Random Doodles

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These Photoshop tips come from some Photoshop related books, tips on the web, and also my own experience. Note: keyboard shortcuts, menu items, and preferences may vary depending on a version of Photoshop you own.

Pixel Graphics Specific

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts

Open document. To open a document in Photoshop, double-click on the gray Photoshop window background. This brings up Open document dialog.

Quick layer copy. To quickly copy a layer, press Ctrl + J.

Quick layer merge. To merge the top layer to the one right under it, press Ctrl + E. To merge all visible layers, press Shift + Ctrl + E.

Select layer. Do you know that you can select the layer by Ctrl + click on a layer in a layers palette? This will make a selection of everything on that layer. Hold your Shift button and do Ctrl + click on another layer to select multiple layers. The selected layer is added to the previous selection.

Move that layer. To move a layer when the Move tool is not selected, just hold down the Ctrl key and drag. To move one part of a layer, use the select tool, box the area you want, and drag. To move the layer one pixel at a time, select the Move tool and use arrow keys of the keyboard. To move the layer 10 pixels at a time, press and hold Shift key and use arrow keys.

Delete layer with one click. To quickly delete a layer, make sure the layer is selected in the Layers palette, hold the Alt key and click on the Trash icon at the bottom of the palette.

Put that layer underneath. By default a new layer gets created above your current layer. Hold the Ctlr key and click the New Layer icon in Layers Palette and the new layer will appear below the current one.

Quickly hide the layers. To quickly hide/unhide all the layers except one, hold the Alt key and click on the Eye icon of that layer in Layers Palette.

Create a merge layer. Want to create a new layer which is a merged copy of all the existing layers? Press Ctrl + J to create a new layer. Press and hold the Alt key. Go down to the Layers menu and select Merge Visible.

Choosing colors quickly. Press "I" to bring up the Eyedropper Tool, then click on a color in your image to make that color the foreground color. Press the Alt key and click to make the color the background color instead. You can also press the "D" key to reset the foreground and background colors to the default (black and white), and the "X" key to swap the foreground and background colors.

Helping hand. If you're zoomed in on an image, using the scroll bars can be incredibly frustrating. Instead, use the Hand tool, but to save time, access it by simply pressing and holding the Spacebar. It temporarily switches you to the Hand.

Eyedropper on demand. When using Brush, Pencil and a couple of other Tools, press and hold the Alt key to temporarily switch to the Eyedropper tool.

Hide/Show palettes. Pressing Shift + Tab hides/shows all the palettes on the screen. Pressing Tab hides/shows palettes and a Toolbox.

Fill shortcuts. To fill a layer with foreground color, press Alt + Backspace. To fill just an object on a layer, press Shift + Alt + Backspace. To fill with a background color, press Ctrl + Backspace. To fill the layer with black, press the letter "D", then Alt + Backspace. To fill the layer with white, press the letter "D", then the letter "X", then press Alt + Backspace.

Don't close, Revert. One command I find sometimes useful is Revert (File menu). If you screwed up the image and want to restore previously saved status, you don't have to close without saving and then open it again. Just hit Revert.

Magic cleanup. To bring your palettes back to the way they should be, select Window / Workplace / Reset Palette Locations, and your room is clean again! Well, maybe not your room, but your screen is :).

Crop by selection. This one was driving me nuts for a while. I couldn't find the way to crop the image based on selection. The answer is simple: make a selection and then instead of selecting a Crop tool, select Crop from Image menu.

Smaller file size. Need to shrink the files size? Use transparency. The transparent areas are virtually ignored when determining file size.

Brush replaced with cursor. Has it ever happened to you? Your brush tool displays a little crosshair cursor. Check your Caps Lock key, most probably you turned it on by accident. Turn the Caps Lock off and your brush will be back to normal.

Smaller PSD file size. Select Edit menu / Preferences / File Handling / in File Compatibility section for Maximize PSD File Compatibility, change "Ask" to "Never".

Out of memory? Try decreasing a number of history states. Edit menu / Preferences / General / History States. Also try purging something from memory: Edit menu / Purge.

Copy layer to the spot. To make a copy of your current layer and have it appear in the exact same location in another open document, right-click on the layer in the Layers palette and choose Duplicate. When the dialog appears, choose the Destination from the Document pop-up menu. You can also make a selection in the second document to indicate where to place the copy. Then do regular copy and paste from the first document to the second and the layer will be placed in the middle of the selected area.

Loading forever. If Photoshop takes forever to load, clean up the plug-ins: brushes, styles, patterns, shapes and even fonts. The more you have, the longer it takes to load.

Colors don't match. Here is something that was a real pain until I found a solution. I noticed when saving graphics for web that the GIF file on a webpage and the same file opened in Photoshop did not match in color! The solution was simple, to change the color settings of my screen. For some reason mine was not set to the highest colors. When I changed that, the two GIF files matched perfectly!

Pink grays. Here is another one that happened to me and a friend of mine. The grayscale in Photoshop all of a sadden started to look pinkish! Took me a while to find the solution but here it is: run Adobe Gamma to create a new profile for your monitor (can be found in Control Panel of Windows). If you don't know how to adjust it, just accept the defaults and save the profile at the end. That fixed the problem.

Drag to another window. Starting from Photoshop 6 you can drag layers, selections, etc. from one open document to another.

Want a larger canvas? Crop it. Skip the Canvas Size dialog and use the Crop tool. Just pull out the bottom right corner of your image window to reveal the gray canvas area, then take the Crop tool and draw a cropping border that includes the entire image area. Then click and drag any of the cropping border's control handles out into that gray canvas area. Hit Enter when finished.

Get back your last selection. Even after you've made some changes to the image, you can choose Reselect from the Select menu. It will load the last selection you had.

Get rid of 01. If you accidentally clicked on a Slice tool, you get the number 01 in the top-left corner of your image. Go under View / Show and uncheck Slices.