and sliders. If that’s not enough, you use the Forward Warp tool to modify a person’s physique. However, you should be careful with this option, as it’s easy to end up with something out of H.P. Lovecraft’s books if you go too wild with this tool.

4 There's an easy way to correct perspective distortions

Perspective Warp tool to the rescue!

Perspective distortions are a common occurrence when taking images of buildings, towers, and other architectural subjects with well-defined edges. While you can technically use the rudimentary Transform tool to correct these aberrations, doing so is quite an arduous task, and you’re likely to mess up the image even more.

Luckily, the Perspective Warp tool within the Edit menu provides an easy way to get rid of perspective and edge distortions. All you do is map the area around the object inside planes before hitting the Warp button to modify the perspective with the help of the vertices at the end of said planes.

3 You can upscale images in Photoshop

Without resorting to plugins

If you’ve got the money, the Topaz Photo AI plugin is one of the best add-ons for Photoshop as it introduces robust AI upscaling and noise reduction. But what if I told you it’s possible to get decent results when upscaling images using the basic Photoshop tools?

To pull this insane stunt, you’ll have to head to the Edit tab and choose the Image Size option. Inside this setting, you can set the Width and Height to your desired values, though you’ll have to enable the Resample radio button and choose Preserve Detail 2.0. While you’re at it, be sure to turn the Reduce Noise slider up a notch. For optimal results, I suggest staying between 1.25x to 1.75x the resolution of the initial image, otherwise, you will start to see some loss in quality.

2 Generative Fill has plenty of use cases

Finally, an AI tool that's actually useful!

The word AI is thrown around a lot these days, and in most cases, it’s just a gimmicky feature without any real-life uses. However, the Generative Fill feature in Adobe Photoshop is an outlier, as it’s more of an all-rounder tool than a one-trick pony with limited usability.

From the name alone, you might have guessed that it’s great for filling AI-generated objects into your images. Well, you’re only half right, because Generative Fill can also remove objects and unnecessary distractions from images. Heck, this neat AI tool can even create decent backgrounds and help expand images. And the end result is actually quite decent, assuming you don’t go too wild with the prompts!

1 You can turn any image into a brush

Why use third-party brushes when you can build them yourself?

Let’s say you came up with a fun pattern that’s unlike any brush you’ve used so far. If you’re wondering whether you can save it as a brush, then you’re in luck, as Photoshop provides an easy way to convert any image, strokes, or illustration into your very own brush.

To do so, select the Quick Selection tool and use it to trace the boundary of the object you’re planning to use as a brush. Then, right-click on the selection and pick the Layer via copy option. Once you’ve isolated the object or pattern in another layer, select this layer and choose the Define Brush Preset option from the Edit panel. The brush will be yours to use once you give it a name.

Mastering Photoshop and its powerful toolkit

Despite being one of the most beginner-friendly raster image editors on the market, Photoshop has a lot of depth to it, and it can take months if not years for you to master the app. The tips and tricks we’ve highlighted in the article can help you out, but this list is far from complete. After all, Photshop has an infinite skill ceiling as the number of features and hidden functionalities keeps increasing with every update. In fact, you may continue to encounter some wacky but useful features even after becoming a pro at Photoshop.