Photoshop Shortcut Commands

Adobe Photoshop has been the choice for digital media designers for the past 10 or so years. What it’s able to provide in terms of image manipulation power is second to none. There are alternatives such as coral draw and GIMP but when it comes to mainstream design, you’ll be struggling to find a designer that doesn’t know their way around Adobe Photoshop.

Although the program is quite intuitive, if you’re not using the program day in and day out, you may not know some of the key shortcuts that can be used to make your life much easier when trying to edit your files. I personally have a terrible memory but I spend at least 4 hours a day on Adobe Photoshop creating digital media, so these shortcuts have been drilled into my goldfish mind. Hopefully you’ll be able to start using some of them if you haven’t started already. (Please note: This guide was written based on the Microsoft Windows version of Adobe Photoshop).

CTRL + A – Select All

One of the best things about Adobe Photoshop is that it incorporates some basic shortcuts that uses may already be aware of. In Microsoft Word for example, if you hold CTRL + A then all of the text in the document will be selected. This is the same in Adobe Photoshop. If the user presses CTRL + A, the whole canvas is selected. This is useful if you want to copy the whole contents of the canvas but don’t forget, you’ll probably have to carry out a copy merged to copy all the contents in the selected area.

CTRL + T – Free Transform Layer

Being able to transform a particular layer in Adobe Photoshop is vital in image manipulation. Perhaps one of your layers was a tiny bit too big. Simply hold CTRL + T and this will bring up a box around the layer which can be used to resize the layer. A top tip is to hold the SHIFT key when resizing the layer and it will maintain the aspect ratio of the layer.

CTRL + U – Colourise

Perhaps you want a layer to become a particular colour. If have selected the layer from the layers panel, holding CTRL + U will allow you to pick a particular hue and saturation for a layer. One of the features that could help Adobe Photoshop novices out would be to include a HEX colouring system that would allow the layer to coloured based off a single hex colour.

CTRL + G – Group Layers

There is always a big debate regarding the layout of layers in an Adobe Photoshop file. Depending on your level of laziness, or if you have to compulsively label each label separately, this will have an impact on how detailed your layout panel will be. I personally find that grouping my layers and naming the groups is a good way of keeping a layout organised and editable but it’s all about personal preference. A quick way to group layers is to click on a selected layer, then hold CTRL and select any other layers you want to group and then hold CTRL + G. This neatly puts the layers in a folder for the user and now they can

CTRL + R – Show Rulers

Rulers are great to help you line up boxes and layers to exact areas. To show the ruler, simply hold CTRL + R and then when you are finished lining up your elements, hold CTRL + R again to hide them.

CTRL + J – Duplicate Layer

In a future tutorial, we’re going to discover how to make 3D items in literally seconds but to give you a small insight; it’ll basically be using this command throughout. If you have a layer that you need another version of, hold the CTRL + J keys and an identical layer is created.

SHIFT + DRAW – Maintain Square Selection

One of the subtle abilities of Adobe Photoshop is to make a complicated task appear simple. If you need to draw or select a square on a particular layer, all you have to do is hold SHIFT and draw your selection and it’ll be a perfect sized square.

CTRL + LAYER CLICK – Select Layer

If you need to make a selection of a particular layer, the quickest and easiest way is to hold CTRL and select the appropriate layer from the layer panel. This makes an active selection around the layer.

TAB – Hide Windows

This is one of the handy features that I find myself using more regularly. If you’re editing on a screen that is limited as to the size and percentage of the canvas you can work on then hiding the history and layers windows helps you be able to see more of the canvas. A simple press on the tab button can give you another 200px of vision space which can be vital depending on the percentage shown of the image you’re working on.

CTRL + S – Save

Don’t forget to CTRL + S all of your work! Save everything (that means every revision). One of the drawbacks to Adobe Photoshop is that it sometimes only allows you to roll back 12 steps to the stage you were at this point. And if you’ve ever used the brush tool to edit an area, you know these steps are taken up pretty quickly.

I hope some of these shortcuts will help you become a little bit quicker when using Adobe Photoshop and help you produce some quality 21^st century digital media.