Mastering Photoshop: Unknown Tricks
and Time-Savers
Thomas Giannattasio
We all have shortcuts that are essential to our daily workflow. A majority of
them are staples such as Copy (Command + C) and Paste (Command + V),
but occasionally we stumble upon a shortcut we wish we had learned years
ago. Suddenly, this simple shortcut has streamlined our process and shaved
quite a bit of time off our day. Collected here are some lesser known but
extremely useful shortcuts. Many of these are not documented in the
“Keyboard Shortcuts” menu, and some of them don’t even have equivalent
menu options.
Please note that all of the shortcuts listed below assume that you are using
Photoshop on Mac OS X. They will work on the Windows platform by
converting as follows: Command → Control and Option → Alt.
Layers
Selection
Sifting through nests of layer sets to find the layer you need quickly
becomes tiresome. Luckily, there are a number of ways to select layers more
intuitively. Using the Move tool (V), you can Command + click on the canvas
to select the uppermost layer with pixel data located directly below the
mouse. If your layers are grouped within layer sets, this action may have
selected the entire folder. You can change this behavior to select the actual
layer by using Auto-select drop-down in the Move tool’s property bar.