Photoshop Keyboard-SpeedUps

Photoshop CS (and higher) has the feature of assigning custom keyboard-shortcuts to access menu-items from any menu. The standard Photoshop-shortcuts are working well but there are also many shortcuts which aren’t used that often. These shortcuts can be reassigned in order to speed up your Photoshop-workflow.
Another point of assigning shortcuts is that your left hand and right hand shoud have its explicit range when working in Photoshop. So it’s important to keep your left hand on the leftmost side of your keyboard while using the mouse with your right hand. Needing mouse-movements in order to reach a menu-item slows down your work – the mouse-pointer should leave the main workspace-area as seldom as possible. That’s why you should assign shortcuts which are easily accessible by the left hand with two ore more fingers.
Below is a small map of the keys which should be easily reachable with the fingers of your left hand.

Your thumb should always lie on the spacebar for the common operations. Find out what keys your index finger is able to reach if your little finger holds down the left CTRL-key. Normally you should be able to press the Y-key (Z-key on german keyboards) or even the U-key without problems. So this may be your range for the access-keys you need to activate with your index finger. The access-key can be a letter, a number or even a function-key (F1-F12).
When you define new shortcuts you’ll have to use at least three keys (two command-keys plus one access-key) if you don’t want to change the common ‘two-key’-shorcuts of Photoshop. So there are three key-combinations for new shortcuts:

• CTRL-SHIFT-Accesskey
• CTRL-ALT-Accesskey
• SHIFT-ALT-Accesskey

Choose the one which is accessible the best for your fingers. Regardless of which combination you choose, the index finger will always be the activating finger which operates with the access-key. The goal is to perform nearly every often used Photoshop-operation with your left hand so that the right hand can permanently be kept on the mouse. The only operations you should do with both hands is CTRL-ArrowKey (up, down, left, right) in order to move an element accurately.

So there’s one important key left which is used very often and can’t be reached with the left hand only – the BACKSPACE-key. It’s used to fill something with the foreground/background-color or to delete elements or selections. That’s why you need to get this key on the leftmost side of our keyboard. You’re doing this with a nice free tool called KeyTweak. This application allows you to remap any key on your keyboard. So you will reassign a useless key on your keyboard with the BACKSPACE-key. The best key for a reassignment is the CAPSLOCK-key because it mostly has an annoying effect and isn’t used that often.

Alright. Now you can assign some new shortcuts which shall help you designing websites or creating any kind of graphics. Here are some of my up-to-date keyboard-shortcuts I’m mainly using for webdesign.

So these hints may help you a bit in order to work faster with your Photoshop. You will find out which actions/operations you’re using the most and so you can customize the shortcuts so that they fit your needs.