Now, one other thing that I want to show you that I think is pretty handy here. I am going to move over the Color Palette so that we can see it. I am going to press the F key, F as in Frank or Fill Screen, of course, in order to fill my entire screen here with the image. I am going to see this light-gray background right here and I am going to go ahead and scroll my image over just a hair bit so that we can see more of this light-gray background.

Now you may know this little tip, and if not, I want you to know it. So I am going to show it to you very quickly. Now it turns how you can change this background color to some other color and well, I don't recommend that you change it to some bright vivid color like, oh, let's change it to bright red, for example. I do recommend that you make this gray darker, it's awfully light, at least from my way of thinking. I like to see a darker gray back here, something that's a little less intrusive so that I can keep my eye on the image. But it is also important to make sure that this background is nice and neutral.

So the first thing you do is you go over to the Gradient Tool here and you change it to the Paint Bucket, because you need the Paint Bucket Tool. Then you choose the desired color from the Color Palette. So if you have the foreground color set to red, you're going to change this background to red. Then I am going to press the Shift key and click in this background. Then it goes ahead and changes this background, this pace-board if you will, to whatever foreground color I have, which of course is red in this case.

Now I bring all of this up, because I want to show you another nifty thing that I've done with the keyboard shortcut, so I think you might really appreciate. Notice here inside the Color Palette that we have these options set to R, G and B, so we're seeing the RGB sliders. Now you may know this little trick as well. If you press the Shift key and click on this little color rainbow down here, it will shift you through the various ramp options that are available to you. So here is the RGB version, Shift+Click and I get the CMYK version with slightly dulled colors.

But what if you want to change the sliders? Well, then you have to actually go over to the Palette Menu and choose the sliders that you want to use, or thanks to the Deke Keys advanced keyboard shortcuts you can access these options from the keyboard by pressing the F1-F4 keys that were formerly associated by default, to undo and cut, copy and paste. You just don't function keys assigned to those commands, because those commands already have more intuitive keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+Z for example for Undo instead of F1.

So here's what I am going to do. I am going to press the F1 key in order to switch to the Grayscale Slider here inside the Color Palette. So it's just F1 for K, F2 for RGB, F3 for HSB, which I use a lot, Hue Saturation Brightness, and F4 finally for CMYK, and those are the ones that I use most often.

Anyway, I am going to go to F1 for K and then I am going to adjust this slider to let's say 75% black and so that's going to give me a nice neutral gray here, a nice neutral dark gray, and then I will Shift+Click in the background once again in order to make this background a deep, nice gray.