Simple Photoshop shortcuts

I first realised the beauty of shortcuts when I was up against looming deadlines at university. I figured that shortcuts could save me time and hey, I may even hit a deadline or two.

Sure enough, shortcuts became my new best friend, and ever since I’ve made an effort to seek out and learn software shortcuts.

So, here’s some Photoshop shortcuts, simple if you know them, but if you don’t, they could seriously ease your workflow.

Using the foreground and background colours

• Change colour of objects in layer to foreground colour by selecting the layer you want to change and hit alt + backspace
• Conversely, you can change the colour of an object to the background colour by pressing apple + backspace
• Swap the background and foreground colour: ‘x’
• Select the eye dropper tool to change the foreground colour: ‘i’
• Change the foreground and background colour back to the default selection (normally black and white): ‘d’

Discovering the above saved me loads of time over the years. Especially the first two; they work far better than simply using the paint bucket, which pixelates the edges of an object.

Marquees

Select the marquee tool (‘m’), or lasso tool (‘l’), and create a selection on your canvas.

• To invert a marquee selection: apple + ‘i’
• Delete the selection: apple + ‘d’

OK, hope that helps.

Hopefully, this will be the first of many!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Photoshop, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.