10 Really Useful PHOTOSHOP Keyboard SHORTCUTS You Don’t Know (Probably) – Photoshop Tutorial
In this tutorial, you will learn ten handy Photoshop keyboard shortcuts that you probably don’t know.
Table of contents
1 – Restore The Last Active Selection
You can remove a selection by pressing Ctrl D (Windows) or Command D (macOS).
But did you know you could restore the last active selection by pressing Ctrl Shift D (Windows) or Command Shift D (macOS)?
2 – Lock Transparent Pixels
Press the Forward Slash key, the same key as the question mark key, to enable the Lock Transparent Pixels, allowing you to only paint on opaque pixels and not transparent pixels.
3 – Cross-Hair Cursor on Painting Tools
If you lose the paintbrush preview and only see the crosshair, press the Caps Lock key to bring back the preview.
The Caps Lock key toggles between the Brush Tool preview and the crosshair.
4 – Birds Eye View (Fit To Screen)
If you cannot see all the transformation handles when transforming a layer, press Ctrl 0 (Windows) or Command 0 (macOS) to zoom out to the bird’s eye view. Allowing you to see all eight transformation handles
Alternatively, by pressing Ctrl 1 (Windows) or Command 1 (macOS), Photoshop zooms to 100%.
5 – Toggle Canvas Color
You can press Spacebar F to toggle the canvas color. To toggle back to the previous canvas color, simply press Spacebar F until you see the original color.
6 – Feather Selection
When you have a selection active, press Shift F6 to enter the Feather Selection dialog box. By feathering the selection, you will blur the edges.
7 – Spring Loaded Tools
To temporarily switch to any tool without deactivating the currently active tool, press-and-hold the keyboard shortcut for the tool you want to activate. When you release the key, Photoshop will return to the previous tool.
8 – Repeat Last Transformation
Photoshop allows you to repeat the last transformation you made.
Press Ctrl T (Windows) or Command T (mac OS) to transform a layer. Then drag the center Reference Point (pivot point) of the small circle down to the center of the larger circle.
From Toolbar, set the Rotation Angle to 20° and press Enter (Windows) or Return (macOS).
Next, press Ctrl Alt Shift T (Windows) or Command Option Shift T (macOS) repeatedly, and Photoshop will repeat the last transformation and duplicate the layer.
In other words, Photoshop will rotate a copy of the circle 20 degrees from the center of the larger circle.
9 – Cancel Any Dialog Box or Tool
If you want to cancel out of any dialog box, workspace, or tool, press the Esc key.
Bonus 1 – Turn Off Hyphenation in Photoshop
When placing a body of text in Photoshop, some of the words will have hyphens at the end of each line. To easily remove the hyphens, press Ctrl Alt Shift H (Windows) or Command Option Shift H (macOS).
Alternatively, to remove hyphens, you can also go to the Paragraph panel, right-click and select Hyphenation. The Hyphenation dialogue box appears, and you can uncheck the Hyphenation checkbox.
Bonus 2 – Hide All Other Visible Layers
Alt-Click | Option-click on the visibility icon
To quickly hide layers except for the selected layer, press Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS) and click on the eye icon.
To re-activate the other layers, simply select the active layer and repeat the previous keyboard shortcut.
Bonus 3 – Revert
F12
If you made a mistake in the document you’re working on, press the F12 key to bring it back to the last save point.
