21 Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts to Help You Edit Like a Pro

21 Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts that are essential to know. Edit like your photos like a pro with these 21 Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts.

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

Hello, everybody. My name is Charles Cabrera. And in this Photoshop tutorial, I’m going to share 21 keyboard shortcuts to help you speed up your workflow in Photoshop. So some of the most useful keyboard shortcuts have to do with zoom in. We want to get into those details, into the image and work very closely.

So to start off, if you click Z, that will give you the zoom tool. And one thing you could do is you could just click and it will zoom in. If I put my magnifying glass right over her earring and click, it zooms in mainly on that point, if I want to zoom back out. I just press option on Mac Alt on PC and my magnifying glass turns to a minus.

And I click and I’m zooming out again if you want to zoom in the whole image, just press command on Mac and control on windows and the plus sign, and you’re zooming in the whole image. And if you want to zoom out the whole image, it is command minus on Mac and control minus on windows.

You know, I’m zooming out if I’m zoomed in on an image and I want to pan around. If I hold down the spacebar, my cursor turns into a hand. And I can just click and drag around the image so I can take care of all the fine details if I’m working on retouching. You know, if I want to put the image to screen, it’s command zero on Mac and control zero on windows in there, I’ve put the image to screen. So those are big help if you’re trying to get any close to those details.

So another tool that we use a lot in Photoshop is the brush tool. And with that, there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts that will help our workflow go more smoothly. So B for the brush tool. And up here at the top is one of the ways that you can get to all the settings for your brush tool. All the settings for brushes, all the different brushes. You can select your brush size, your brush hardness, but we don’t need to go through all that. By the way, you can get to all your brush settings by right. Clicking while in while using the brush tool.

And there is another way to get to it in order to increase your brush size. You can use the right and left brackets. So I can paint I can use my left bracket to make my brush smaller. Also, you can use the parentheses, which is right above the bracket. And you can use that, can you? If I hit that and draw. So that is a softer brush than above. I hit that again, and I can make it harder by using the right parentheses. So same keyboard shortcuts on Mac and PC used the right and left brackets to make your brush larger and smaller and the right in left parentheses to make your brush either softer or harder.

So there’s another way to control your brush size in the brush hardness on Mac, its control option on PC. Its control alt right, click and drag. So I’m on Mac. So control + option. And if I click and drag, here’s my brush size. Getting smaller and larger by drag up and down. My brush is getting softer in this. Getting harder.

So that’s another way to control your brush size and hardness. And this one’s a little bit more graphical or shows you before you actually start drawing. And a little tip when you’re using your brush. If you want to draw a straight line, you can dab it right there. Hold down shift and Photoshop will draw a straight line using your brush. You can do that with other tools to make, for instance, the Pen tool. You can hold down shift. Mostly tools that are drawing tools will allow you to use the shift key to help you draw straight or paint straight.

And there’s really useful keyboard shortcut when you’re using the brush and you want to sample colors. So be for the brush to hold down option or alt. And my brush tool turns into an eyedropper. So I could sample here in this image with the color on her lips. But what if I want to sample and paint maybe some eyeshadow? I can sample this from a lot of different places. If I had a library of colors that I wanted to choose from or I can sample from outside of Photoshop. So again, if I hold option or alt and click and don’t let up, go outside of Photoshop. And you can see the foreground color over there on the right is just change into all these different colors out here. I’m sampling everything outside of Photoshop so I can sample, say, this eyeshadow right here. Come back into my image. I’m going to paint a little bit of this up here.

Obviously, that’s too much, you know, just say for illustration, I painted all the sand and it’s way too much, way too high, a very helpful keyboard shortcut that I just discoved. If I hold down the tilde key and I brush, I’m erasing. All this area in here, it’s better than going over to the eraser tool and I could take down my opacity even more. But you get the idea. So that’s another cool keyboard shortcut for the brush tool.

So when we were working on our images and we just opened up an image, it is really good idea to duplicate the background layer or duplicate first layer that’s here like in this photo. So just to duplicate this layer via copy, it’s command on Mac, control on windows.

And so we duplicated the base layer or the background layer just to be safe. We always have the background layer or the bottom layer to fall back on in case we’ve made some mistakes or we need to get some more information from it . But then as we’re working in Photoshop, we may need to make working layers in a lot of times their blank layers.

So to create a new blank layer on the Mac. It’s shift command in on back on windows that shift control in. So shift command in. And this method brings up the new layer dialog box, which you can name a layer and you can use all these other parameters. Like you could feel the layer. You can use the different blending modes and have things kind of set up where you are already as you create a new layer.

If you don’t want all that and you just want a blank layer on a mac, it’s shift command alt in on windows, it’s shift control in. So a Mac shift command althin. And there is my new layer. And now I can work on that layer. I can paint on it, fill it with another color. So if I want to do something with this layer, if I want to make some color adjustments and brightness adjustments, I can use the camera raw filter. If you’re not familiar with the camera filter, I have a video that I will link up in the card and darran description . And you can learn all about camera. It’s just like making adjustments in Lightroom.

So a Mac, it’s ship command on Windows. It’s shift control. A, if you’re going to use any of the filters. And in this case, the camera filter, it needs to be on a layer that is visible like this layer right here. So again, on Mac Chif command a. And here we are in the camera dialog box, and you can make changes to the exposure contrast highlights, any little touch up you need to make here in Photoshop. And then you say, OK, yeah.

A lot of times when we’re working on image, we want to desaturate the image to get a better look at the image, maybe without color. And so that shortcut is command shift view on Mac, on windows. That’s control shift, command shift you. And that image is desaturated. I say this is handy for you to see.

Sometimes looking at something between black and white or near black and white will help you with adjusting or blending images into scenes. We can undo this desaturate layer by command Z on Mac and control, Z on windows. So we undo and if we want to revert back to desaturate again or redo a change, we had to shift to those modifiers. So it’s shift command Z almak and shift control Z on PC. So shift command Z puts us back into what we had before, command Z to undo that. So let’s make a selection.

We come up here and we can either use the rectangular marquee or the elliptical marquee, let’s use the elliptical marquee, and we’re going to make a selection around this guy. We hold down the shift. You can move your selection around. And if I don’t want that selection anymore, I can get rid of that selection by Kamandi on Mac and control the on windows. So my selection is gone. If I wanted to, I could have saved that selection somewhere. But if I didn’t want to bring back the last selection,

Kerry select by hitting command shift on Mac and control ship Deong Windows and Shift RD. And there is my selection. It is back again. So I want to fill in this shape right here, but I don’t want to fill in around the dog. So I’m going to come up here to select and say inv.. And so I want to feel that Shapin, I’m going to hit shift after five and it’s shift at five on Windows two. So springs up the field dialog box. I can fill the contents of that with the foreground color, background color or any of these use any of these modes here. And I’m going to say,

OK. And of course, I can do other things with this. I can drop the opacity and. Work on this, but you get the idea. It’s still in a shape for a that selection temporarily, I can hit command or control h he goes away. Command and control brings it back. Command and control d to deselect another useful keyboard shortcut by create a blank layer. I’m on a mac, so I want to create a new blank layer and I don’t wanna see that dialog.

So it’s QIf command old hen. There’s my new layer. I want to come over here to the color picker. Click on that and I want to sample this color in here in the leaves and say, OK, it’s now my foreground color was chosen.

A lot of times what you want to do is you want to fill a layer with a color. I’m going to just choose another color here, too. So there’s something in the foreground and background colors over here and color picker. So now if I want to fill this layer here with a color, either my background color or foreground color on Mac, elderly will fill with your foreground color or command, delete or fill with your background color on windows. Alt delete for foreground color or control, delete for background color.

So I’m unimac so I’ll delete just filled my layer, my blank layer with the foreground color and now I can come in and I can change my blend mode to soft light and I can bring down my path here a little bit. So that added some different coloring to the image headers before near see after kind of made everybody more like an autumn color in there. And the final keyboard shortcut, if I want to save as like maybe I want to say this as a Photoshop format or a to format, its command shift s on Mac or control shift s on windows.

So command shift s. And here’s my save as dialog box. And down here I can select different formats. This happens to default to Photoshop and I can say save. If this video was helpful, give it a like, and don’t forget to subscribe. Check out my other videos on using shortcuts with free transform and Photoshop layers. And remember, it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

See the previous blog article here 👉 Gradient Map vs Gradient fill – What is the Difference? 2021

Check out my photography website here 👉 https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com