Lessons

Lesson Info

Keyboard Shortcuts Part 1

this is an interesting challenge that whenever over the years when I talk to people they'd say could you can you um or advanced class and I was so what exactly do you mean by that and I had an interesting conversation with someone just the other day about this and I think there's a percentage of people other that somehow feel like people who teach photoshopped are keeping secret some more advanced techniques that they're going to release at a certain time and the reality is that's just not the case when we're using photo shop I would never even in a more introductory class I wouldn't hold something back so I'm not gonna tell you this now because it's too advanced for you I think really what advanced means is things that can help you get to the end result you want more easily more quickly more accurately so we will be talking about things that are a little more unusual perhaps lesser known would be another way to say it so things that people have never seen before or maybe saw once and ...

took notes and kind of later on didn't we're unable to decipher their notes and couldn't figure out what it meant things like that but really what it comes down to is ways to get things done it's really my interpretation of advanced is I want to help you advance your ability to use photo shop so some of the techniques that I'm going to show be honest and say I have talked about before and creative live but I also know by experience that there's a lot of things that I show and then I meet people a year later I'm like oh yeah that thing and they never really put it into into use so that's something that I want to make sure that we're taking full advantage because as I've said many times before here on creative live we are creatures of habit we do things the way that are comfortable tow us and some of these techniques are going to show you will force you to be uncomfortable for a little bit until you put it into action so for example I actually did a facebook post in preparation class and said what kind of things would you like to see in an advanced class and one of the things that that I had to kind of chuckle at is at least one response of some like you know more advanced stuff and I'm like thanks that's very helpful I don't know what you mean by that but for example here's an example kind thing were to talk about a couple of people said oh I'd like to know some advanced masking techniques well I gotta be honest and say when I am working in photoshopping masking I use the same techniques even if it's someone with black hair against the white wall or someone with black hair against the black wall I just add an extra step but fundamentally it's still the same process so it's not like I suddenly unleash some advanced technique that I've never used before having said that we will be talking in that section about some ways where we can take advantage of channels and things that aren't every day but again another part of my goal I should say is too equip you with lots of choices because day to day I use a core of tools all the time but every so often I run against unusual situation or something a little more challenging and after add in some other plan so I have a plan a and a plan b and sometimes the plan c's though if the first way doesn't work then I want to be able to address it in some other ways the bottom line for me as long as you get the work done that you're trying to do that's a good thing so a lot of people think I will say things like I'm probably doing this the wrong way well as long as you get it done that's the right way if I can help you do it more quickly or more accurately that's even better so the other thing I'll say is that don't be surprised if some of these advanced techniques don't include twenty five steps because I also did a little search on this thing called google might hurt of it's kind of a neat way to find things so I typed in advanced photoshopped tutorial and at least half of them were like how to make a exploding planet and it was like eighty four steps and I was like interesting for all those many times I want to make an exploding planet now you know how to do it but it was almost like the perception was to be advanced that has to have a lot of steps and to me if I could do something in two steps and get the job done that's even more advanced because that I'm doing it more quickly so a lot of this it's advanced some of them you may have seen before some of you may not but it's really it's about advancing your knowledge and your ability to work really quickly so one thing I always forget to mention so I made sure I stuck the slide up on the screen so we'll be there for anyone the center said this is my my social media photoshopped ps guide across on facebook at they've crossed on twitter and google plus it's just harder toe but I think he can now do google dot com slash across or something like that but it's in case anyone's understood those air some of things where you can find me doing other stuff okay so the first thing I want to talk about and part of the reason I want to touch on this right up front is the fact that I want to use some of these things throughout this class so I don't want to have to be explaining later when people going how did he do that is the importance of keyboard shortcuts I talked to a lot of people and they're like yeah keyboard shortcuts a little bit to me gosh if you're not using keyboard shortcuts you're working too hard and I'll insert standard photo shop industry joke here unless you're getting paid by the hour then you don't want to do things quickly then don't use keyboard shortcuts use menus but considering most people want to get things done more quickly keyboard shortcuts to me are hugely important and I'm not in any way suggesting you should memorise every short cut there is but as you're working if you realize that is thie in our family we call umpteen is a measurement of many if that's the umpteenth time that you've done the same thing by going and taking your mouths and clicking on a menu or a tool then you're working too hard so throughout this whole course you will not see me unless I'm specifically trying to demonstrate something going over and clicking on the toolbox I'm taking advantage of the fact that every tool other than a couple of exceptions in photo shop has a single letter you compress to activate the tool so if I'm working in my mouth is over away over here on the right hand side and I'm focusing on what I want to do I don't want to move away from there to go click on a tool and come back I just want to activate the tool and the good thing is most or I should say perhaps many of the tools have very logical shortcuts like em for marquis and tea for type and see for crop and l for lasso so if I want to switch to my lasso tool while I'm over here I just pressed letter l now I have the last o'toole I want to switch back to the move tool I press the letter v for movement some of them we just have to kind of force the issue a little bit but what this does it means I can focus my attention that's really what this is all about is not not just speeding things up but also taking any distraction away if you had your mouths and exactly the right position you had to move away from that to go click on a tool that's forcing you to have to try and remember now where was I a second ago and I just don't want to do that so most of the tools are fairly logical somewhere a bit more of a stretch like w is a short cut for the quick selection tool because it shares the same slot as the magic wand others are just a real stretch and have no there's no simple way to remember so you just have to learn them honestly mean that the good thing is though that I would say that the key functions I use all the time those shortcuts are pretty straightforward so if when you're first starting and this is the part where change is painful so it first is going to take you a while so if you're unsure you can actually look at the tool and it shows you the letter beside so here it saying marquis tool m and if I click on a different tool that showing me that that's a shortcut for that tool so it first in orderto learn these shortcuts that might actually slow you down a bit and then as you start doing it'll speed things up so that two other important things to note about this tool shortcut idea so in certain tools for example this set the healing spot healing healing patch tool content aware and red eye tool they all have the same letter beside them so that means by default if I want to switch between those tools without clicking on them I press shift and the letter so whatever the letter is in this case it's j h time I press the shift key is tumbling through them so this way I don't have to worry about going and clicking on a tool it also is important note that whatever tool you leave it on that's the one that the shortcut will use from now on so for example if I do it so that the last tool that I used is is thie say the patch tool it means from now on if I switch to a different tool and then press j to go back it's gonna automatically select whatever tool I last used so photoshopped one of its standard functions has a long memory so that it will always do that now some people are of the opinion that pressing shift and the letter is an extra key so there is actually a preference you khun turn off if you wish and this is why it's called a preference my habit I'm so used to pressing shift and the letter that I just do it but there is this option right here that says turn off use shift key for tool switch when I do that that means now if I just press the letter j it's going to switch between the tools automatically without me having to do any extra letter so that's a personal preference personally I have the shift key turn on because since we are all creatures of habit including me that's the one I my fingers learn so many years ago that I think I'd be hard pressed like I actually turned it back on in my case because I don't want to mess up later on by forgetting that the other thing that's interesting some people some of you may already know this this letter keyboard shortcut function but every so often in a version of photo shop but they'll be slips in a cool little feature that's not a big whiz bang like content aware phil type thing but some really cool little function that saves you time and one of them relates to the tools so let's say for example that I pressed b for the brush tool I'm gonna zoom in a little bit so I'm starting to paint but then all of sudden I realize I need to make a selection will instead of pressing l for the lasso to switch to the lasso tool and then pressing b to get back all of these letters are what they call spring loaded and that means instead of just pressing l I'm gonna put my finger and hold on it so I'm holding down the letter l that means I can make a selection but as soon as I let go it's right back to the brush tool so it saves me having to go l b l b and press that every time you just click and hold the letter and it's temporarily activating that tool because you let go it goes back whatever tool you just had so for situations where you find yourself having toe switch back and forth between two tools that's a very useful way to do it just as a quick aside years ago I I was lucky enough to teach at a conference in italy and they had simultaneous simultaneous translation and they told me afterwards that they had toe hire a different translator because the first guy who didn't they had didn't know photoshopped so when the instructor said spring loaded keys he translated as keys with springs inside of them and everyone in the room was kind of going what does one how can I have springs inside of my keys so anyway I just thought that was so spring loaded keyes is another way and the same thing applies you may have noticed it popped up a second ago that since I'm zoomed in and I want to scroll my view instead of going clicking on the hand tool I just press and hold the space bar for the hand tool that's been around for a long time but this is just another quick way same idea where I can now scroll where I want when I let go I've got whatever tool I last hat so these are temporary you compress commander control and the space bar to get the zoom in tool if you throw in the option all key it'll be the zoom out tool and one of things that people comment is well how will I remember this because you know all of these how'm I remember the short cuts well the simple answer is pressed something and see what happens so if you're not sure you remember there were some shortcut to temporal activate the space bar just try it you press the commander control key no that's not the space bar now space for a while there it is our side say that's not the handle so in this case this is how we learn the shortcuts and make them a habit is by taking longer initially is I said to try and figure out which one is which but then once you do then it's habit I'm not consciously in my head thinking now I shall press the letter j to get the patch tool it's just a habit because I do it all the time so I don't have to think about it in fact sometimes what I'm teaching and it's a beginner's class on I want to make sure people understand what's happening I have to stop myself from using shortcuts because I'm pressing the wrong thing a couple of other quick examples and I know for some of you this is not advanced but I want to make sure because as I often talk about the photo shop many of us are mostly self taught and the biggest problem with being self taught of course is the teacher because how do you teach yourself something you don't know so a lot of people discover things and then miss along the way important things so right now if you look down the very bottom I set two colors for foreground and background I have two different shades of red if I start to use a tool and go oh wait that's the wrong color many people would come down here and click to swap them whereas you compress the letter x and it does the same thing this is incredibly important when we start talking about things like masking because if you're switching back and forth in black and white and your every time going back and pressing her ex to do that excuse me pressing the little arrow to swap that's taking a long time by the same token if I'm working away and I now decide I want to just get back to black and white as my sort of default colors or maybe I just need the color white so here's an interesting little side story that's related this was a number of years ago but I had a class of like six people I think and early it was a kind of intermediate class people who have been using photo shopped for long enough to teach themselves different ways to do things and at one point we were following along and we all had blue is our foreground color I said let's make make sure your four run color is white and sick different people use six different ways to choose white is therefore wrong color and most of them except for one guy we're really inefficient because like one guy went over and clicked on the color picker and typed in values to make sure it was white someone else dragged up here someone else found the swatches panel and said there's whitened here somewhere personally I would oppress deford default on x for swap so too quick pressing of the keyboard and now I have white is my foreground color so that's just a example of says while yes you can do things in different ways some of them are more efficient than others and one of things we have to try to do is change our habits a little bit now later on we'll talk about how we can also edit our own keyboard shortcuts but first I want to talk about just a couple of other important principles one of them is a short cut that I used so much now without thinking that I have to again remember to consciously tell someone because otherwise they'll just go what just happened there so I'm going to do this I'm just going to add a new layer which I used a keyboard shortcut for but I could have clicked on the button and let's um pick any old color just something you can see and I want to fill this layer so again I'm using a shortcut for this shift delete or shift back space opens up this phil dialog box and I can decide I want the foreground color now here's another example of something we'll talk about throughout this class maybe in my head I'm thinking I want this layer to be fifty percent see through like fifty percent color but if I type fifty percent in this phil dialog box that means I've set my ceiling at fifty percent I can never go higher without filling over again so as a habit I always suggest phil at one hundred percent capacity even I don't want to end up with that over here in my layers panel of course I have in opacity command if you have no idea what opacity level you want then in fact you can just use the little slider scrubby sliders they call it to just dial in some number but again to me that's kind of the inefficient waste I'm gonna press v for the move tool and instead all I do is press the first number of whatever opacity I want so say I want fifty percent I just pressed the letter five that's it I want to go click anywhere photoshopped just knows because I have a non painting tool active that I must be referring to the opacity of the layer so if I want experiment with two twenty percent nine for ninety percent six for sixty percent if you know for some odd reason you want like sixty eight percent you just have to type really fast six eight if you go six eight it's going to go sixty eighty so if you know you want a very specific number like sixty eight I have to say it fast too I don't know why that happens but and the only one that's a little odd for people at first is zero was one hundred so if you want to get back to one hundred you press zero which is kind of odd but that's just the way this so this works not on ly for um the capacity of the layer but it also works if I am using a any tool that uses brushes so the paintbrush rubber she's been clumsy rubber stamp that's the old one clone stamp any tool like that that has an option for opacity it's the same thing so if I'm here's another example I'm painting over here and I go oh wait that opacity is too high let's undo that I'll press five for fifty and now it's more see through so I didn't go up to the options bar click in opacity and move it I just press the number and again that the whole goal of talking about these things and right out front is to say we want to keep our focus where it is not have to move away and say ok I'll move my brush up to some setting and then try and come back to where I just was in this case I'm not moving my brush I'm just pressing eighty percent or undo that impressed twenty percent and that's my goal is to keep everything my focus where it is now you may notice that for example here there are two different settings opacity and philo passing and they serve different functions which will get into a little bit later and some other issues but if I want to change the opacity of the layer in one of those I have to throw in one extra little key so pressing just like four again will say I think that my movie will never go press for that changes the opacity of the layer to forty percent if I had let's do this I'll do some type so you'll get some foreshadowing of what some things we're gonna talk a little later okay so in order for this to be visible on going toe add a stroke so make it big enough so you can see it and of course this would be aesthetically the perfect type face to use when you're you know talking about wedding flowers is like a collegiate fun like this but that's what I have all right so one of the functions we can do in photo shop is if I want if I lower the phil opacity it makes the phil color go away but the layer style stay there that's what phil opacity does as opposed to regular opacity so if I just have the move tool selected and I press for example five it's going to change the overall opacity see how even the stroke became semi see through by press zero for one hundred if I throw in the shift key shift five means I'll change the phil opacity not the regular opacity so the shift key is like a little tuggle that goes back and forth between the layers opacity and phil opacity or in the case of a paintbrush you see up here it has capacity and flow so if I wanted to change the flow then I would press shift and the number and the on like I said the only one that usually throws people off a little bit at first is well two things you have to make sure you're telling photoshopped which are you changing by which jj tool you have active in other words if I want to change the layer opacity right now it won't happen because my paintbrush is active and because the paintbrush also has a pass it'll think that's what I want to change so it was a habit I pressed the for the move tool which is a non painting tool now I can press zero and get our shift zero for the philip ass ity and seven for the opacity and so on so one of things that happens in photo shop is different fields where you khun change information have a focus on them or not depending on what tool you have so as long as I have a non painting tool active then I'm able to change this on the fly and later on we'll talk about another little change to this that was introduced some versions of photo shop aco one of the challenges is that over the last little while of course there've been a number of different changes two versions of photo shop and I can't honestly tell you any more at what stage certain things were introduced because it's just become a blur of photos offers but the bottom line is when we get to some of these functions tried on your version if it doesn't work then that will pretty much tell you you don't have the right person for that jim we wanted just not open that can of worms should probably talk about that for one second about versions of photo shop for yeah I think that would be a fantastic thing to do and we actually had a question about it just how much is going to be covered and then maybe if you could touch upon the the two thousand fourteen out there that's a little bit confusing yeah okay well I am using the very latest version because in my job I need to always be up to date with everything first of all will say that the a vast majority of everything and talk about in this two days of advanced techniques is fairly generic to multiple versions of photo shop so if you have I can't put a number on it but say ccs six for sure maybe c s five maybe even see us for some of these things work when I show things that are unique two on lee this latest version of photo shop cc two thousand fourteen I will mention it that this is a new feature one of things that so ever by now unless you're living in a cave you know creative cloud is the thing where this is how we get our software but up until recently creative cloud has just been viewed by most people I think as a way to get access to their software and get regular updates at adobe max a couple of weeks ago adobe introduced some new things with the very latest version of photoshopped that now create some interesting options that are beyond just a way to get your software for example there is an app that I may or may not show tomorrow if I get my act together there's an app for currently only for the iphone called they'll be brushed cc where you can take a photograph of any texture or anything you see and it makes it into a brush automatically in the next time you open photo shop is already there as opposed to what we used to have to go through to make brushes so that's where creative cloud is a little bit has started to expand it and mohr than just a way to quote read your software unquote so photoshopped the creative clouds about for a while with in two thousand fourteen adobe ran into some situations where they decided to make some significant changes where with some of the technology that was available certain photoshopped functions didn't work anymore so instead of just suddenly one day updating everyone software going oh sorry that that function doesn't work anymore they decided we're going to keep for a shop cc and then within create this version called twenty fourteen which is a different installation up until now he just went check for updates and updated your existing software when you have photo shop see see if you update to twenty fourteen it's actually a complete difference dilation of two different versions of photo shop on your machine which is fine but the reason they do that is because some of the functionality for example there was a cool filter called oil pink that some people use in twenty fourteen that no longer works because of the something that happened behind the scenes so instead of just removing completed they said that's one of the reasons the motivation behind keeping cc and a new installation of twenty fourteen s so you you need to you can go back to that filter and that's just one example there's a few things like that that people have for example certain filters they use that as an extension that don't now work in twenty fourteen part of the reason I matter obviously don't work for adobe so I don't know their motivation but I know ultimately their goal is to make photoshopped run better so something they did under the hood to make photo shop run better meant broke a connection with a few things that an older versions of photo shop and it seems I ought to call photoshopped cc older but let's be real it is the good news is that like in adobe max introduced several new things that I'm already just completely over head over heels in love with like the library function is amazing because now you can have a library that you sync automatically between for those of us that you's foolish often illustrator for example or thes apse on a phone and they show up in your right in your panel that's pretty cool so getting back to the original point though and the reason I brought this whole thing up is that the majority of things I don't talk about it doesn't really matter of your version of photo shop and the bottom line is if you see something you think that looks pretty cool to me try it and see it should work but if it doesn't do certain things that may tell you while you're still using a photo shop cs five which is now I don't know how many years old that is or c s six which is still now a few years old and in our world of technology things moved pretty fast especially with creative cloud but I promise you that most things I'll talk about should work is that enough of a disclaimer that that's awesome on dh just don't be provide a list of the things that are different and each of you and that's one thing that I got to get really good credit for because they never did yeah now I'm ready to go to adobe dot com and click on a product it'll say new in this version on you scroll down before that we added this before that so you can actually start we're gonna look back and go when was this added or what the difference is if if I'm debating should I update to the latest version of one of my gaming's maybe losing it's usually gaining is only this this has been the first time it's actually been a relative significant will now you no longer have this function because of the way it's built under the hood