Control photoshop with mouse gestures
When I show people something in photoshop, the thing they are most amazed by is not whatever technique I show them. It’s that I don’t use a keyboard to control photoshop, I use my wacom pen to issue mouse gestures almost exclusively, only touching the keyboard for the most obscure and rarely used commands.
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.
