I’m talking about things like using the B key to select the Brush tool, M for the Marquee tool, S for the Stamp tool. These make sense, right? Well don’t expect them to all be this easy.

The rate at which you learn this stuff should develop naturally over time, you can’t be expected to remember all of them at once. As you use them more and more, eventually shortcuts will become second nature and you won’t even think about it.

More advanced stuff like using the command, option and shift keys to act as modifier keys for whichever tool you have selected, is probably the most useful aspect of keyboard shortcuts and will speed up your workflow considerably.

But if you only ever learn one shortcut make it this one.

SAVING you work frequently is something you should get in the habit of doing as early as possible. But we’re all human and we forget. It’s only when you’re busy doing something that you tend to forget to save as often as you should, and without warning Photoshop will throw a fit and close.

It can be demoralising to have this screen pop up when you haven’t saved for a while. It’s popped up and ruined my life one too many times and I just had to do something about it. I now have a little application running called PS SAVE whevever I’m working in photoshop.

Every 10 minutes a dialogue box will pop up saying:

Just click yes and everything is taken care of. That way, when photoshop throws a hissy fit (again) at least you’ll only lose 10 minutes of hard graft. Worth having eh? Oh hell yeah, it is trust me.
Why this hasn’t been integrated into photoshop yet I have no idea. It’s only when you’ve lost a good 2 or 3 hours of work that you’ll start to looking for a solutions like this.

Download PS SAVE