There are over a hundred shortcuts in Photoshop. Now rather than in update you with dozens and dozens of shortcuts many of which you wouldn’t use on a regular basis, I have put together a couple of lists. One for mainly for the Control keys and one for the toolbox keys for you to jot down on a poster and stick on the side of your computer. Some of these you already know and some will be new to you but these are worth memorizing because it greatly increases your workflow, improves your workflow and saves you quite a lot of time at the end of the month. Those few seconds here and there times hundreds and hundreds of applications can add up to quite an amount of time. So the first one you probably all know, the Control or Command + Z; Control for the PC or Command for the Mac, undo, redo the last thing you did. I use it quite a bit with non-sharp mask. See what effect it’s having on our photo if I put too much on it, I don’t know. Control or Command + O lets you navigate to the document that you want to open. Control or Command + N start a new document. Control / Command + D deselect; here’s one you may not be familiar with. Control / Command + M or Control / Command + L for levels brings up the two most used adjustment layers. Control or Command + 0 is fit the image on the screen. Control or Command + F for repeat the last filter. So if you have used Gaussian blur or unsharp mask on an image, you have another image that you want to apply the same settings with that filter, you can just use that shortcut rather than going the long way around. And another shortcut took me a long while to get in the habit of using is right clicking or option clicking on the top of the document to access duplicate document image size, very useful shortcut there for you. And another one that I use all the time is filling a layer with a color. So all backspace or option backspace for the layer with the foreground and this is to fill it with background color. Let's just, and of course you can click into these and change the colors. Now in the second part of this tutorial on essential shortcuts, I will be covering the new feature of Photoshop, which is being able to assign your own shortcuts and customizing shortcuts. If you want to see the document in all its glory without any distractions, you hit the tab key and clicking the tab key brings your palettes back. Another little known shortcut timesaving device, whatever you want to call it, is, if I have taken photographs in an area and they are all very similar. So I go to my adjustment layers here curves and put on an S curve or I can now drag this curves adjustment layer to another document rather than going through all of that again, I can just click and drag and it applies it to the next document. You can do that well with the adjustment layers. Another lesser-known shortcut is if you want to drag one photograph into another one and I do use this quite a bit with the painted effects and you want to center it. You are going to hold the mouse down, hold the Shift key down, let me just remove this curves adjustment. So you hold the mouse, hold the Shift, you drag and drop and it centers it in the document. It’s going through here make sure that I got everything. So that’s it for the Control keys and some of these other shortcuts that I use often and moving over to the toolbox. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s the same for the Mac and the PC using the keyboard shortcuts. V for the pointed tool, Z for zoom and another thing with the zoom tool is you can click and hold the mouse down, drag into an area and zoom into a particular area of a photograph. As we see, I don’t list every shortcut that’s available for the tools in here because a lot of them I don’t use that much. A big one for me is the changing the brush size. So B for brush and hitting the brackets key increases the size. Hitting the other brackets key decreases it. You can also do change the softness of the brush by holding the Shift key and the brackets down. So that’s a very hard brush and very soft one. If you want to access the subset of tools, so I press M for my marquee. I don’t want the elliptical marquee, I want the other one so I hold down the Shift and I can toggle between the two. So that’s it for your toolbox and Control shortcuts. In the next tutorial I will be getting into how to customize and create your own shortcuts.
Course: | Adobe Photoshop for Photographers (3rd Edition) |
Author: | Gavin Phillips |
SKU: | 33611 |
ISBN: | 1-932808-56-6 |
Release Date: | 2005-03-31 |
Duration: | 4 hrs / 76 lessons |
Work Files: |
Yes |
Captions: | No |
Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |