Photoshop Efficiency Tricks
Friday March 3, 2006 by Kevin Kubota
It was 1:04 am and my spouse pressed the remote button to trigger my shock collar for the third time in an attempt to get me out of the office and into bed. “But Honey!” I yelled to her upstairs – which wasn’t a good idea with two little kids sleeping, “I’ve just discovered some cool shortcuts to make working in Photoshop more efficient! Now I won’t have to stay up so late!”
When you begin to work in Photoshop on a regular basis, you realize there are many tools and commands you use quite often. One of the best ways to minimize the time you spend hunting and pecking for tools and buttons, and leave yourself more time for actually working on your images, is to use Photoshop’s built in keyboard shortcuts and actions. I plan to cover actions in another column, but keyboard shortcuts are very powerful and often overlooked by neophyte Photoshoppers.
Almost everything you choose, click, or add has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. That means, for example, instead of going to the toolbar and selecting the HAND tool with your mouse and moving it back over the image to use, you can simply press the SPACE bar and the hand tool instantly appears – ready for action. Pressing “V” on your keyboard activates the MOVE tool, shazaam! Right clicking (or control-clicking for you Mac users without a multi-button mouse) brings up a contextual menu on your image, in your layers, or when certain tools are active – giving you additional options at your fingertip.
The best way to learn shortcuts is to catch yourself whenever you find you are doing something repetitive – even using a certain tool – STOP and re-choose the tool using the keyboard shortcut. Even if you’ve already selected the hand tool from the toolbar the old way – unselect it and reselect it by using the SPACE bar. Why redo it? Because this is how you force yourself to learn the shortcuts. If you tell yourself, “I’ll use the shortcut next time” you’ll forget and slack to the hunt and peck method.
If you want to learn what key activates which tool, simply hold your cursor over the tool you want – don’t click it – and the name of the tool and a letter (V) will appear. This is the key on your keyboard you can type to activate that tool. If you don’t see the text appear, go to Photoshop’s general preferences and select “Show Tool Tips”.
Speaking of right-clicking, here’s the coolest part of my column – lucky for those of you who stuck with me this far! If you don’t have a multi-button wheel mouse, go get one! Period. Mac or Pc, you can use the Microsoft optical Intellimouse from Costco (about $39). You can program any of the buttons and the wheel on the mouse to do shortcuts for you!
Here’s what I do in Photoshop and it saves me a ton of time: Program the left SIDE button to type, “CMD/CTL 0” (this means COMMAND key for Mac users, CTL key for PC users). Which quickly zooms the image to fit all of it on the screen – great for getting an overview of your work. Then, program the right SIDE mouse button to type, “CMD/CTL OPT 0”, which jumps to 100% view – perfect for retouching. Next, program CLICKING the WHEEL BUTTON to type, “B” to activate the BRUSH tool. Finally, program ROLLING THE WHEEL forward to type, “[“ and ROLLING THE WHEEL back to type, “]”. Typing these bracket keys change the size of your brush, so you can now quickly choose the brush tool by clicking the wheel, then simply roll it forward or back to change the brush size on the fly. Try it, you’ll like it! Keep the LEFT click button at default and the RIGHT click as a CTL click if you’re a MAC user. When you use Photoshop a lot, you’ll zoom and use the brush tool all day long, and this is one of my best time saving shortcuts.
Now, will this actually get you to bed earlier, or just give you more time to create?
