The Suite Spot

Single Key Accelerators in Photoshop Discovering the keys on your keyboard that activate a particular tool is pretty straightforward – simply hover over the tool in the toolbox and you’ll see it in the tooltip that appears or when you click and hold on a nested toolset (like the marquee tools, for example) you’ll actually see the letter there. Some tools have the same shortcut, and you can cycle between them by adding the shift key (you can turn that behaviour – the need for the shift key – on and off in the preferences). Here are some of the shortcuts along with some suggestions for how you might remember those that aren’t so obvious; those that are followed by a letter I or Id mean that the shortcut is exactly the same … Read entire article »

Spring-loaded Tools in Photoshop Photoshop CS4 has a neat little function called Spring-Loaded Tools which can save you lots of time if you need to frequently switch between tools whilst working, provided you know the ‘quick keys’ or ‘Tool Shortcuts’  (they’re actually called single key accelerators) for the tools. Imagine for example, you’re drawing (with the Pencil tool) and you need to keep switching between that and the Eraser; you could hit E on your keyboard (to switch to the Eraser) do whatever it is you want to do and then hit B to return to the Pencil tool. Now in CS4, all you’d need to do is simply hold down the E key for the time you were using the Eraser and as soon as you release that key you’d be … Read entire article »