We offer a rather wide breadth of Photoshop coverage on SLRL, because Photoshop is a photo resource like no other, and is so capable and complex that even the more experienced Photoshop users can do with a little help, or suggestion for a higher level of use.
When I’m asked, and it’s often, what one could do to improve their Photoshop usage, whether it be in technique, efficiency etcetera, the first thing I will tell them typically, is to get a Wacom tablet. It is, without question, the best way I know of to entirely change how you use Photoshop, and change your Photoshop output. There really is no substitute for this.
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One of the next things I mention, is to make shortcuts so familiar they become second nature; simply an extension of your mind, and triggered via muscle memory. Now, shortcuts will speed up a workflow and your mental space, but Photoshop’s use and ability is so vast, you’ll never remember them all. Enter Cheetyr: a web resource that aims to solve this.
Cheetyr, is a web resource that is essentially, a searchable database of almost every Photoshop shortcut in existence. Broken down into intuitive headings (tools, changing view, selecting & moving, images and layers, opacity, and general), any Cheetyr user can quickly scroll through the entire library of shortcuts, or use the search function that works quite well to reduce the options and highlighting applicable ones to your query.
Thoughts
The interface is super clean, and easy to navigate. Like the interface, the actual resource is very focused and minimalistic, and it’s actually a developing project which is continually added to.
[REWIND: Photoshop Playbook: Image File Formats Explained: When To Save As What]
The price for this simplification is that it may leave you wanting more. When I use Cheetyr, I have it open in a new tab or window which means it’s open for a lot of my time. Having to use it so often makes you want more from it, and I would like to see simple additions like the ability to create a shortlist of favorites, and actually for them to develop a database for Lightroom. Currently Cheetyr also has lists for shortcuts for Illustrator, CSS, Git, and Vim. Check it out here.
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bookmarked
very useful!
Why no Lightroom?
I love it bookmarking it!
same here bookmarking this one
definitely bookmarking this one too…
Bookmarked that one, thanks
Brings back memories of the old WordPerfect keyboard template cards, that does. (And speaking of “I’m old”, learning the three or four new hot keys in each new release of Ps was a lot easier than learning all of them at once in the newer versions would be. If it seems hard, blame your parents and grandparents; they *could* have scheduled you much earlier, when things were still easy.) Realistically, though, if you can learn the shortcuts for your 20 most-used features, you can eliminate over 80% of your non-painting/drawing mousing around (and the mental workflow interruptions that go with it), and anything that has more than one “moving part” that you do more than two or three times a day really needs to be an action. (I have actions that (barely) give me time to go get a fresh cup of coffee, but anyone who’s been around me before, say, 2:00 in the afternoon can tell you that three minutes getting coffee is a much more productive use of my time than a half-hour devoted to the tedious by-the-numbers setting-up of a standard layer set.)
I’ve been using this one for a while now; http://waldobronchart.github.io/ShortcutMapper/#AdobePhotoshop
Cheetyr looks like it would be a bit easier to find what you need perhaps.