Subtitles of the Movie

Now for those of you that are new to graphic design or new to this suite of applications you need to be aware of keyboard shortcuts - one of my favorite concepts in all of this training series. Keyboard shortcuts are essentially when we use strokes on a keyboard to access certain features of the program much more quickly and easily then if we were to go say through a menu item or to go to a tool or what have you. And under the category of keyboard shortcuts I'd also add mouse shortcuts, another just little tricks here and there that we can use. For example, in Windows I have Photoshop open here. I have this blank background here. And I can just double click and it will launch the open file dialogue box. I'm just going to hit cancel out of that - technically not really a keyboard shortcut but very cool none the less. A short little way to do it rather then going to file open or even using the handy keyboard shortcut Ctrl O. Now again, I mentioned that I'm going to be on Windows for this training series but for you Mac users out there I'm going to be giving you the keyboard shortcuts to use as well. It should be noted that the Ctrl key on the PC is not the equivalent of the Ctrl key on the Mac. The Ctrl key on the Mac is more like a context click key kind of like a right click on a 3 button mouse. However, the Ctrl key on the PC closely resembles the Command key on the Mac - the little key with an apple on it called the command key. So in this segment I basically want to give you a few keyboard shortcuts that are standard pretty much across the board. In almost every single one of theses Adobe applications we'll be covering in this training series these shortcuts are pretty standard. Now if I was going to create a new Photoshop document here I could go to file new and make a new document or I could hit Ctrl and the letter N and in new. So I'm going to hit Ctrl N and you guessed it on the Mac it's going to be Command and N. And here we have the new file dialogue box. I'm going to hit ok to use the default settings. And let me share with you briefly what I consider to be probably the most important keyboard shortcuts. I call these the space bar shortcuts. They help us to find our way around a document and also they all involve the space bar. So the first one is holding the space bar plus the Ctrl key or the Command key on the Mac. You'll notice that we get this little magnifying glass tool. If we click now we'll zoom in. You can see this icon kind of zooming me in as I'm clicking here. If I hold those 2 keys, the Ctrl key and the space bar key and then with my middle finger probably, hold the Alt key also called the Option key on the Mac for the purposes of this training series I'm just going to refer to it as the Alt key because Alt is also written on your keyboard. So if I hold the Alt key down as well, I have the zoom out tool. You see the minus sign. Click and I will zoom out making the image smaller so I can see all of it. Now if I zoom in again by hitting Ctrl and space bar and clicking in my image you'll see that I get these scroll bars. It's saying that I'm not quite seeing all of my image. As a matter of fact I'm going to put a little paint squiggle here so we can follow along. And now we can't see all of our image as you can tell my the scroll bars. So if I hold the space bar key down by itself we get the hand tool. Click and drag with the hand tool we'll kind of pan our image around. You'll see that that faint green little splotch kind of moves around as I click and drag. Now what's really great about these series of short cuts, the space bar shortcuts, is that they only toggle those features in command. Meaning, that it accesses those tools while you hold those keys and as soon as you let go of those keys it goes back to being the initial tool. Right now we have a paintbrush tool selected and if I hold the space bar, I have the hand tool but as soon as I let go of the space bar I'm back to painting. Now imagine if we didn't know those keyboard short cuts - what a hassle it would be to go back to our tools pallet, select the hand tool, move this where we want and go back to the brush tool. That's an inconvenience that we don't want to take the time for. Not only that but it just interrupts the creative flow of things. Now I'm going to zoom out hitting Ctrl space bar and Alt again. By the way, when you are in Photoshop if your going to zoom out you don't really need the Ctrl key or the Command key. You just really need Alt and space but I introduced it by saying add the Alt key because in other applications such as Illustrator and InDesign you need all 3 - the Ctrl key or Command key on the Mac, the Alt key and the space bar down at the same time. Thankfully Photoshop will allow that exception so just go ahead and use those 3 buttons if you are going to zoom out.