From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Modifying keyboard shortcuts to boost productivity - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Modifying keyboard shortcuts to boost productivity

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- [Instructor] Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to increase your productivity when you notice that you're selecting the same commands over and over throughout the day. So, keyboard shortcuts are listed next to the menu items, and many commands have shortcuts assigned to them, but many of them do not. And we can customize those, which we'll do in just a moment. But first, just to decipher them, this icon right here is going to be the Command key on Mac, or Control key on Windows. Here we've got the Option key, or the Alt key on Windows, and the arrow is the Shift key on Mac and Windows. So the keyboard shortcut here, for example, for close and go to bridge would be shift + Command + W, or Shift + Control + W on Windows. Now, one of the commands that I use over and over during the day is I go back and forth between viewing all of my images and just seeing one of the images. So under the window menu, arrange, I don't want to have to continually return here to change between consolidate all to tabs and tile. So, I'll select the edit menu and then choose to edit my keyboard shortcuts. I'll make sure that I'm editing the shortcuts for application menus, because you can also edit the shortcuts for your panel menus, your tools, and your task spaces. Then I will scroll down until I see the window menu, use the disclosure triangle, and then scroll down again to see all of the different options. Here we can see the tile option and the consolidate to tabs. So when I want to tile my images, I want to use the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + T. So I'll click to the right, and then use the keyboard to type that in. Photoshop's going to warn me that that keyboard shortcut is already in use, but I rarely use edit transform again. So I'll go ahead and accept that. Then I'll click to the right of consolidate all to tabs, and use Command + Shift + R for that shortcut. Again, I'll accept it. Now, if you set up a lot of custom keyboard shortcuts, you can always save out different sets for different tasks. But for now, I'll simply click okay, return to the window menu to arrange, and we can see that Photoshop is now listing those keyboard shortcuts next to those commands. So I'll use Command + N to create a new document. I'll choose Create, and then I'll use Command + Shift + T in order to tile my two images, and Command + Shift + R in order to return to tab. So although creating custom keyboard shortcuts might seem like a minor thing when you're first starting to learn Photoshop, as you become more and more advanced, you're really going to want to access your tools and your menu items more quickly. And customizing your shortcuts is one of the most productive ways that you can do that.

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