Photoshop

18 Exceptionally Useful Photoshop Shortcuts

| George Coghill

Apple Command Key symbolFrom Digital Photography School (via Lifehacker): a quick list of 18 of the author’s most commonly used Photoshop shortcuts, broken out into three groups: simple, intermediate, and advanced.

Although this is from a photography site, these shortcuts apply to just about any Photoshop user. A quick list of my faves, and a followup of additional shortcuts from myself as well as from the user comments on the tip page. Sure to enhance your productivity.

My faves, which I am trying to embed in muscle memory:

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Annotated Keyboard Graphic With Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

| George Coghill

annotated keyboard for photoshop shortcutsHere’s a pretty handy little reference graphic: an annotated keyboard with Photoshop’s keyboard shortcuts. And even an extended text-based shortcut chart on the bottom!

This makes me think that not only could it use a bit of spicing up in the visual sense, but also that this would be pretty handy for Illustrator users as well… maybe even incorporating Modifier key shortcuts to boot.

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Free Printable Keyboard Shortcut Cards for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop & More

| George Coghill

Computer Arts illustrator shortcuts preview 02A set of free, printable keyboard shortcuts cards for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and more are available for download over at ComputerArts.co.uk.

The set includes keyboard shortcut cards for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator CS, Macromedia Freehand, Cinema 4D and 3D Studio Max. These are CS1 versions, but from what I can gather the shorcuts should be pretty much the same for the newer versions. Not too sure about the Macromedia apps (which are now Adobe apps) as I have never used any of them.

As anyone who has read this blog can tell, I am a huge keyboard shortcut junkie, and you should be one as well. I cannot even begin to emphasize how much knowing these will enhance not only your pleasure on using graphics software (and software in general), but how much of a marked increase in productivity you’ll see.

I cringe in geek pain when I see a fellow Photoshop or Illustrator user laboriously hauling their mouse over to the Tools palette, or even to the menubar for anything but the most arcane of Menu items.

Download. Print. Learn. Kick massive butt.

See also:
• Annotated Keyboard Graphic With Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

• Keyboard Protective Cover With Photoshop Shortcuts

Tip: OS X Window Switching Keyboard Shortcuts for Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign)

| George Coghill

Here are some super handy keyboard shortcuts for switching between open document windows when working within the Adobe Creative Suite applications (Illustrator, Photoshop & InDesign). These are Macintosh-only keyboard shortcuts since I do not have access to a Windows machine. Sure to increase your productivity.

  • Illustrator: Command (Apple) + ~ (that’s the “tilde” key, to the left of the numeral one, otherwise known as “the little squiggly line thing”)
  • InDesign: same as Illustrator
  • Photoshop: Control + Tab

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Photoshop Tip: Resize A Marquee Selection

| George Coghill

Photoshop Transform Selection ScreenshotSo you’ve just made a selection in Photoshop using the Marquee tool, but you didn’t start in the right place and one of the corners isn’t covering part of the area you want selected.

Yeah, you could try to place your cursor oh-so-perfectly right near the area in question and try to drag another rectangular marquee selection (using the Shift key of course to add to an existing selection). But why doesn’t Photoshop just give you interactive resize handles for the selection?

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Tip: Keyboard Shortcut To Fill A Photoshop Layer (Or Selection) With The Background or Foreground Color

| George Coghill

Photoshop tool palette color swatchesEver just want to fill a selection or layer with the background or foreground color in Photoshop? Forget heading all the way over to the palette to choose the Paintbucket tool – just press Command (Apple key)+Delete for the foreground color, or Option+Delete for the background color (Alt+Backspace and Control+Backspace on Windows).

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Wacom Tablet: Scroll Click

| George Coghill

Wacom Intuos3 6X11 Pen Tablet

Wacom has just updated their graphics tablet driver software for Macintosh and the release notes PDF tells us that a new feature has been introduced, “Scroll Click” (my nickname for it). This is an awesome new feature that allows the user to set a pen button to the “scroll click”, and then when pressing that button, you can drag the pen on the tablet to activate scrolling. In addition to this being very cool, it’s a feature that I suggested to the tech & PR departments a few weeks ago, I can’t help but assume this was implemented due to that request. I was initially given a not-so-encouraging response, basically because the Intuos line of tablets has the Touch Strips srcoll/zoom hardware touch-sensitive areas. Of course, their other tablets do not have these.

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Wacom Intuos3 Graphics Tablet Review for Cartoonists & Illustrators

| George Coghill

***Update: See my review of the Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet ***

I have been holding off on writing up a review of the Wacom Intuos3 graphics tablet until I had a chance to work with them for some time and really get a feel for real-world usage, particularly for cartoonists & illustrators. Oddly enough I had a hard time finding an in-depth review specifically geared towards artists that draw. There were some big questions that needed to be answered, most importantly that of how the Wacom tablets worked with Adobe Illustrator.

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