5 Tips for Photoshop Efficiency

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.

• 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

Photoshop is chock full of other keyboard shortcuts for commands. You’re probably already familiar with some of the basics – Ctrl-S to save, Ctrl-O to open a file, Ctrl-C to copy, Ctrl-C to Paste – which are common to other types of software. Many of these shortcuts can be found listed next to the command when you click an option from the top menu:

• Holding the Shift key generally constrains movements to straight horizontal, vertical, or 45-degree angles. For example, if you’re using the Move tool to move a layer, holding the Shift key will allow you to move it perfectly horizontally (or vertically, or at a 45-degree angle) so that you don’t have to guesstimate your placement.
• The Alt key will often allow you to copy things, depending on the context. When you have the Move tool selected, holding the Alt key and then using the Move tool will allow you to copy the selected layer to a new layer. Or, if you’re working in the Layers palette, holding the Alt key down, clicking on a layer, and dragging it to another spot in the Layers palette will create a copy of that layer. The same thing works with the Path Selection tool when you’re working with paths.
• Holding the Ctrl key and then clicking on a thumbnail in the Layers palette makes a selection based on the pixels in that layer.
• Ctrl-D will clear all selections, such as selections you’ve made with the Marquee or Lasso tools.
• Holding the space bar temporarily switches you to the Hand tool so that you can easily move your canvas around.
• Change the layer opacity by simply typing in a number.

There are also more obscure keyboard shortcuts that you may or may not find useful. For example, here is a very small sampling of commands that you can use just for navigating around the Layers palette:

• Alt-[ and Alt-] allow you to select different layers in the Layers palette by moving up and down the layers
• Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] allow you to move the selected layer up and down the Layers palette, thus changing the layer order
• Shift-Ctrl-[ and Shift-Ctrl-] move the selected layer to the very bottom or the very top of the layer order, respectively.
• Holding Shift-Alt and then using the [ or ] keys allow you to select multiple adjacent layers.

It’s pretty fun to try finding these hidden shortcuts by holding the Shift, Ctrl, and Alt keys while clicking away at the screen. You can also scour blogs and web sites for “photoshop shortcuts” or “photoshop keyboard commands” to find more. One resource you might find helpful are the PDFs at http://morris-photographics.com/photoshop/shortcuts/. However, even these extensive PDFs don’t include tricks like double-clicking in the grey Photoshop work area to bring up the “Open” dialog box if for some reason you’re not fond of the Ctrl-O keyboard shortcut! There is a lot to discover in Photoshop; while you may not find some of the “shortcuts” to be worth retaining in your memory, you’ll inevitably find some that you will use every time you open Photoshop.

If you find yourself doing a task in Photoshop that follows the exact same steps over and over again, you may find it helpful to create a Photoshop action to automate those steps. A common example is if you have a bunch of photos that you’re resizing from high resolution to web-ready formats. Let’s say that your boring, repetitive steps consist of:

1. Opening the photo.
2. Going to File > Image Size and entering in a new width or height, then clicking OK.
3. Saving the photo for the web in a different folder.
4. Closing the photo without saving.

Instead of going stir-crazy by doing this for all of your 257 photos, let Photoshop do the work by creating an Action! Here are the basic steps for making your own custom Action:

1. Open the Actions palette by going to Window > Actions.
2. Click the “Create new action” icon in the bottom of the Actions palette.
   

   

3. Name your action – for example, “Resizing photos.”
4. Notice that the recording button is immediately active, so any commands that you do in Photoshop will be recorded. If you’re not ready to record, hit the Stop button. When you’re ready, click the Record button to begin recording again.
   

   

5. I would start with the photo already open before recording (you’ll see why later on). Then, you can proceed with your normal steps and perform your tasks on the photo, including saving the photo for web and closing the photo without saving. As you perform your tasks, you’ll see a list of Photoshop commands building under the Actions palette. When you’re done, hit the Stop button.
   



6. For this particular example, however, I’m going to deviate slightly from what I would normally do. Let’s say you have a mixture of landscape and portrait photos. When resizing the image, you would pick the larger dimension and change that size. Creating an action this way, however, would force you to make two separate actions – one for portrait photos, one for landscape photos. Luckily, Photoshop has a built-in command for “fitting” the resized photo into a certain area. So when recording my action, instead of going to Image > Image Size, I’ll go to File > Automate > Fit Image and type the width and height that I want the image to be resized within.
   



So, my Action would really look more like this, with the Fit Image instead of Image Size command:

With your action complete, let’s test the action. Open up another photo, click on the name of the action in the Actions palette, and hit the Play button. Photoshop will go through the steps of your action. Check to make sure that the photo was resized and saved for web properly.

If all looks well, you’re ready to batch and automate! Go to File > Automate > Batch. Most likely your new action will already be selected, but if not, select it from the dropdown list. Change the Source to Folder and click the Choose button to set the folder to your collection of high-res photos that need to be resized. Also set the Destination to Folder and set this location to where you want the web-ready photos to be saved. Finally, you can set the other options for renaming the saved file or overriding commands as necessary. One important option to set is to change the Errors dropdown to Log Errors to File, click the Save As button, and select the filename and location for your error log file – this way, if Photoshop runs into a problem, it will log the issue and keep going instead of stopping the process completely.

“Non-destructive editing techniques” describe ways to modify and adjust layers without actually changing the pixel content of the layer. This is a roundabout way to save time in Photoshop – you don’t actually save time on the front end, but you save lots of time and trouble on the back end if you need to go back and make new edits!

Let me give you an example of the difference between “destructive” and non-destructive editing. One common modification for pumping up the contrast on a photo is to use the Image > Levels command and dragging the outer sliders towards the center:

• Use adjustment layers for photo-type adjustments. Most of the adjustment-type changes you would make to an image layer can be done using adjustment layers for non-destructive editing, as I’ve shown in the Levels example above.
• Use vector shapes with layer style effects. Using the marquee tool to create a rectangle selection, filling it with the paint bucket tool, and adding a gradient using the gradient tool, results in a pixel- or raster-based layer where you’d pretty much have to recreate the layer if you wanted to make significant shape or color changes. In contrast, creating a vector rectangle and applying a gradient layer effect allows you to change the shape of the rectangle or change the gradient effect at any point very easily.
• Use layer masks to hide portions of layers. Using the eraser tool will permanently remove information from a layer. Instead, add a layer mask and use it to hide the parts of the layer that you don’t want to show. You can then always go back and edit the layer mask to hide or show more of the original picture or remove the layer mask altogether.

When you’re working with files that have multiple layers, there’s nothing more frustrating than going back to it later and trying to figure out if that small bullet icon is on Layer 1, Layer 15, or Layer 36. Invest some time in the front end to keep your Photoshop documents organized so that you can save time later on when you open the document for editing. And if you pass your file on to someone else for editing, they’ll thank you profusely as well! Here are the two main ways that you can get organized in Photoshop:

• Name your layers descriptively. Double-click the name of the layer to rename it from “Layer 3” to something more helpful, such as “left column background.”
• Group layers together. Photoshop allows you to group layers together into “folders.” If you’re making a web site comp, you may find it helpful to group together the layers that hold objects related to the top header area, for example. You can also name the groups descriptively. You can even group groups together into subfolders. Click the folder icon in the bottom of the Layers palette to create a new group. (And a keyboard shortcut: Select your layers first, hold Shift, then click the folder icon. This will automatically create a new group with those selected layers so that you don’t have to drag them into the folder later.)