Share your favorite Photoshop Trick

As much time as most of us spend in PhotoShop we're bound to have picked up some tricks to make editing faster and easier. 

I'll go with three for now.

1 - Ctrl-zero zooms to full screen and double clicking on the magnifying glass zooms to 100%.  (Yes, I know I cheated.  This one was in the other thread).

2 - [ & ] to go up and down in brush size.

3 - Hold down space and the tool becomes the hand so you can drag the image around without changing tools. 

My favorites (that haven't already been mentioned) are:

Double click the gray background to open files
Ctrl-W to close individual windows
X for switching between foreground and background colors (especially useful for masks)
Shift-[ & Shift-] for the brush hardness/softness

I've also made actions for my workflow, the ones I use most are:

FileSetup (It creates a bg copy and adjustment layers for Levels, Curves, and Hue/Sat)
SaveAsFullJPEG
SaveAs25%JPEG
SignatureLayer
SaveForPAF    (no joking)  (This one saves the image to a 650px longest dimension for posting here)

I'm with Mike, sometimes automating the simple tasks is what saves the most time and work.

the actions I have for saving time are:

FinishImage - sharpens, flattens and saves
GlamourTreatment - slight saturation and noise reduction and makes a layer to erase back detail
Webresize - same as everyone elses, but adds really mild sharpening
BW - my favourite way to make black and white
ModernSepia - my version of colorized sepia (really popular for weddings)

I have a few others, mainly really custom stuff like one that gets rid of the magenta cast I get a lot.

OH did anyone say Ctrl-Z for undo and Ctrl-Alt-Z for multiple undo's?  I use these a lot

I have that as an action.

Click on the black/white little squares at the bottom of the color bar.


Change your rectangular region from normal to relative size.

Thanks for the tip Mike.  Marian, I already know how to do it with the mouse, I was looking for the keyboard shortcut... but thanks for the info.

My favorite most used PS effect is heavy blur on a copied layer and then switch the Blend mode to "Soft Light".

I am a heavy user of "Selective Color" and for normal portrait work almost always move the Cyan slider to the left when affecting the Red colour. This warms up the skin tones only - I love warm skin tones.

I have my mouse scroll wheel set to Zoom In and Out of the image

Tab - to get rid of the tool bars to more easily work on the full screen image - press Tab again to restore them

Space bar with mouse down to move the navigator around when zoomed in

How about sticking a Note or several Notes on the image for future reference - Notes/Audio Annotation - "N" key. I do that from time to time for the same reason that I Comment my coding for web design.

Most used standard shortcuts are Ctrl M for curves, Ctrl L for levels - for my book layouts, Ctrl A (select all), Ctrl Z (undo), Ctrl X (delete), Ctrl C (copy), Ctrl V (paste), Ctrl T (free transform), Ctrl Backspace (fill layer with background colour)  - - - are staples that come second nature to me.

I also have a set of actions of saved steps that I use for:

* Black & White conversions and color tints that I like
* Edge Sharpen and a couple of basic soften effects
* resize for web which uses my favourite 1/2 resize/sharpen until I get to the final size - then borders and branding

* I also have actions written for common single step procedures that would require either going to the menu to initiate, or would need to take extra steps to get the settings the way I want. Examples are "image size", "rotate right", "rotate left", "smart sharpen", white 5px stroke (border), black 5px stroke (border), "drop shadow" with my preference of look.

* the most common actions that I use are assigned to my F1-12 keys where I know them inside and out - eg. F3 is rotate left, F4 is rotate right, F5 is smart sharpen, F6 is my favourite allround Channel Mixer black and white setting, F7 is my favourite brown/sepia tone

Of course many other daily used tools like Patch, Heal, Lasso Tool, Brushes, etc. I virtually never use the clone tool.