I’ve been doing quite a bit of photo retouching this past week, and in the process realized that I wasn’t being as efficient in my workflow as i could. I decided to consciously seek out the single-keystroke shortcuts for those tools that I was using the most. Here they are, in no particular order:
- J= healing brush
- B= paint brush
- V= move (the crosshair arrows at the very top of the tools palette)
- L= lasso
- M= marquee
- G= gradient
- P= paths
Now, I realize that these are pretty basic, and that there are many more single-key shortcuts (and we’re not even getting into multi-key shortcuts, like image or canvas sizing), but I’m willing to bet that a lot of us out there suffer from this same condition of convenience, and just move the mouse/pen over to the specific tool on the palette, thinking that in the short run that one step really makes no discernible difference. Whether it does or not is another matter, and entirely up to you to decide.
I, for one, plan on continuing to use these and try to make my workflow a tiny bit more efficient.
