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Effective Adobe Photoshop Shortcuts for Digital Artists LoyicaBlog

Adobe Photoshop is the key software for all digital artists, photographers, and graphic designers. What sets these users apart is how they use the tool. There are

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Author
Loyica Team
Mar 20 2019
Effective Adobe Photoshop Shortcuts for Digital Artists

Adobe Photoshop is the key software for all digital artists, photographers, and graphic designers. What sets these users apart is how they use the tool. There are many key parts you can utilize in your creative process. Surprisingly, the tool is very flexible as it leads you towards the same result in different ways.

What matters the most is to apply some shortcuts and hacks to save time and focus more on digital illustrations to create your design.

Keyboard Shortcut

There is a keyboard shortcuts window where you could modify the already existing shortcuts and learn which key is used for a specific tool. To do this open Photoshop, go to Edit and select Keyboard Shortcuts. You can also access the same settings from Windows > Workspace > Keyboard shortcuts & Menus.

Now you can pick a category (Application Menus, Panel Menus, and Tools) and look for a shortcut. The Application Menus will have the shortcuts related to File, Edit, Image, Layer, etc. For example, if you are using the brightness/contrast option frequently, you can simply assign a key combination to save time.

The Panel Menus offer you many options in its Layers portion, ctrl/cmd + Shift + N is the standard new shortcut layer. You can also set up a shortcut to Delete Hidden Layers because deleting unnecessary layers can improve the performance of the software.

The Tools section provides you with all the shortcuts assigned to all the tools found on the left panel of the Adobe Photoshop.

Alter the Brush Size

To increase or decrease the size of your brush on Adobe Photoshop, click and hold the Alt key (On mac, hold ctrl and Alt keys), click and hold the right mouse button and drag horizontally from left to right to increase the size and vice versa.

The Brush Softness

The shortcut for this tool will only work for Photoshop’s default round brushes and not the custom made brushes. The shortcut is quite the same with a little addition. All you have to do is click and hold the Alt key (on Mac press Ctrl and Alt keys) then click and hold the right mouse button, now drag upwards to harden the edge of your brush and drag down to make it softer.

Color Picker

Photoshop offers a quick color picker called the HUD Color Picker. It is located right where your cursor is located on the canvas. To quickly pick a color for your design you can click and hold Alt + Shift, then click and hold the right side of the mouse button. To perform this on Mac click ctrl^ + alt  ⌥ + cmd ⌘, then click and hold the right mouse button effectively.

Final words

Adobe Photoshop has a lot of spaces for you to explore and there are many fascinating shortcuts and hacks the software offers. Some of the tips that are mentioned above are handy and worth a try if you are not using them yet. So, start using them to have a productive experience using Adobe Photoshop.

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