PHOTOGRAPHY HOBBYIST

Selecting Colors From An Image Quickly Press I to activate the Eyedropper Tool and then click on any color in your image to turn that color into the foreground color. Press the ALT Key and click on any color in your image to turn that color into the background color.

Change Brush Tip Sizes Quickly With any brush selected you can press the Right Bracket Key “]” to increase the size of the brush tip, or Press the Left Bracket Key “[” to decrease the size of the brush tip.

The Move Tool & The Arrow Keys Get in the habit of calling up the Move Tool with the keyboard shortcut, which is the letter V. Also, once the Move Tool is active you can use your Keyboard Arrow Keys to nudge a layer or selection in 1 pixel increments. To speed things up, Press Shift along with an arrow key to nudge in 10 pixel increments.

Hide Your Palettes To hid all your palettes press the tab key once. You can press the Tab key again to bring them back. To hide all your palettes except the toolbar press Shift+Tab.

Zooming In & Zooming Out To use the zoom tool press CTRL and the plus sign “+” (Mac: Command and the “+” sign). To zoom out press CTRL and the minus sign “-” (Mac: Command and the “-”sign).

Navigating In Magnified Images If you’ve zoomed in on a large image and have lost your bearings you can jump quickly to specific views using these shortcuts: Press the Home Key to set the view to the top left hand corner of your image. Press the End Key to set the view to the bottom right hand corner of your image. Press the Page Down Key to move the view one full screen down. Press Command+Page Down (PC: Control+Page Down) to move the view one full screen to the right. Press Command+Page Up (PC: Control+Page Up) to move the view one full screen to the left.

Selecting Just the Pixels in a Layer One easy way to highlight an object that is contained on a transparent layer is to press the Control Key (Mac: Command key) and then click on the layer that contains the object in the Layers Palette. Doing it this way ensures that only the visible pixels will be highlighted.

Tile Images for Better Visibility When open multiple files simultaneously in Photoshop they automatically cascade and it can be quite difficult to find the particular image you are looking for within all of the overlapping files. To avoid this problem you can choose Window> Arrange> Tile and all of your open files will rearrange themselves to be visible all at once. When you’re ready to close the windows you don’t have to spend time closing them individually, instead use the Close All shortcut Control+Option+W (Mac: Command+Alt+W).

Getting Rid Of the Welcome Screen - And Bringing It Back When you first open Photoshop CS you will probably see a Welcome Screen that has links to Tutorials, Tips and Tricks, and a set of Color Management Help Files. At some point you might want to stop this screen from coming up. You should see a check box at the bottom of the screen that you can click to hide the screen at startup. Later on, if you change your mind and decide that you want to have it show up again, you can temporarily bring the screen back by clicking under the Help menu and choosing Welcome Screen.

Cycle Through All Of Your Open Documents Sometimes you’ll want to find one of your open documents that is hidden, but navigating using the Window menu won’t help because you can’t recall the name of the file. Instead press Control-Tab repeatedly (MAC and PC) to cycle through all of your open documents.