Photoshop is one of the most popular photo editing and retouching programs in the world. It allows making from small changes in the images to letting the imagination fly. However, it is not easy to fully master a program of this size. For this reason, there are many who usually look for tutorials to do the different jobs they need. However, we can always work faster if we know some of the keyboard shortcuts that Photoshop offers us .
The keyboard shortcut is a key or set of keys that performs a previously defined action . For example, a very simple one, to create a new document in Photoshop we can go to File and then click on New. But this action has its corresponding keyboard shortcut, which is none other than pressing Control + N.
Photoshop has hundreds of keyboard shortcuts. It's almost impossible to know all of them, so let's go through 50 useful keyboard shortcuts to work faster in Photoshop .
Basic shortcuts
Let's start with some basic shortcuts. It is likely that if you use Photoshop you already know them, but it does not hurt to remember them.
| Ctrl + N | Create new document | |
| Ctrl + O | Open document | |
| Ctrl + W | Close current document | |
| Ctrl + "+" | Zoom in on the image | |
| Ctrl + "-" | Zoom out the image | |
| Ctrl + 0 | Fit image to screen size | |
| Ctrl + Z | Undo | |
| Ctrl + Alt + Z | Undo step back | |
| Tabulator | Hide or show the panels (thus leaving the image full screen) | |
| Ctrl + T | Free transformation | |
| Ctrl + R | Show or hide rulers | |
| Ctrl + Tab | Navigate Open Images in Photoshop | |
| Alt + Shift + Ctrl + S | Save for web (widely used if you have a blog) | |
| F2 | Cut | |
| F3 | Copy | |
| F4 | Paste | |
| F12 | return | |
| D and C | Switch between background and default colors |
Tools
Many of the most common Photoshop tools have their own keyboard shortcut. A quick way to open the brush or any other option.
| H | Hand tool (ideal for moving the image when we have applied zoom) | |
| B | Brush tool | |
| V | Pointer Tool | |
| W | Magic wand | |
| M | Rectangular selection frame | |
| C | Cut | |
| AND | Eraser | |
| OR | Rectangle | |
| T | Text | |
| J | Healing brush | |
| G | Paint bucket | |
| P | Pen | |
| S | Cloner buffer | |
| OR | Overexpose | |
| Z | Zoom |
Layers
To work with Photoshop you have to know how to master layers. Their importance means that they have a large number of keyboard shortcuts for handling them. These are some:
| Shift + Ctrl + N | New layer | |
| Shift + Ctrl + Alt + N | New layer without dialog (create a new layer without showing us the dialog to name) | |
| Ctrl + J | New layer via Copy | |
| Shift + Ctrl + J | New layer via Cut | |
| Ctrl + Shift +] | The selected layer moves to the top | |
| Ctrl + Shift + E | Merge visible layers | |
| Ctrl + Alt + A | Select all layers | |
| Ctrl + I | Invert the layer colors | |
| Q | Activate the quick layer | |
| F7 | Show or hide layers window |
Work with images
Photoshop is the leading program for retouching images, so there are many keyboard shortcuts designed for this task. Here are some of the most interesting:
| Ctrl + B | Color balance (opens the dialog for modifying color settings) | |
| Ctrl + U | Hue / Color Saturation | |
| Ctrl + Shift + U | Desaturate color | |
| Ctrl + Alt + I | Resize image | |
| Ctrl + M | Color curve adjustment | |
| Ctrl + L | Adjust color levels | |
| Ctrl + 1 | Expand to 100% |
These are just a small sample of the hundreds of shortcuts that Adobe Photoshop has . If you know all of them, we invite you to take a look at the official Photoshop help page. We have tried to collect those that we think are most important to the daily work of many users. Do you know any basic that we have left? Put it in comments.