One of My Favorite Photoshop Tools…..
This little gem of a tool gets overlooked by most. Yet it is one of the most useful tools in the Photoshop tool box. So how does it work and where do you find it? You can access the “Fade” command from the “Edit” menu. I use it so much I have assigned a function key on my Wacom tablet to it. “Fade” gives you the ability to adjust not only brush strokes but many of the filter effects by adjusting the opacity of the effect and the blend mode.This gives you an extraordinary amount of control.
A great way to try out the “Fade” command is to open and image and add an empty layer above your background layer and set the blend mode of this layer to “Overlay”. Select the brush tool and set the foreground color to black and the opacity to 50%. Now just paint in an area of the blank layer in a continuous motion. You will see that you have darkened it considerably. Here is where the fun begins. Now access the “Fade” command. The keyboard shortcut on the Mac is “shift+command+F”. Adjust the opacity slider and watch what happens. Pretty neat. You now have control of your brush strokes in a new and very useful manner. Now play around with the blend modes and watch what the effects are. This opens a whole lot of possibilities. You can also see what your original brush stroke/filter effect looked like by clicking on and off the preview button.
The one “gotcha” of the “Fade” command is that it will only act on the very last action you perform. For example if you are painting in a mask and you interrupt the brush stroke, when you apply the “Fade” command it will only affect the very last action. It only has one level in which to work.
So give it a try and I think you too will agree that it is a great tool to add to your arsenal.
