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This one is an oldie but a goodie, and a lot of you know it already but
for those of you don't, again this is a catch-up to get everyone on the same page.
Every tool in Photoshop has a letter assigned to it that you can just tap on
your keyboard to switch to that tool. So you don't have to disrupt what you are
doing in the middle of an image, come all the way over here to left hand side
and start clicking and hunting and pecking for the tool icon that you are
looking for. Just press the letter to switch to the tool that you are thinking about.
So for instance, the M key gives you the Marquee tool. If you type the L key,
that's Lasso. If you type the W key, that's the Magic Wand tool. C for Crop,
I for Eyedropper, and so on. Most of them make sense. Every once in a while
there is a wild card, like J is the Healing Brush and you are like, what the
heck, why is it J? And that's how you actually remember it. It's an oddball.
So B for Brush, S for Stamp, E for Eraser, G for Gradient, R for Rotate, O for
Dodge and Burn, P for the Pen tool, T for the Text tool.
The point is you don't need to memorize them right now by watching this movie.
Just know that the concept is there, if you didn't already know that.
And more important, if you hover over a tool and wait for a second, it gives you a
tool tip telling you the name of the tool and also gives you its letter
shortcut in the tool tip. So pick these up as you go along, if you haven't
memorized them already. They really accelerate how you work with the
product. You will also notice that a lot of the tools have additional tools in
their slot. You can tell that by the little tiny triangle on the bottom right hand
corner of that tool slot. So for instance, in the Marquee tool, there is actually
more than one Marquee tool. There is the Elliptical Marquee tool, the
Rectangular Marquee tool, and a couple of other oddball ones there.
Under the Lasso tool, there is three different Lasso tools. And you see that
they all have the same letter for that tool slot. So for instance, the Lasso
tools have L. You will notice that if I hit L more than one time, the tool is
not changing because by default, if your tool has more than one tool in its slot,
you need to hold down the Shift key to cycle through those additional tools.
So I'll do that. Shift+L, now I have the Polygonal Lasso tool.
Shift+L again, the Magnetic Lasso tool, Shift+L one more time takes me back to the
Regular Lasso tool. So again, if you see a tool have a little
triangle in its slot, hold down the Shift key to cycle through that tools
in the slot. If you don't like that requirement of holding down the Shift key,
you can actually change that. I'm going to open up my Preferences, it's
Command or Ctrl+K and right here in the General Preferences, that's this little check
box here that says Use Shift Key for Tool Switch.
And you can just turn that off and then click OK. And now just pressing L
will cycle you through the tools in that slot. Sometimes that's a better way. Sometimes it
gets in the way, because you don't realize that you are actually switching tools.
So, your choice. There you have it. Tool shortcuts really,
really accelerate how you work with the product. It's really kind of a cool thing. Your brain
just doesn't even think about the actual tool anymore. You just
automatically press the letter without even really thinking about it. So
there you go.