7 Photoshop efficiency tips

Photoshop is an immense application, packed full of so many features that almost no one will ever discover them all, or how to use them to their full potential. With so many features also comes a bunch of shortcuts and hotkeys, which are often hidden away in documentation, and in my experience, most people only use things recommended by other people, or things they find by accident. So here are the shortcuts and various bits of trickery I use literally every single day in Photoshop, to make life just a little bit less painful. Some may seem so simple that everyone should know THAT one, but thats not the case. If even 10 people find something new here that helps their workflow, then my mission has been accomplished.

1. Quick tool switching

These are obvious, but the tool hotkeys I use all the time are:

(M) Marquee Selection SHIFT+(M) to change marquee type (V) Move tool (T) Type tool (G) Gradient/Bucket Fill tool SHIFT+(G) to switch between Gradients and Bucket Fill (B) Brush tool SHIFT+(B) to change brush type (E) for the Eraser tool.

If you use vector shapes a lot (which I dont), then you probably want to memorise the vector tools hotkeys too.

2. Moving around the canvas

Getting to where you need to be is easier when you hold SPACE, and click and drag. Combined with the Zoom tool (Z) and the ability to zoom back to 100% size with CTRL+ALT+0 (+ALT+0), youll rarely need to use anything else. Apple magic mouse users can also scroll in all directions with a single finger, but if you own one you probably know, as it can be pretty sensitive to accidental touches also.

3. Visual Layer Selection

Im terrible at naming and grouping my layers. It slows me down, and as quite a visual person, the layers palate with its tiny thumbnails often doesnt help me find what I need, in order to select it. So to quickly select a layer, or select multiple layers to move or group, I use visual layer selection. For this to work, you need to select the Move Tool (V), and then up the top, check the Auto Select: box, and then select Layer from the dropdown, and then uncheck the box again. If you dont do this, the behaviour will select groups instead of layers inside groups, which can be frustrating. (you only need to do this step once) With the Move tool selected (V), CTRL+CLICK (+CLICK) on a layer on the stage to select it. Hold down SHIFT as well to select multiple layers, or click and drag to select all layers your drag selection touches. This method does not work for layers with very low opacity. To select layers like this, RIGHT CLICK on them, and the list that appears will show all layers that your cursor is currently hovering over. Its also worth noting that when selecting tiny layers, the single white stroke around the edge of the move cursor is *not* the point that you should be aiming for, instead its the first black pixel on the tip of the arrow. If in doubt, zoom.

4. Quick Duplication
If you ever need to duplicate a layer (or multiple) to move somewhere else on the canvas, simply select the layer using the method described above (though any selection method will work), and hold ALT while clicking and dragging the layer. It will drag out a duplicate, leaving your original where it was. I use this all the time for creating multiple tabs or menu items, paragraphs of text, headings, boxes, pretty much everything. Note: The duplicated layer will appear above the topmost selected layer in your layers palate, so if you like to keep your layers grouped and named nicely, youll have to move and name them manually to keep everything in order. (this is also one of the reasons I dont bother in my initial designs).

5. Quick Colour Selection

The 2 keys that will help you manage your colours a bit faster, are (D) which resets the foreground and background colours to black and white respectively, and (X) which swaps the foreground and background colour positions. Say you wanted to quickly apply a white fill to something, youd simply hit (D), (X) and then apply your fill.

6. Quick (and useful) Fills

The 2 fills I use most often have slightly different behaviours. The first is just a standard area fill. Pressing ALT+BACKSPACE will fill the whole of your layer with your foreground colour. If you have a text layer selected, it will change the text colour, and if you have a marquee selection of some form, it will fill the whole of the selected area (if the layer type allows this, does not work on vector shapes). This is again useful with the quick colour selection hotkeys above. (D), ALT+BACKSPACE will fill your layer with solid black. The second, and slightly more useful fill type, fills the area while maintaining transparency. What this means is say you have a complex clearcut shape, and you wanted to make the whole shape black without messing around with selections or channels, you would press ALT+SHIFT+BACKSPACE, and youd see the shape be

completely filled with your foreground colour, while maintaining the transparency level of each pixel. An example is shown below:

This is an excellent way to retain nice antialiasing on your shapes. It also works with marquee selections, and will fill the non-transparent area within the selection. To be honest I have no idea how to do this using Photoshops menus, as Ive always used hotkeys, but Im sure there is a way (maybe someone could let us know in the comments.

7. Selection from layer

Selecting the opaque area of any particular layer is a useful thing to be able to do quickly. In the layers palate, hold CTRL () and click the thumbnail image of a layer. You should notice that this creates a selection around the edges of that layer, and also preserves the alpha channel of the original layer. The uses of this are too numerous to list, but Im sure youll find many by yourself.

Watercolor Text Painted on a Wet Paper

this effect with different color schemes or underlying papers. Perhaps scrapbooking fans will consider this effect for their hybrid scrapbooking projects. The image below shows the final effect:

Watercolor Text Effect

Open a new 450px by 250px document with white background. Create a new layer and paint it with white. Choose the Horizontal Type Mask Tool and before starting to type, choose the font you want to use. In this case we will be using Brush Script font with a font size of 200px. Click on the blank document and type the word Blue. Visit MyFonts.com for some other cool brush style fonts.

Go to SELECT >> FEATHER and set it to 5px. The feather shouldnt be too large, the font must remain readable, but dont set it too small because the effect wont be noticeable.

Now set Foreground color: #0000CA and Background color: #E300B6. You can use any color you like, but for some reasons, the effect can be quite different according to the colors you choose. When you finish this tutorial, try another colors to see what you get. Go to FILTER >> RENDER >> CLOUDS. After that, go to SELECT >> DESELECT to remove the selection.

After removing the selection (very important!), go to FILTER >> ARTISTIC >> WATERCOLOR and enter the following values: Brush detail: 1 Shadow intensity: 0 Texture: 1. Click OK to apply the filter.

Wet Paper Background

So far the watercolor text effect looks great, but why not make it even better? Copy the paper background image below and paste it into the watercolor text effect document. This texture is part of my High Resolution Paper Backgrounds Collection.

Move the layer below the TYPE layer and name it PAPER. After that, select the TYPE layer and set the Blending mode to Multiply.

So far the image should look like this:

Select the PAPER layer and click on the Add new layer icon on the Layers palette. Name the new layer as BUMP. Select the Paint Brush tool and create a brush tip of Master diameter 90px and Hardness 0.

Paint some thick strokes on the BUMPS layer. In the next step, these strokes will become the bumps in the paper. The checker box pattern is just the layer transparency.

With the BUMPS layer still selected, set the LAYER FILL to 0% and choose Bevel and emboss from the Layer Styles pop up menu. Use the settings shown in the image below.

At this stage, the image should look like the one below:

But the effect is not quite ready. To have a complete illusion of paper relief we will have to add some shadows to "raise" the paper a bit. Set the Background color to white. Go to IMAGE >> CANVAS SIZE and set the width to 500px and the height to 300px. This will add a thick white border all around the image.

The next step is adding a very subtle drop shadow to the paper. Select the PAPER layer and select Drop shadow from the Layer styles popup menu. Use the settings shown in the following image.

Take a look at the image below and you will see that although the light comes from the top left, the shadow can be seen on all four sides, being the right and bottom sides the most noticeable.This is done by setting a shadow size (8 pixels in this case) larger than the shadow displacement or distance (2 pixels in this case). I often use this technique to make the shading more soft.

Believe it or not, we are not still there! There is a last touch of magic. Select the Paint brush tool and create a 90px brush tip like the one mentioned earlier in this tutorial. Set the Foreground color to black. Select the Background layer and make a single click with the brush near the the edge of the paper. Try different positions of the brush tip to create deeper or lighter shadows. Check the image below to see how it works:

Now make some other clicks in different spots until you believe the paper looks the way you want. The image below shows the final result of this tutorial:

Paper folds and creases

This tutorial you have just finished reading, and hopefully managed to get the same results, can be combined with another tutorial I wrote last year: Creating Paper Folds and Creases. Combining both tutorials you can create something like this image:

In this case, I used Color Burn instead of Multiply as the text and drops layer blending. There are so many settings in these two tutorials that you should play with them. Start with following the instructions as strictly as you can. Once you get the same results, you can start playing with the settings to achieve different results.