Barry Deas

5 Killer Photoshop Shortcuts You Must Learn

There’s no denying that regular use of shortcuts/hotkeys will save you time and improve your workflow. Yet for some unknown reason, people refuse to acknowledge this and some of them are happy to mouse alllll the way over to the Paint Bucket Tool when they could have pressed two keys and saved themselves a couple of seconds. Seconds schmeconds, who cares about saving yourself a few seconds, right? Think how many actions you complete in a single hour of Photoshopping. 100? 1000? It all adds up.

Now I know that most of us designers use shortcuts frequently, but are they the right ones? There are some shortcuts that are literally seconds faster than using your mouse to complete your action. These are the ones that’ll drastically improve your workflow. Luckily, we’re going to cover the 5 that are most likely to save you time and make your design process a lot smoother, and fun.

Auto Select Layer

• Shortcut:

  CTRL + Click

• What’s it do?:

  Automatically selects a layer based on where you click. Instead of having to trawl through hundreds of layers and groups, you can just CTRL + Click on a layer and it’ll go straight to it, saving you a ton of time. This is without a doubt my most used and favorite shortcut

Group Layers

• Shortcut:

  ALT + Shift + Click

• What’s it do?:

  Groups all the layers you select into a single folder. This is immensely handy when you’re organizing your layers and groups. There’s all sorts of different options when you use the modifier keys too

Copy Merged Layers

• Shortcut:

  CTRL + Shift + C

• What’s it do?:

  Makes a copy of the pixels on your canvas, instead of just copying the images on the layer. Essentially it’s like merging all the layers then making a copy, only it does it much faster. This one will definitely improve your workflow

Make Selection From Path

• Shortcut:

  CTRL + Enter

• What’s it do?:

  Creates a selection based on the path you just laid out. A simpe shortcut but it’s still a lot faster than right-clicking and going through a dialog box

Fill Pixels

• Shortcut:

  ALT + Shift + Backspace

• What’s it do?:

  Fills the layer with your foreground color, but instead of filling the entire canvas it only fills the pixels that are currently in use in the layer. You’ve gotta see this one for yourself. You’ll thank yourself for learning when you realize how much time it’s saving you

Do yourself a favor and try out these shortcuts for at least a week. I can almost guarantee you’ll be happy you did when you see how much time you’ve saved.