5 Tips for Photoshop Efficiency

1. Learn to use keyboard shortcuts for accessing tools

Move your mouse cursor over to the toolbox, scan the toolbox for the tool you want to use, click on it, move back to your canvas. Is this what you do to change tools in Photoshop? Switching tools by going back to the toolbox and selecting your new tool each time takes up precious seconds that add up to minutes and hours over longer projects . Becoming familiar with Photoshop’s keyboard shortcuts for accessing tools shaves off that time and keeps your cursor within the canvas area so that you don’t have to figure out where you were before you switched tools.

Keyboard shortcuts for the tools are displayed in a tooltip along with the name of the tool when you hover over the tool. In the diagram below, I’ve hovered over the Move tool. The keyboard short cut shows up in parentheses – in this case, if you’re in Photoshop and simply hit “v” on your keyboard, you’ll automatically switch to the Move tool.

Some tools have flyout menu options for selecting from similar tools. Often, these tools share the same shortcut. In the example below, you can see that the Brush tool, Pencil tool, and Color Replacement tool share “b” as the keyboard shortcut. Simply hitting “b” on your keyboard will switch to whichever tool was previously selected (in this case, the Brush tool). To switch to the Pencil or Color Replacement tools, you’ll have to type Shift-B to cycle through the other tools.

The easiest way to begin learning keyboard shortcuts is to focus on a couple of the tools that you use most often and practice using the keyboard shortcuts for them. As you commit them to memory and instinct, you can add on other tool shortcuts as you go! Here are the ones that I personally use most often:

• M – Marquee tools
• V – Move tool
• C – Crop tool
• B – Brush, Pencil tools
• U – Vector shape tools (rectangle, ellipse, etc.)
• P – Pen tools
• A – Direct Selection and Path Selection tools
• D – Changes the foreground color to black and the background color to white
• X – Switches the foreground and background colors
• Q – Changes between Quick Mask and Standard modes