Photoshop CS4 introduced document tabs that make it easy to switch between a variety of open images. It’s a terrific feature that I usually like a lot.

But there are days the tabs feature drives me crazy! If you’ve ever dragged one Photoshop window over another, only to have it sucked in as a new tab, you know what I mean.

So for you, a checkbox in Photoshop’s Interface preferences: Turn off "Enable Floating Document Window Docking" and say goodbye to that annoying feature.

Source: Working with lots of small images for our tips newsletter, this is one of the very first preferences I disabled in CS4. Adobe even posted a recent technote covering how to How to un-tab image windows in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

I was working on this week’s tip, when I got an email from Steve Laskevtich from Luminous Works with a PDF handout titled “11 Ways to Zoom in Photoshop CS4.” There are SO many ways to do the the same thing in Photoshop, that I (like I expect many of you will do) immediately set out to find ways of zooming that Steve had missed.

So let’s call this a group project. How many different ways are there to zoom in Photoshop CS4? I’ve started us off with the eleven from Steve. I’ll be contributing my own additions in the comments along with the rest of you.

We teach clients how to manage their professional image libraries using a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Bridge. I typically don’t recommend iPhoto for most professional libraries.

Then Apple added Faces (facial recognition) in the latest version of iPhoto. I’m loath to give up my professional workflows, but easily keywording photo libraries with people’s names is a game changer for many businesses.

This week I started testing Picasa 3.5, free software from Google, which now includes face-matching. It works great, integrates easily with Lightroom or Bridge, and did I mention it’s free?

I’m always delighted when I discover basic Photoshop techniques I missed along the way. We all know you can drag selected pixels from one window into another. Somehow I missed that if you drag that same selection while using one of Photoshop’s selection tools, you can drag the selection itself (with no pixels) over into a new document.

I must have known this at some point, but I’d obviously forgotten because I have a clumsy method I’ve used for years when I needed to copy selection outlines between documents. If this little tip saves anyone those extra steps, then revealing my personal ignorance was worth it.

Source: This is one of those little details I picked up during Jason Hoppe’s 5-Week Photoshop Fundamentals course. For as long as I’ve been using these tools, I still learn something new from almost every course I sit in on.

Did you spend the extra for an "Extended" version of Photoshop CS4? If so, your copy of Photoshop sports a new 3D menu that you’ve never touched. (Tip: If you bought the bundle of CS4 that included Flash and Dreamweaver, you got Photoshop Extended in the deal.)

You’ll get your money’s worth today. This 3D Postcard trick lets your extra Photoshop investment finally pay off. This is a great trick for adding a sense of dimension to your portfolio when you need to show off flat screenshots, webpages, or examples of printed projects. Adjust your flat object in 3D space, add an appropriate shadow and you’re set!

At first glance, this tip may seem a little frivolous. Creating word-search puzzles isn’t a skill that is in high demand. Yet as we dig below the surface, this project is a great demonstration of InDesign’s ability to place Excel spreadsheets as a table. Which can be pretty handy for many types of information-heavy design projects.

This tip was written several years ago when one of our clients needed coaching in how to create word-search puzzles for a monthly magazine she produced.