Something Useful - Vital Photoshop hotkeys

Heyo hey. I really really really am a huge fan of hotkeys. They literally save lives. Seriously, this one time I was walking down the street and this guy sprung out from behind a bush and hurled himself at this poor old helpless woman's purse. I just flicked the old ctrl-z, and BAM, he was undone. No, he just stared at me for a moment while I threw digits his way in a sorta harry potter-esque fashion.... No, none of that ever happened at all, I dont actually think a hotkey will save a life, but they will definitely save you some time. So lets get started I guess.

Photoshop Hotkeys that rock

Ctrl+J - Create new layer from selection...
If nothing is selected, just duplicate selected layer

[ and ] - Decrease and Increase the size of the brush
Increments in units of 10, unless under 10, then its just units of 1

Shift [ and ] - Decrease and Increase brush Hardness or Softness

The number keys up top do a number of cool things depending on what tool you have selected. You can just hit 1 for 10%, 4 for 40% or 76 for 76%. Pretty straight forward.
- Move tool selected -
"1-10" will adjust the opacity of the layer selected
- Brush selected -
"1-10" will adjust the opacity of the brush
"Shift 1-10" will adjust the flow of the brush
... etc. with all the tools after that. It'll always adjust the opacity for 1-10, and the secondary slider for Shift 1-10

Say you have the Dodge tool selected, you can hold "alt" and it'll toggle to the Burn tool. Great when you're rocking the Dodge Burn Combolicious.

When you're selecting a tool from the toolbar, if you hold alt, you'll toggle between the different tools available. Also if you wanna grab a tool without resorting to the mouse, you can hold Shit+whatever, and it'll toggle thru the tools within that hotkey. For example: Shift+M will go thru the different marquee selection tools, circle and square. Shift+W will toggle thru the magic wand tool, and the wand selection tool. BAM!

D - Default Colors, Foreground Black, Background White

X - Swap foreground and background colors.

Ctrl+E - Merge Selected Layers

Alt+Click in between two layers to use the bottom layer as a mask for the top layer. This works great for adjustment layers too. You can layer a bunch of adjustment layers on top of a layer you want to adjust without having to make a mask for each adjustment layer.

Ctrl+Click on a layer to make a selection out of it. Then Ctrl+Shift+C to copy all layers in the selection. Click the channels tab, then hit the "Create new channel" button down at the bottom of the window. Hit Ctrl+V, and you've turned your selection into an alpha channel. You Ctrl+Click that layer again and you'll get a gradiated version of your selection. This is great when you have some kind of gradient that you want to turn into an alpha channel so you can paint in a gradiated fashion.

Hold shift while you're drawing to draw a straight line.

With the a brush-like tool selected, click once somewhere, then shift click somewhere else to make a straight line between those two points.

Q - Quick Mask mode. This lets you paint in your selection. Very useful to refine a selection.

Double Click anywhere on the photoshop background and it'll bring up the "Open..." dialog.

Keep in mind, you're right click context menu changes depending on you're tool, so experiment around with them, there is a lot of cool stuff to uncover within those tools context menus.