• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Matt Doyle | Elated Communications

Web and WordPress Development

  • About Me
  • Blog
    • Design & Multimedia
      • Photoshop
      • Paint Shop Pro
      • Video & Audio
    • Online Marketing
      • E-Commerce
      • Social Media
    • Running a Website
      • WordPress
      • Apache
      • UNIX and Linux
      • Using FTP
    • Web Development
      • HTML
      • CSS
      • JavaScript
      • PHP
      • Perl and CGI Scripting
  • Portfolio
  • Contact Me
  • Hire Me
Home / Blog / Design & Multimedia / Photoshop / 10 Useful Photoshop Tips for Beginners

10 Useful Photoshop Tips for Beginners

5 September 2001 / Leave a Comment

Just starting out with Adobe Photoshop? Here are 10 handy tips to help you get up to speed.

1. Moving layers with the Control key

You don’t need to activate the Move tool to move layers around. Simply hold down the Control key (for Windows users) or the Command key (Mac users) and click and drag on your layer with the mouse:

Move with the Control key

2. Hiding the Palettes with the Tab key

Are the palettes getting in the way? You can hide them temporarily just by hitting the Tab key. To bring them back, press the Tab key again.

3. Selecting all pixels on a layer

To select all the opaque pixels on a layer (as opposed to using “Select All”, which selects the whole layer), hold down the Control key (Windows) or Command key (Mac), and click on the layer in the Layers Palette:

Select pixels on a layer

4. Double-click to open documents

To open a document in Photoshop, you don’t need to reach for the File > Open menu option or even press Control+O – you can just double-click on the grey Photoshop window background!

5. Dragging layers between documents

You can copy a layer from one document to another by clicking on it in the Layers palette and dragging it across to the second document window:

Drag layers between documents

6. Use Layer Sets

If you’re using Photoshop 6 or higher, check out Layer Sets. These let you organize your layers into folders – very useful if you have lots of layers in a document! To create a new Layer Set, click on the folder icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, then drag layers on top of a layer set to add them to the set:

Layer sets

7. Full screen mode

If you’re working on a large image such as a photo, you can maximize the available editing area by pressing the F key to toggle between a full screen mode with and without menu bar, and normal editing mode. If you also use tip number 2 above, and the tool shortcut keys, you can do a lot of your work without a menu or palette in sight!

8. Nudging

You can get precise control over the position of your layers by using the arrow keys on the keyboard to nudge the layer around. Hold down the Control key (Windows) or the Command key (Mac) and use the up, down, left and right arrows to move the layer 1 pixel at a time. To move the layer by 10 pixels at a time, hold down the Shift key as well.

9. Choosing colours quickly

Press I to bring up the Eyedropper tool, then click on a colour in your image to make that colour the foreground colour. Press the ALT key and click to make the colour the background colour instead.

You can also press the D key to reset the foreground and background colours to the default (black and white), and the X key to swap the foreground and background colours.

10. Keeping to straight lines

You can often constrain movement of the mouse to the nearest 45-degree or 90-degree angle by holding down the Shift key while you click and drag with the mouse. This works on tools such as the Paintbrush Tool, Line Tool and Move Tool. Great for drawing straight lines!

Keeping to straight lines

Filed Under: Photoshop Tagged With: Photoshop, shortcuts, time-savers, tricks

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To include a block of code in your comment, surround it with <pre> ... </pre> tags. You can include smaller code snippets inside some normal text by surrounding them with <code> ... </code> tags.

Allowed tags in comments: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong> <pre> .

Primary Sidebar

Hire Matt!

Matt Doyle headshot

Need a little help with your website? I have over 20 years of web development experience under my belt. Let’s chat!

Matt Doyle - Codeable Expert Certificate

Hire Me Today

Call Me: +61 2 8006 0622

Stay in Touch!

Subscribe to get a quick email whenever I add new articles, free goodies, or special offers. I won’t spam you.

Subscribe

Recent Posts

  • Make a Rotatable 3D Product Boxshot with Three.js
  • Speed Up Your WordPress Website: 11 Simple Steps to a Faster Site
  • Reboot!
  • Wordfence Tutorial: How to Keep Your WordPress Site Safe from Hackers
  • How to Make Awesome-Looking Images for Your Website

Footer

Contact Matt

  • Email Me
  • Call Me: +61 2 8006 0622

Follow Matt

  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Copyright © 1996-2023 Elated Communications. All rights reserved.
Affiliate Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Service T&C | Credits