First download a free copy of Autohotkey

Save a textfile called “cs3resize.ahk” and copy and paste the code below into that file and save it. Then doubleclick it to run the script.

By default the script uses the M key to trigger, you can change that by looking at the comments in the code below.

Select the brush tool, then hit M and move your mouse or pen up and down (NOT left and right) on the screen and watch your brush resized on the fly. Hit M again to return to normal drawing mode.

The script simply sends out the left and right bracket keys when the mouse/pen is moved up and down. You can easily make copies and this script and bind other hotkeys for brush hardness or anything else in photoshop that has increasing and decreasing values.


;CS3 Brush Resize on the fly
#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{

}


Tabs suck unless you’r some old lady working on pictures of your cat. If you frequently need to have multiple images open, references, matte creation, compositing etc.. you open new images all the time and drag contents from one into other windows.

With the old floating windows all you do is control+drag a layer and there you go, takes a second. With tabs you have to control+drag, move your mouse to the tab you want, which is frequently some stock photo named 2509523509fu.jpg so when you have a ton opened you have to search for it. Then you have to hover the mouse over the tab for 5 seconds to switch and then you can drop the layer. Huuuuge waste of time when you do this hundreds of times a day. Does adobe even know thier own target group? Tabs are not needed for the power users that are the main target for Photoshop. Alll this bloat to “help” is not needed, you don’t pay out your ass for CS4 if you’r just some clueless user editing a few photos.

I know you can go to preferences and uncheck open new documents as tabs but that doesn’t get rid of tabs. You now have to drag new images on the toolbar to have them not open as tabs, wtf?

If you have an image open and go to open new image then the new image will be opened as a tab inside the floating window that had the focus, NO STOP IT! arghhh.

When I go uncheck “open documents as tabs” that because I don’t want tabs ever, anywhere.

There’s a free program that allows you to use keys such as TAB, numlock, scrolllock, printscreen or the break key and map it to something usefull. That program is called AutohotKey. You can download it for free and unleash all that power here: Download Autohotkey

For example here’s how you would map the numlock key to send out F11 which you could map to whatever in photoshop. I like everything on my numerical keyboard so I can just keep my hand there and have everything I need in reach.

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
NumLock::
{
Send {F11}
Sleep, 100
return
}
}

If you look at your numerical keyboard and place your hand there, look at how many usefull keys are in reach of your fingers without mocing your hand.

Numpad minus
Numpad plus
Numpad divide
Numpad multiply
Numpad comma
Numlock
Printscreen
Scrolllock
Break key
page up
page down
home
end
insert
delete

All those keys are sitting there useless when you could bind them to all the stuff you use all the time and never have to move your hand.

That’s not all, you can also bind the mouse buttons to something usefull. Here a couple of scripts I use:

Bind your pen up button to W and now you can rotate the canvas by dragging the pen around.
#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
w::
{
send {r down}
Loop
{
sleep, 10
GetKeyState, state, w, p
if state = u
break
}
send {b}
return
}
}

Bind your pen down button to S and resize the brush on the fly by dragging left and right.
#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
s::
{
send {alt down}
mouseclick, right,,, 1, 0, d
Loop
{
sleep, 10
GetKeyState, state, s, p
if state = u
break
}
mouseclick, right,,, 1, 0, U
send {alt up}
return
}
}

Here’s an example of using the insert key to send out control+shift+n, use the photoshop keyboard editor to bind that to something you need. You can modify this script and make copies of it to match Numlock, printscreen or any other key.
#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
insert::
{
send {Control down} {Shift down} n {Shift up} {Control up}
return
}

}

Here’s some examples for numlock and printscreen:


#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
PrintScreen::
{
Send {Control down}{Alt down}{LShift down}h{LShift up}{Alt up}{Control up}
Sleep, 100
return
}
}

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
NumLock::
{
Send {F11}
Sleep, 100
return
}
}

But that’s not all, this one is going to blow your mind baby so don’t skip it!

Since I like everything around the numerical keyboard I want to be able to bind as much stuff to those keys. AutoHotKey also allows you to create your own modifier keys.

A modifier key is a key that while held down modifies any other key, like ALT+S, while ALT is held down S works differently.

How about we make numpad divide a modifier key looking for another press of numpad multiply?

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
NumpadDiv & NumPadMult::
{
Send, {control down}{F8}{control up}
Sleep, 100
return
}

}

The only drawback is that the first key (The modifier) looses its normal function unless you make another script to handle that.

In the example above, in photoshop the numpad divide key would lose its ability to work, so we write a new script to catch that.

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
NumpadDiv::
{
Send, {control down}{F5}{control up}
Sleep, 100
return
}

}

Now AutoHotKey knows that if you press and then release the divide key then it catches that key, if you press divide and multiply then it knows that it has to catch that instead.

If you sit and let all this sink in for a while, imagine all the combinations of keys you can bind to the numerical keyboard, you can operate every single thing in photoshop without moving your hand of the numerical keyboard.

The only keys on the numerical side of the keyboard you should leave alone is the numbers 0-9 as they are used to control transparency of the brush and layers. That doesn’t stop you from making modifier combos out of them. Just catch numpad1 & numpad2, then make sure you also create a section for numpad1 and send out numpad1 so that when you only press and release numpad1 it works like normal.

You could be sneaky and make your arrow keys your modifiers, so that when you press arrow left + numpad1 it’s one thing, when you press arrow up + numpad1 it’s another and so on, that’s 104 combos worth of keys right at your fingertips.

Se also: Changing Photoshop Hardcoded Shotcut Keys

No matter. Go download the program Autohotkeys, it’s free and awesome.
Autohotkey allows you to trap keys before a program gets control and send some other keycode intirely and throw away the trapped keycode.

This means that you can now just bind commands in photoshop to whatever random keycode and then setup autohotkey to watch for say “w” and translate that into the keycode photoshop expects.

Not clear enough yet? Ok here’s a sequence of what would happen. In this example want the curves dialog shortcut to just be “c” which photoshop won’t allow.

Autohotkey is watching for the key C to be pressed.
I press C.
Autohotkey catches that I pressed C and discards that, so photoshop doensn’t know C has been pressed.
Autohotkey sends control+m
Photoshop brings up the curves dialog because it sees control+m.

Here’s a simple code snippet you can change around to map out shortcut keys in photoshop.

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
NumLock::
{
Send {F11}
Sleep, 100
return
}
}

Let’s look at what’s going on here:

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop

This is a section; So this only gets triggered when photoshop has the focus.

NumLock::

We watch for and catch the numlock key. Look in AHK helpfile for a table of keycodes.

We enter another section that only gets triggered when AHK sees that numlock has been pressed.

Send {F11}

AHK sends out the F11 key that you bind to whatever you want to happen in photoshop when you press the numlock key.

Sleep, 100

AHK pauses for 100ms just to give the program some time to react and returns.

Holding down keys

Say you want to simulate that you hold down alt+shift+m. This is done by by putting the keys you want to press and hold within brackets using the Send command.

Here’s a Send command that presses and holds down control+shift while pressing the M key:

Send {Control down}{Shift down}m{Shift up}{Control up}

The {Keycode up}{Keycode down} trick works for all keys.

Creating toggle dialogs (you will love this)

A toggle dialog is a popup window like the curves dialog where the same key that brings up the dialog will also close the dialog. Using a toggle dialog speeds up your workflow a lot. So say you bind the C key to bring up curves, adjust the curves and hit C again to accept the changes and close the curves dialog. So instead of pressing control+m, adjust, press enter you just to “C, adjust curves, C” done. MUCH faster.

First create a watch for whatever key you want and bind it to a command that brings up a dialog window.

Now look at this dialog window and notice the titlebar text. For example the curves dialog will say simply “Curves”

Here’s the code to handle a dialog toggle. Just change the “#IfWinActive, Curves” to whatever the dialog titlebar says. And also change the “c::” part to the same key that brings up the dialog.

#IfWinActive, Curves
{
c::
{
Send, {ENTER}
Sleep, 100
return
}
}

What’s going on here then? Since the curves dialog is now on top of photoshop, it no longer has the focus, so the watch that brings up curves won’t trigger, because these are all inside “#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop” sections that only triggers when photoshop has the front focus. So now the “#IfWinActive, Curves” section will trigger instead; see that you pressed C, and send ENTER instead which will close the curves dialog window.

Holding down a mouse button while pressing keys

Special shortcuts in programs like photoshop or corel painter allows you to hold down a key combination and click and drag to rotate the canvas or resize your brushes.

Let’s see how we can emulate this and even make it better:

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
s::
{
send {alt down}
mouseclick, right,,, 1, 0, d
Loop
{
sleep, 10
GetKeyState, state, s, p
if state = u
break
}
mouseclick, right,,, 1, 0, U
send {alt up}
return
}
}

This script presses the ALT key while holding down the right mouse button so all you need to do is press the shortcut key (S) and move the mouse, no need to click and drag.

To change the shortcut that is watched, simply change the key (S in this example) and also change the S in the line that says “GetKeyState, state, s, p ”

You can add other modifiers, for example press control+alt, just change the 2 Send lines or chage the right mouse key to the left mouse key as in the example below that presses control+alt while holding down the right mousebutton:

#ifWinActive ahk_class Photoshop
{
w::
{
send {alt down}+{Control down}
mouseclick, left,,, 1, 0, d
Loop
{
sleep, 10
GetKeyState, state, w, p
if state = u
break
}
mouseclick, left,,, 1, 0, U
send {Control up}+{alt up}
return
}
}

See also: Photoshop and AutoHotKey the Perfect Pair

You have a layer selected, now you create a new layer and do something to it and undo that. Photoshop will undo what you did AND SELECT THE PREVIOUS LAYER

Draw…
Nah no good, undo.
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I was working on.
Try again..
Nah no good, undo..
(Photoshop undos and selects previous layer)
Click back to the layer I was working on.

Start drawing again… Only to find out I forgot to reselect the layer I was working on so now Im drawing on the wrong layer

FSFSFSFSFSGHSKFJK:HUF GARRRR! FOR FUCKS SAKE (Throws things around)

This is seriously the only thing in Photoshop that PISSES ME OFF!

Peaked your interest? Think about your hands never leaving the photo to press shortcuts, never going to menus or toolbars, mouse gestures control everything.

Want to try it?

First you need the free program called StrokeIt

After you install StrokeIt you need to define the application:

Then you add an action:

And finally the command:

The way I do it is that I define the actions to be the letter of the shortcut for toolbar things, like B for brush, O for dodge and burn, P for the pen and so on.

I also use up/left, down/left, Down/left, Down/right, Up, Down for brush sizing, undo/redo. Finally I have things like Curves, calculations, screen modes (F) and toggle pallettes (TAB) on whatever feels right.

I recommend starting out with a few commands and slowly working your way up until you have everything you use in your workflow on mouse gestures.

It took me about a month to become totally proficient without misfires, some gestures are harder but now I never get misfires at all and it’s total bliss to be able to control photoshop completely with mouse gestures.

Notice that I use a pen for this, don’t try this with the mouse because it’s not precise enough and you will get constant misfires. I started out trying to use a mouse and got the impression that mouse gestures was never going to work. Then I switched to a wacom intuous3 pen and it was like night and day.

Lets start out positive and list the few things I do like:

Rotate canvas. This has been on my wishlist for ages.
Spring loaded tools. The ability to switch to another tool while holding the tool shortcut down, and then when you release, you are back to the previous tool is awesome, well done.

That’s about it, now for what I don’t like:

Bugs, ohh is there ever bugs.

Almost all of them stem from the new GPU openGL acceleration.

I realize that this is probably because we need an updated graphics driver, but as always you get the runaround blame game. Adobe says it’s NVidas fault and to ask them for updated drivers, and NVidia says Adobe needs to fix the bug, and we are caught in the middle.

Go above around 100 brush size and your brush is only displayed in half.

Many times the screen will flicker and dialogs and tool palettes leave blobs around the screen that will only go away when you resize the window.

I realize that this is because of the new accelerated UI stuff, but what I can’t understand, is that if I go and turn that off, all the buggyness remains.

Some people probably love that zooming is smooth now and that you can fling the image with the hand tool. All I feel is that it makes everything slower and laggy feeling. The first thing I do on a new windows install is turn off all the fading, zooming crap. If you don’t think about it it’s cool and new, but all it does is slow you down.

All the rest of the new features is adding all kinds of newbie interfaces to things you have been able to do since CS1 at least and bloating the UI with unnessecary palettes and extra dialogs.

Refine selection? Blur the mask and use curves white/black inputs to choke or expand the mask.

Adjustments palette? Great, now instead of the dialogs popping up in the middle of the screen right where my cursor is, I have to move all the way over to that stupid palette. Why is it needed? You have been able to add adjustment layers since forever. All it does is clutter my screen with yet another palette.

How about working on updating stuff that is actually usefull. Lens blur for example could need a serious speedup and way larger radius values. Half the filters won’t work in 16bit, let alone L*A*B which many pros use all the time.

The new tabbed windows I also hate. First thing that got turned off. Only I can’t you see… When I turn it off everytime I drag windows around the image inside the windows goes blank until I resize it. This happens even when I turn OpenGL accell off. In fact all the bugs that seems to be caused by the openGL stuff remains even when opengl accell. is turned of, why?

And finally for my biggest pet peeve.. hardcoded shortcuts. Still, after many many complaints from European users that has been going on for ages, Adobe STILL have not got off their asses and fixed that shit.

Why is this important? Let me explain.

I’m European, Danish to be presize. We have been trained to not install localized versions, because the translations suck. Imagine if someone ran the language strings in PS through babel-fish. Couple this with the fact that most Europeans speak English fluently and read almost all technical literature in English because of bad translations so English interfaces is the standard here, we almost always install the US versions and not the localized ones.

Now photoshop becomes terribly confused. Danish OS language and US version of photoshop, oh noes.

This has the unfortunate effect that all the hardcoded shortcuts is not even accessible on our keyboards. Brackets for resizing brushes and brush hardness? Nope. Tilde key? Nope. No brackets and tilde means that things like channel walking, selecting layers, moving layers etc.. can ONLY be done with the mouse, and I don’t use the mouse/pen except for drawing.

Sure, I can remap the brush resize/brush hardness shortcuts, sort of.. You see, when you remap those keys they work in the main window. Try going into vanishing point or liquify and you’r right back to the hardcoded versions that you can’t use.

Why is the TAB key for hiding palettes hardcoded? I’m left handed and use a large wacom tablet, so whenever I need to hide the palettes I need to reach over my left hand to hit tab or lift my drawing hand. I could move the keyboard over but then reaching all the other shortcuts becomes awkward. Why can’t I remap that key to say, / on my numerical keyboard? All this would become a moot point if ALL keys could be remapped by the user, it would be such a simple change, just add those shorcuts the the keyboard shorcut editor and they don’t need to mess with language stuff at all since we could now take care of that ourselves.

I’m staying with CS3, I lament the loss of rotate canvas and spring loaded tools, maybe CS5 will be better?

Firefox 3 has support for color management, but it’s turned off by default and the only way to turn it on is to use about:config

Type about:config into the address bar
Type gfx.color_management.enabled into the find bar of the about:config screen.

Doubleclick the word false so it turns into True, and close the about:config page and restart Firefox.

Now Firefox will display photos with embedded color profiles properly and use color management. Photos without embedded color profiles will default correctly to sRGB and display as they would without color management.

As opposed to a normal collection, where you decide what photos is put into the collection, smart collections are live and updates themselves on the fly, according to criterias you setup.

One use for smart collections that I use a lot is to create a smart collection that shows me all the non-rejected photos that has not been keyworded yet. I select that smart collection once in a while when I have some down time to see if there’s any matches. Then I just select the keyword spray can tool, type in keywords and spray the photos that maches, change keywords, spray some more until the smart collection is empty and I’m done, knowing that all my photos are keyworded so I can find stuff easily later.

Here’s how you setup such a smart collection.

First select the collections panel. Click on the plus icon and select Create smart collection.

In the smart collection name texbox type: Without Keywords (RAW/DNG/TIFF/PSD)
Match: All
First criteria: Keywords – Is Empty

Hold down ALT and Click on the hash icon at the end of the last entry in the criteria list to add a special criteria. Accept the default: Any of the following are true

From the last item in the criteria list below the Any of the following dropdown select File type: Digital Negative

Click the plus sign at the end and add another criteria.

Again select file type and select RAW

Add 2 more file type criteria: TIFF and Photoshop Document. I skip JPEG because I never use jpegs for anything but intermediate exported images for web or clients so no point in keywording those.

Click OK to save your new smart collection. You should now see a list of all your DNG,RAW, TIFF and Photoshop files that are not keyworded. Go ahead and start adding keywords to them. As soon as you add a keyword the photo will dissapear from the list as it no longer matches the criterias.

If you want to do the same but are wondering how here’s how to change foldernames and add folders and subfolders in Lightroom:

First make sure you’r in the Library, hit G if unsure.

Click on the Folders panel. Now select a directory where you want to add a subfolder and click the little + icon and from the popup menu select “add subfolder”

Changing folder names in Lightroom is done by context clicking on the folder name and selectin rename.

To change the name of a photo just hit F2 and you get a little dialog where you can change the name.

BTW NEVER change folder and file names outside of lightroom, if you do then Lightroom can’t find them anymore, big nono.