Friday Tutorial::Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a sure-fire way to make you life in photo-editing that much easier. I used to think it was this big mystery that only the pros used, but if you can come up with a simple system you can learn them quickly. Try this: After using your mouse three times to do the same step, take a second to look up the shortcut and start using it. One at a time, you will start to memorize your most used shortcuts. Almost every Adobe program has a list of shortcuts that you can look up and even print out. In Lightroom it’s in the Help menu (click on Library module shortcuts while in the library module, Develop module shortcuts while in the Develop module, etc. or use the shortcut command (or control)+/).

In Photoshop it’s in the Edit menu at the very bottom (keyboard shortcuts), and it even goes one step further by allowing you to change and add keyboard shortcuts to suit your work flow and comfort. Sweet!

Here is a quick “how to” on changing/adding shortcuts. It always drove me crazy when it came time to flatten an image and I had to do two or three mouse clicks to get it done. Why wasn’t there just a quick shortcut? Well, I had to make one. So I opened up the Keyboard shortcuts window:

Then I found the menu option that I wanted to change and then entered the new shortcut. For me it was Flatten Image I was looking for, which is under the Layer section. By default there was no shortcut so I added what seemed to make sense to me: command+f. I did this by clicking on the white space in the shortcut column, next to where it says Flatten Image, and pressing the keys as I would when I wanted to use the shortcut.

Easy, right? Very…except that command+f was already being used (Last filter, I think). Well, since I flatten images a lot more frequently than I apply previous filters, I decided to keep my change, and do something different for the Last filter shortcut. Then click on the Save icon and then Okay, and you’re done.

But wait, there’s more. Keyboard shortcuts are saved as .kys files, so you can save your default shortcuts and add entirely new sets of shortcuts for different types of editing. Really, you say? Why, of course! Once you’ve made the changes you want, click on the Create a new set based on the current set of shortcuts icon (to the left of the trash icon), rename it as you’d like and click save.

You can always revert back to the defaults by clicking on Sets and choosing Photoshop defaults. And this way you can have different sets for say portrait work and fine art work. That way, within each set, you can assign the command+f key (for instance) to do something different.

And don’t forget that you can change shortcuts for Tools as well as for Menus. So give your left-mouse-button finger a break and start using a few more shortcuts. You might even save some workflow time in the process.