Sorry this is late, didn’t quite prepare for a busy weekend and I didn’t have any posts ready to go.

This week I’m going to be quickly looking at some of the useful keyboard shortcuts you just have to know if you’re to use Photoshop quickly and efficiently.

This applies to all Photoshop versions as long as it has the function that has a shortcut to it.

Shortcuts are the key to saving time, if you can string more and more together it means less time rooting through menus and more time creating.

Lists are perhaps the best way to represent them all, I’m a Windows user so just change any Ctrl with a Cmd and you’ll have the Mac keyboard shortcuts, easy really. The information in the brackets represents when this shortcut is effective.

The number values I find are more convenient on the Numpad, but work fine on the top row.

View

• Spacebar and hold (all times unless typing) — Allows you to click and pan like the Hand tool
• Ctrl + = (all times) — Zooms into the centre of the screen
• Ctrl + - (all times) — Zooms out of the centre of the screen
• Alt + Scroll wheel (all times) — Zooms in/​out to where the mouse cursor is
• h + Left Click (all times unless typing)  - Fits canvas to screen temporarily, zooms back in when released
• Ctrl + 0 (all times) — Fit canvas to screen
• Ctrl + 1 (all times) — Zooms to 100%
• f (all times unless typing) - Cycles through viewing modes
• Tab (all times unless typing) — Hides all palettes
• Ctrl + 2–5 (all times) — Channel selector 2 — RGB, 3 — Red, 4 — Green, 5 — Blue

Colour Swatch

• x (all times unless typing) — Switches foreground and background colour
• d (all times unless typing) — Resets colours to default black and white
• Alt and hold (with the most tools) — Allows you grab a colour like the Eyedropper tool

Editing

• [ (any tool that has a brush size) — Decreases Brush size
• ] (any tool that has a brush size) — Increases Brush size
• q (all times unless typing) — Edit in Quick Mask mode
• Number 1–0 — Sets the opacity value of your brush/​gradient/​bucket/​eraser if you have that tool selected and the layer opacity if the layer is selected, 1 = 10%, 25 = 25%, 00 = 100%
• Alt + Dragging — Duplicates what you dragging whether it’s a layer style, layer mask or the layer itself

Also

As I remember more I’ll probably add them in, but they are the main ones I can remember that aren’t immediately apparent.

That’s all folks.