Get efficient with Photoshop

Five tips to get tasks done more efficiently in Photoshop.

Images and parts of the text is taken from a brilliant tutorial/article about Photoshop on Developer Tutorials, I have updated it slightly to suit the newer versions of Photoshop and added some of my own preferences. They have a lot of very good and descriptive articles on how to use applications more efficiently, as well as tips and tricks, worth a visit.

1. Learn to use keyboard shortcuts for tools

Move your mouse cursor over to the toolbox, scan the toolbox for the tool you want to use, click on it, move back to your canvas. Is this how you use the tools in Photoshop? Switching tools by going back to the toolbox and selecting your new tool each time takes up time that adds up to minutes and hours over larger and longer projects. Becoming familiar with Photoshop’s keyboard shortcuts for accessing tools cuts down a large amount of that time. It also keeps your cursor within the canvas area so that you don’t have to figure out where you were before you switched tools.

Keyboard shortcuts for the tools are displayed in a tooltip along with the name of the tool when you hover over the tool (Pops up after 2 seconds). In the figure below you can see the Move tool and the help message. The keyboard shortcut shows up in parentheses, (V) for this tool. In this case, if you’re in Photoshop and simply hit “v” on your keyboard, you’ll automatically switch to the Move tool.

Some tools have fly-out menu options for selecting similar tools in the same genre, these tools often share the same shortcut. In the example below, you can see that the Brush tool, Pencil tool, and Color Replacement tool share “B” as the keyboard shortcut. Simply hitting “B” on your keyboard will switch to whichever tool was previously selected (in this case, the Brush tool). To switch to the Pencil or Color Replacement tools, you’ll have to press “Shift”+”B” to cycle through the other tools.

The easiest way to begin learning keyboard shortcuts is to focus on a couple of the tools that you use most often and practice using the keyboard shortcuts for them. As you commit them to memory and instinct, you can add other tool shortcuts as you slowly learn and memorize. I frequently use:

• A – Direct Selection and Path Selection tools
• B – Brush, Pencil tools
• C – Crop tool
• D – Changes the foreground color to black and the background color to white
• E – Eraser
• M – Marquee tools
• P – Pen tools
• V – Move tool
• X – Switches the foreground and background colors

2. Learn to use more keyboard shortcuts for other tasks

Photoshop is full of other keyboard shortcuts for different tasks, learning them really makes everything much easier, and faster. You’re probably already familiar with some of the basics – Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+O to open a file, Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+C to Paste – which are common to other types of software. Many of these shortcuts can be found listed next to the command when you click an option from the top menu.

But there are many other keyboard shortcuts for performing a variety of actions. Here are some that I’ve found to be indispensible while working in Photoshop.

• Ctrl or Alt and + or – zooms in or out of your canvas.
• Holding the Shift key generally constrains movements to straight horizontal, vertical, or 45-degree angles. For example, if you’re using the Move tool to move a layer, holding the Shift key will allow you to move it perfectly horizontally (or vertically, or at a 45-degree angle) so that you don’t have to guess your placement by the naked eye.
• The Alt key will often allow you to copy things, depending on the context. When you have the Move tool selected, holding the Alt key and then using the Move tool will allow you to copy the selected layer to a new layer. Or, if you’re working in the Layers palette, holding the Alt key down, clicking on a layer, and dragging it to another spot in the Layers palette will create a copy of that layer. The same thing works with the Path Selection tool when you’re working with paths.
• Holding the Ctrl key and then clicking on a thumbnail in the Layers palette makes a selection based on the pixels in that layer.
• Ctrl-D will clear all selections, such as selections you’ve made with the Marquee or Lasso tools.
• Holding the space bar temporarily switches you to the Hand tool so that you can easily move your canvas around (Most digital tables have this function built into the pen, I use Wacom Bamboo).
• Change the layer opacity by simply typing in a number.

For more shortcuts you can search blogs and webpages for “Photoshop shortcuts” or “Photoshop keyboard commands”. One resource you might find helpful are the PDFs at Morris Photographics. However, even these extensive PDFs don’t include tricks like double-clicking in the grey Photoshop work area to bring up the “Open” dialog box if you’re not fond of the Ctrl-O keyboard shortcut! There is a lot to discover in Photoshop; while you may not find some of the shortcuts to be worth retaining in your memory, you’ll inevitably find some that you will use every time you open Photoshop.

3. Create Actions

If you find yourself doing a task in Photoshop that follows the exact same steps over and over again, you may find it helpful to create a Photoshop action to automate those steps. A common example is if you have a bunch of photos that you’re resizing from high resolution to web-ready formats. Let’s say that your boring, repetitive steps consist of:

1. Opening the image.
2. Going to File > Image Size and entering in a new width or height, then clicking OK.
3. Saving the photo for the web in a different folder.
4. Closing the photo without saving.

Instead of going numb by doing this for all of your <insert a number above 10> photos, let Photoshop do the work by creating an Action! Here are the basic steps for making your own custom Action.

1. Open the Actions palette by going to Window > Actions (Or pressing Alt + F9).

Click the “Create new action” icon in the bottom of the Actions palette.

1. Name your action, for example, “Resizing photo”
2. Notice that the recording button is immediately active, so any commands that you do in Photoshop will be recorded. If you’re not ready to record, hit the Stop button. When you’re ready, click the Record button to begin recording again.
3. You should start with the image already open before recording (Will show why later on). Then, you can proceed with your normal steps and perform your tasks on the image, including saving the image for web and closing the image without saving. As you perform your tasks, you’ll see a list of Photoshop tasks building under the Actions palette. When you’re done, hit the Stop button.



4. Let’s say you have a mixture of landscape and portrait images. When resizing the image, you would pick the larger dimension and change that size. Creating an action this way, however, would force you to make two separate actions – one for portrait photos, one for landscape photos. Luckily, Photoshop has a built-in command for “fitting” the resized photo into a certain area. So when recording the action, instead of going to Image > Image Size, you go to File > Automate > Fit Image and type the width and height that you want the image to be resized within.
5. So, the Action would really look more like this, with the Fit Image instead of Image Size tasks:

With your action complete, take it out for a test drive. Open up another image, click on the name of the action in the Actions palette, and hit the Play button. Photoshop will go through the steps of your action. Check to make sure that the photo was resized and saved for web properly.

If all looks well, you’re ready to batch and automate! Go to File > Automate > Batch. Most likely your new action will already be selected, but if not, select it from the dropdown list. Change the Source to Folder and click the Choose button to set the folder to your collection of images that need to be resized. Also set the Destination to Folder and set this location to where you want the web-ready images to be saved. Finally, you can set the other options for renaming the saved file or overriding commands as necessary. One important option is to change the Errors dropdown to Log Errors to File, click the Save As button, then select the filename and location for your error log file. This way, if Photoshop runs into a problem, it will log the issue and keep going instead of stopping the process completely.

Then click OK, sit back and do something else while you let Photoshop perform the magic!

4. Learn non-destructive editing techniques

“Non-destructive editing techniques” describe ways to modify and adjust layers without actually changing the pixel content of the layer. This is a way to save time in Photoshop, you don’t actually save time on the front end, but you save a lot of time and trouble on the back end if you need to go back and make new changes.

Lets take an example of the difference between “destructive” and “non-destructive” editing. One common modification for pumping up the contrast on a image is to use the Image > Levels option and dragging the outer sliders towards the center.

This permanently changes the image, in other words once you save and close it, there’s no return.

To change the levels “non-destructively”, you can add an Image Adjustment layer in the Layers palette. Click the Create new adjustment layer icon in the bottom of the Layers palette and choose Levels.

The same Levels dialog box will come up and you can make the same changes, but instead of permanently changing the layer of the image, you’ll see an additional layer come up in the Layers palette.

The wonderful part of adding the adjustment layer is that you can always go back and change the adjustment by double-clicking on the <insert name for your Levels layer> thumbnail. You can also turn it off by clicking the eye icon to hide the layer, or if you wish you can remove it completely by deleting the layer. You can add more adjustment layers on top of this one to continue to make “changes” to the image, all without touching the original image itself.

Other tips for non-destructive editing

• Use adjustment layers for image adjustments. Most of the adjustment changes you would make to an image layer can be done using adjustment layers for non-destructive editing, as shown in the Levels example above.
• Use vector shapes with layer style effects. Using the marquee tool to create a rectangle selection, filling it with the paint bucket tool, and adding a gradient using the gradient tool, results in a pixel- or raster-based layer where you’d pretty much have to recreate the layer if you wanted to make significant shape or color changes. In contrast, creating a vector rectangle and applying a gradient layer effect allows you to change the shape of the rectangle or change the gradient effect at any point very easily.
• Use layer masks to hide portions of layers. Using the eraser tool will permanently remove information from a layer. Instead, add a layer mask and use it to hide the parts of the layer that you don’t want to show. You can then always go back and edit the layer mask to hide or show more of the original picture or remove the layer mask altogether.

5. Get organized

When you’re working with files that have multiple layers, there’s nothing more frustrating than going back to it later and trying to figure out if that small bullet icon is on Layer 1, Layer 15, or Layer 36. Invest some time in the front end to keep your Photoshop documents organized so that you can save time later on when you open the document for editing, or more importantly collaborating between other designers. Here’s two main ways that should get you organized in Photoshop

• Name your layers descriptively. Double-click the name of the layer to rename it from “Layer 2″ to something more helpful, such as “Left Column Foreground”
• Group layers together. Photoshop allows you to group layers together into folders. If you’re making a web site composition, you may find it helpful to group together the layers that hold objects related to the top header area, for example. You can also name the groups descriptively. You can even group groups together into subfolders. Click the folder icon in the bottom of the Layers palette to create a new group. (Keyboard shortcut: Select your layers first, hold Shift, then click the folder icon. This will automatically create a new group with those selected layers so that you don’t have to drag them into the folder later.)