Speed Up Your Photoshop Workflow

If you’re a designer, the quality of your work must be paired with a reasonable amount of time for its completion. Working under tight deadlines and the competition on the market are just a few factors that should convince you that speed is important. And then, if you can do the same work in less time, it means you can use the gained time more effectively: for planning, for self-promotion or even for some fun!

Here are a few useful tips that you can use to speed up your Photoshop workflow:

1. Use Shortcuts

The best and easiest thing you can do to work faster is to use as many shortcuts as possible. You probably are familiar with Ctrl + S and Ctrl + Z, Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V, but you could do so much more! You can use shortcuts for all the menu commands and for all the tools, and more. Whenever a menu command doesn’t have a shortcut assigned to it, you can define one with Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts (Alt + Shift + Ctrl + K, to be true to our statements).

Above: I have set my own keyboard shortcuts for the Shadow/Highlights and the Exposure command under Image > Adjustments. Also, I have reassigned the CTRL + P command from printing (which I rarely do, since I design mostly for the web) to the Photo Filter adjustment, which I use a lot more often.

Some of the best time-saving tools are those for navigation inside your document:

• Hold down the Spacebar key to make the hand tool temporarily active and drag into your document;
• Use Ctrl + Spacebar + Click anywhere in your document where you want to zoom in;
• Add Alt to the previous shortcut (Ctrl + Alt + Spacebar + Click) to zoom out.

You can use these in the middle of painting, selecting, erasing, anything except for typing (true for most shortcuts), and once you release the spacebar key you are back to your previous tool.
My most used tool shortcuts (I can tell these by how faded the paint is on these much abused keys on my keyboard!)

• V – the move tool (remember it by the resemblance of the letter V with the arrow)
• C – the crop tool
• B - the brush tool
• P – the pen tool
• S – the stamp tool
• G – the gradient tool

Easy to remember, aren’t they?
Photoshop has a series of other shortcuts that aren’t related to a tool or a menu command, which means you can’t really read them in a tool tip. Here are some of my favorites:

• Alt + click and drag to duplicate an object and position it in a different location (to simply duplicate a layer, hit Ctrl + J)
• Ctrl + T for the transform controls. Then you can right click to have access to all the command from under Edit > Transform, including the very useful flip horizontal/vertical. To freely transform your object, Ctrl + click and drag on any corner of the transform controls (watch for the cursor to change from black to white before dragging).
• Ctrl + Alt + Shift + E: this works when you have selected the top most (visible) layer in the Layers palette, and it places a snapshot of your image on a separate layer at the top (it’s like saving a flat version of your comp and bringing it back into the comp as a layer).

For a comprehensive list of very cool and useful shortcut tricks, read this article at Web Design Wall.

2. Reuse your settings

When working with images of the same kind (as it happens often when retouching or preparing images for web), it’s very likely that you’ll need to use the same filter or adjustment with the same or close to same parameters. Then why start from the default values when you can fine tune from the previous settings?
How? Easily: use the Alt key in combination with any shortcut for adjustments or for filters. For instance, if your most recently used filter was Gaussian Blur, you can hit Ctrl + Alt + F to bring up the Gaussian Blur dialog with the setting you last used already filled in. Or, for Hue/Saturation, for instance, just hit Ctrl + Alt + U if you need to make similar adjustments with those used last time you applied Hue/Saturation.
Don’t have a shortcut for the adjustment you want to reuse? Click on the adjustment in the menu and press Alt while it’s opening (you might need a little exercise to “catch” it – if you press Alt before you click the menu option, you will close the menu).

And of course, you can always save presets for adjustments you need to apply to multiple images.