Photoshop Shortcuts you MUST learn
I love shortcuts, you could say I was fanatical about them. The only thing I use my Mouse/pen for in Photoshop for is editing, everything else is keyboard shortcuts and I know them all like the back of my hand.
Not everyone likes to use shortcuts, in fact some hate them, tis ok, everyone’s different.
But there’s a few shortcuts that are just flat out stupid not to learn.
Brush resizing. How can you stand constantly moving your cursor to bring up a pop up, then drag a goddamn slider, just to size your brush?
Hit the left and right bracket keys and voila. Same for brush hardness, just throw in shift+left/right bracket to change the brush hardness.
Just these 2 shortcuts will save you so much time it’s not even funny.
Change brush opacity. Couldn’t be easier, hit the keys on your numerical keyboard. Hit 1 to set the opacity to 10, hit 0, then 5 quickly to set the opacity to 05, hit 0 to reset opacity back to 100%
Again this saves endless amount of time.
Hold down ALT while clicking add new layer and up comes the dialog to name the layer and other options. Why would you want to add the layer, then doubleclick on it just to rename it? Waste of time.
Hold down control while adding a new layer to add the layer below the current layer, why add it first, THEN drag it down?
Want to add a mask that reveals all? Hold down ALT and click add new layer mask.
Want to add a new layer that contains all the current visible layers? Hit control+alt+shift+e
Want to check your r, g, and b channels? Hit control+1/2/3, hit tilde to go back to the RGB composite view, that’s called channel walking btw. If you have alpha channels you can even get to them just by using control and numbers from 4-9. Hey, while we are at it.. want to select the pixels in the channel you just selected with control+number? Just hold down alt+control+number, no more need to even use the channels palette most of the time.
Want to draw a straight line with any brush tool? Click once, hold down shift, then click at the endpoint of the line you want to draw, voila, straight line.
Hit F 2 times, now your canvas is not constrained to the current window, hold down spacebar and drag it anywhere. Hit F a couple times more to get back to normal view.
Ok, lets get out of “I just got photoshop” territory and into some real goodies…
I work in full screen mode allmost all the time and it’s a pain to hit TAB to get your palletes back just to work with layers so here’s a few that will help you out if you work like that.
ALT+Left/Right brackets will select next/previous layers.
Control+Left/Right brackets will move the currently selected layer.
Control+Shift+Left/Right bracket will throw the currently selected layer to the top or the bottom of all layers.
Some selection magic..
Make a selection don’t let of of the mouse, now hold down spacebar and you can move the selection, release space while keeping the mouse button down and you can continue to resize.
Make a selection, now hold down shift and draw another selection intersecting the previous, let go of the mouse and you add to the selection. Hold down ALT to subtract from the selection instead.
Hold down ALT+Shift and you will intersect from the selection, meaning that everything in the selection that you draw over the existing selection will be intersected, try it out and it becomes much clearer to understand. Remember that when adding, substracting or intersecting a selection you can still press space to move the selection you are currently drawing, so you can hold down control+shift+spacebar or control+alt+spacebar. Practice this because it comes in realy handy once you got it down.
