Laurie McCanna's Tip #6
Speed Up Your Work in Photoshop
This article covers how to speed up your work in four different ways:- Memorize some keystrokes for commonly used tasks in Photoshop
- Color your menu items to find them easily
- Use Actions to automate repetitive tasks
- Memorize even more keystrokes to really speed up your tasks
Memorize Some Keystrokes
First, learn some common key strokes. It will only take a few minutes, and I promise you won't regret it. Watch any dedicated Photoshop user, and you'll see that they use the keyboard as often as the mouse or Wacom Tablet for their work. For instance, to create a smaller image from a larger image, I'll select the area I want, then Ctrl+C (copy), Ctrl+N (new file, the exact size of what has been copied), Ctrl+V (paste selected area), Ctrl+E (merge layer down), Ctrl+S (save image).Here are the keystrokes that I use most often. Mac users, subsitute the Command key for the Control key :
| Ctrl+A | Select all |
| Ctrl+C | Copy |
| Ctrl+D | Deselect - removes marquee. |
| Ctrl+E | Merge selected layers. To merge all layers with this keystroke, select all layers. |
| Ctrl+H | Hide/Show selection (also known as marching ants). |
| Ctrl+N | Create New File |
| Ctrl+S | Save |
| Ctrl+U | Adjust Hue/Saturation |
| Ctrl+V | Pastes a copy in the center of a new layer |
| Ctrl+X | Cut (useful for layers as it pastes the item to your computer's clipboard, so you can paste it back in on a new layer using Ctrl+V) |
| Ctrl+Z | Undo - if only real life had a Ctrl+Z! |
| Ctrl - | Zoom out. Be sure to use the - on the keyboard, not the number pad. |
| Ctrl + | Zooms in. Be sure to use the + on the keyboard, not the number pad. |
Speed Up Your Work by Colorizing Your Menus
I just got around to trying this trick out in Photoshop and I wish I'd done it earlier. I've carped about how each update to Photoshop increases the complexity of using Photoshop exponentionally, as users paddle through palettes and muddle through menus in order to find what they're looking for.
By coloring various menu and palette items, your eye will be quickly be drawn to them. Out of a long list of commands, the one you use most frequently can be color coded easily. You can also toggle the visibility of commands. You'll want to be careful with this one because the menu or palette item will be gone if you turn off the visibility.
Changing the color of a menu command in PhotoshopTo get to this nifty trick, Select Window > Workspace > Keyboard Shorcuts & Menus. Click the Menu tab, and browse through the Application Menu Commands to find the commands you want to highlight. When you find the menu command you want to colorize, click the word None to reveal a dropdown of different colors.
This way, please. Watch your step.
Using the Actions Palette
With the Actions Palette, you can record and edit common tasks within Photoshop. You can record a single step action, such as convert to RGB color. You can also record multi-step tasks, and you can insert pauses or ask for input from whoever uses the actions. A mutli-step task might be: straighten a scan, adjust the levels of the scan, crop the image, resize the image and save the image. This can vastly reduce the amount of repetitive work you do. To open the Actions Palette, select Window > Show Actions. This will display the default actions that come with Photoshop.
In this example, I've just created a recorded action to flatten all the layers in an image, and index the image. To create a new action, select New from the flyout menu. You will be prompted with a dialog box that will ask you to enter a name for the Action. The Set is just the name for the folder of actions. You can choose to assign a function key (one of those keys that lives at the top of your keyboard - F1 through F12). You can also assign a color to the action if you'll be viewing your Actions in button mode (more on that to follow)
Then click the Record icon (it's the black dot) at the bottom of the Palette. To stop recording, click the Stop icon again. The Stop icon is the first icon at the bottom of the Actions Palette. You can also edit a list of actions by clicking the arrow next to an Action to reveal the details.
Once you've created your actions, you can view them in Button Mode, which means that the Actions will be available as colored buttons on the palette.
Learning Even More Keystrokes
Here's a list of most of the tools from the toolbar. These tools all have a single letter that you type to access that tool. For tools that are grouped together, they share a keystroke that you would type more than once to access the second or third tool in a group. For instance, I would type m to bring up the Rectangular Marquee Tool, but I would type mm to get to the Elliptical Marquee Tool.| Icon | Keystroke | Description |
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m | Rectangular Marquee Tool |
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m | Elliptical Marquee Tool |
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v | Move Tool |
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l | Lasso Tool |
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l | Polygon Lasso Tool |
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l | Magnetic Lasso Tool |
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w | Quick Selection Tool |
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c | Crop Tool |
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k | Slice Tool |
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k | Slice Select Tool |
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j | Spot Healing Brush Tool |
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j | Healing Brush Tool |
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j | Patch Tool |
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j | Red Eye Tool |
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b | Brush Tool |
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b | Pencil Tool |
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b | Color Replacement Tool |
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s | Clone Tool |
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s | Pattern Stamp Tool |
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y | History Brush Tool |
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y | Art History Brush Tool |
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e | Eraser Tool |
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e | Background Eraser Tool |
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e | Magic Eraser Tool |
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g | Gradient Tool |
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g | Paint Bucket Tool |
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r | Blur Tool |
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r | Sharpen Tool |
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r | Smudge Tool |
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r | Smudge Tool |
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o | Dodge Tool |
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o | Burn Tool |
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o | Sponge Tool |
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p | Pen Tool |
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p | Freeform Pen Tool |
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t | Horizontal Type Tool |
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t | Vertical Type Tool |
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t | Horizontal Type Mask Tool |
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t | Vertical Type Mask Tool |
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a | Path Selection Tool |
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a | Direct Selection Tool |
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u | Rectangle Tool |
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u | Rounded Rectangle Tool |
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u | Ellipse Tool |
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u | Polygon Tool |
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u | Line Tool |
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u | Custom Shape Tool |
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n | Notes Tool |
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n | Audio Annotation Tool |
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i | Eyedropper Tool |
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i | Color Sampler Tool |
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i | Ruler Tool |
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h | Hand Tool |
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z | Zoom Tool |
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d | Reset Colors to Black and White | x | Swap foreground and background colors |