Recently I’ve been photoshop-ing a fair bit as I’m making posters/website for an upcoming event for a student society. By accident, I found a shortcut that did exactly what I wanted! The elusive shortcut ctrl+alt+shift+e creates a new layer of whatever you see on the screen right now (or ’stamp visible’ in photoshop terminology).
So after the amazing discovery, decided to put up a few photoshop shortcuts that I feel are essential. I’m no photoshop guru, but these are the shortcuts that I probably can’t live without. I’m using Photoshop CS2, but most these shortcuts should probably work with most versions of photoshop. Seems like Adobe likes multi-keyed shortcuts, so organised them into the number of keys on the keyboard you need to press - wonder if there are any more than 4!
Single key shortcuts
- v - changes to ‘move’ mode. So if you have a layer selected, you can now drag it with your mouse or nudge it.
- m - changes to ‘marquee’ mode.
- a - changes to ‘direct selection’ mode. If you have an active vector path, you can now go ‘right click -> make selection’ and then you can fill the selection with colours etc.
- x - switches the foreground/background colours
- d - resets the palette to the default of foreground/background colours to black/white respectively
- [ & ] - decreases & increases (respectively) your brush size
Double key shortcuts
- alt+backspace - fills the layer with foreground colour
- ctrl+backspace - fills the layer with background colour
- ctrl+d - deselects your selection. Handy if you are horrible at selecting stuff like me.
- ctrl+e - merges your current layer with the layer below it
- ctrl+g - groups the layer(s) you have currently selected into a folder
Triple key shortcuts
- ctrl+alt+z - goes back through the history undo-ing the previous actions (find ctrl+z useless as it just undoes the last step)
Quadruple key shortcuts!
- ctrl+alt+shift+s - opens the ’save for web’ dialogue where you can choose to save as jpg, gif, png etc.
- ctrl+alt+shift+e - creates a new layer and puts in that single layer whatever you see on the screen right now
Mouse+keyboard combination
(not exactly a shortcut, but just as useful!)
- shift - when creating a selection, holding down ’shift’ while dragging the selection keeps the proportion. Nice when you need a perfect circle/square, or if you’re dragging in a logo/image
- space - when creating a selection, holding down ’space’ will let you move the location of your selection. Always found it hard to know where to create the selection so it is exactly where I need it to be.
- ctrl - if you ctrl+click on a layer, it will select the outline of the image on that layer.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Ooo, this is useful, but you forgot one of the bestest shortcuts! Pressing ‘tab’ makes everything in the Photoshop window (except for what you’re working on) disappear so that you have nothing blocking your view. ^^
oops, how could I forget that one! and also ‘f’ which changes the view type (screen mode) of the window - works hand-in-hand with the ‘tab’ key.
Works well when you are editing more than one pic: ‘tab’ to remove stuff on the screen, ‘f’ to flip to the standard view, select the pic you want and then ‘f’ again to full-screen it
lol @ the tabs =)
i reckon its better if you just have a bigger screen! Then u wont need to tab at all!
Great write-up here. I always find it interesting to see different people’s favorite shortcuts. It just goes to show you that we all work differently.
Ha ha ha… the “elusive” Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E is one of my favorite shortcuts. I don’t even know if it’s available in the menus. I use it for creating a new layer that I can sharpen — this way I don’t lose any of my edits below.
hi Brian
Indeed it does seem like depending on what you do with photoshop, you’ll have a different set of shortcuts ingrained in you - I’ve picked up a couple since discovering the wonders of vectors!
Thanks for the nice words
Yep, the elusive shortcut comes in very handy when you need to edit something, but don’t want to exactly duplicate the many many layers that make up the image!