Sunday 17 August 2008

Photoshop shortcuts fuck yeah

Now i first started using Photoshop in college, waaaay back in '96, which probably means we were running with version 3.0 (Tiger Mountain) or maybe 4.0 (Big Electric Cat) on the Power Mac 7600, which boasted a whole 16MB of RAM, a 132 Mhz processor and a whopping 1.2GB hard drive! The fucking thing would take five minutes to start up, and we could save multiple Photoshop files onto a single 120MB floppy disk, ahhh, them were the days...

Anyway, i'm getting off the subject here, thing is after all this time i'm still discovering new things about this program that blow me away, so here are a list of my favourite shortcuts that help make my digital world a better place:

  • CMD ALT Z: much better than the simple CMD Z which simply undoes the last action, it allows you to go all they way back through your history panel, which is fantastic for a messy bastard like me.
  • CMD SHIFT Z: partner in crime to the above shortcut, this will let you go forward through the history panel after you have gone back, these two shortcuts are indispensable to me now.
  • SPACE: I must use this button the most when working with Photoshop, it allows me to quickly drag the image to where ever i need it, and it's a much easier button to find on the keyboard than H (Hand Tool) is, when my mate Glynn (aka: Bacon / Darth Bacon / Solid Bacon) saw me flying around the document using this the first time he just about shit himself!
  • F: The first button i hit when starting a new document or loading up an image, you can skip through the various screen modes, i use the third choice "Full screen mode with menu bar" as it lets you define a custom colour for the background workspace (right click on the workspace area and select from the drop down menu that appears).
  • TAB: Fantastic for quickly uncluttering the workspace and viewing your image without all the tool, layer, navigation, history panels in the way.
  • CMD SPACE: Zoom in, need i say more?
  • ALT SPACE: Zoom out, like zoom in, only the opposite.
  • B: My weapon of choice, it's the mighty brush tool, i quickly bring up the brush palette by hitting right click anywhere in the workspace, which is a damn handy.
  • F5: When i quickly need to create a custom brush hitting this button gets that palette up nice and quick, but don't forget, after you have made that perfect custom brush make sure you save it into your custom brush presets for later!
  • NUMBER KEYS: Hitting one of these (or multiples) allows you to quickly change the opacity of your brush, for example 1 = 10%, 2 = 20%, all the way up to 0 = 100% brush opacity.
  • CMD 0: Zooms in or out to display the image within the screen.
Well thats all for now, i may expand this further later, but this pretty much covers it for what i use while digitally painting in Photoshop.

Peace.

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