I thought I knew Photoshop, but these 3 under-appreciated features proved me wrong

Even after years of clicking through the same menus, Photoshop still has tricks hiding in plain sight. These three features changed how I work, and I had no idea they existed.

.psdt templates

A smarter way to start every new project

For years, I built every new Photoshop project the same tedious way: open a blank canvas, set up my layers, drop in my usual guides, and save a copy of an old file just to reuse its structure. It wasn't until I stumbled across the .psdt format that I realized I'd been wasting time for no good reason. A .psdt file is a Photoshop template, and it works exactly like a Word or Excel template does. You build the file once, with your layer groups, your color profiles, your guides, your text placeholders, all set up exactly how you like them, and then you save it as a template instead of a regular .psd. From that point on, double-clicking the template opens a fresh, untitled copy of that setup, leaving your original template untouched no matter how much you edit the new file.

This sounds simple, but the time savings add up fast if you do repetitive work. Social media graphics, YouTube thumbnails, print layouts, business cards, anything you produce in a consistent format benefits from a template you never have to rebuild. I now keep a small folder of .psdt files for the formats I use most often, and starting a new piece takes seconds instead of minutes. You can create one through File > Save As and selecting Photoshop Template from the format dropdown, or by saving directly into your Templates folder so it shows up in Photoshop's New Document window under the Saved tab. It is such a basic piece of functionality that I'm almost embarrassed it took me this long to find it, but once you start using templates, the manual setup ritual feels like a relic from the past.

The eyedropper works outside Photoshop

Pulling colors from anywhere on your screen

I always assumed the eyedropper tool was confined to whatever canvas I had open, which meant I was taking screenshots of reference images, pasting them into a new layer, and sampling colors from there just to match a shade I liked. It turns out that extra step was completely unnecessary. When you select the eyedropper tool in Photoshop and click and hold the mouse button, you can drag the cursor anywhere on your screen, including outside the Photoshop window entirely, and it will continue sampling color in real time as you move. Release the click over a browser tab, a desktop wallpaper, another application, or even a physical photo displayed on a second monitor, and Photoshop grabs that exact color and loads it as your foreground color.

This works because Photoshop is reading pixel data from your display itself rather than from the document, so as long as the color is visible somewhere on screen, it's fair game. I use this constantly now when I'm matching brand colors from a client's website, pulling a palette from a mood board I have open in a browser tab, or grabbing a tone from a reference image without importing it into my project file at all. It eliminates an entire category of busywork that I didn't even realize was busywork until I stopped doing it.

There are a couple of caveats worth knowing, though. This cross-screen sampling only works while you're actively holding down the mouse button during the drag; a simple click confined to the canvas behaves the way you'd expect. It also depends on your operating system and graphics setup, so in rare cases involving certain multi-monitor configurations, the sampling might not extend correctly. But for the vast majority of users, this is a small feature that quietly removes a lot of friction.

The "fade" command

Dialing back an edit without starting over

The "fade" command may be the single most underused feature in all of Photoshop, and once I started using it, I couldn't believe I'd gone so long without it. You'll find it under Edit > Fade, but the catch is that it only appears immediately after you apply a filter, a painting tool, or certain adjustments, and it disappears the moment you take any other action. What it does is let you reduce the opacity and change the blending mode of whatever you just did, without undoing it and starting over from scratch.

Say you apply a sharpening filter and it's too aggressive, or a Gaussian blur that smooths things out more than you wanted. Instead of hitting undo and reapplying the filter at different settings through trial and error, you open Fade and drag the opacity slider until the effect looks right, blending the filtered result with the original underneath. You can also change the blend mode in that same dialog, which opens up effects that aren't achievable through the filter's own settings, like fading a sharpen filter with the Luminosity blend mode to avoid introducing odd color shifts.

I'd always assumed that fine-tuning a filter meant going back into its dialog box and adjusting sliders before committing, which works fine for filters with adjustable settings but does nothing for tools like the paintbrush or the eraser. Fade applies to those too. It's a forgiving, non-destructive way to soften any single action you've just taken, and because it works immediately after almost anything, it has become a reflex for me rather than a special-case tool. The only rule to remember is that it has to be your very next move, so if you click elsewhere first, the option is gone for good.

---

Old software, new tricks

Photoshop has been around for decades, yet it still holds surprises for people who use it daily. Templates, the cross-screen eyedropper, and the fade command all prove that mastering Photoshop is a moving target.