25 Photoshop Tips and Tricks That Will Improve Your Workflow

On this video tutorial photographer Nathaniel Dodson (from the website tutvid) demonstrates 25 tips & tricks that will help make your photo better easily.

This is a long video and Dodson was kind enough to give us a table of contents and we added a few notes:
00:14 1. Bird’s Eye View – just hold H and move the mouse and click where you want to see a zoom of that location in your image.
00:36 2. Painting selections – press Q to make a quick selection and press Q again to set it as in.
01:29 3. Sticky (temporary) tools – press and hold the latter to any tool in Photoshop and it will go to it but only temporary and when you stop pressing it you will go back to the tool that you had before.
02:10 4. Overscrolling – useful tip in the Photoshop preferences you can mark “overscrolling” and then you can move your image so that you can work on any part in the center of your view without zooming in.
03:00 5. Blank blend layers – pick an adjustment layer to your image and just change the blend mode (even without changing it at all) and you can play with the opacity to get a bigger or smaller effect.
03:35 6. Opacity hotkeys – just click the number on your keyboard when you are using a brush (1 = 10%, 2=20% and so on – 0 = 100%, clicking 46 quickly will give you 46%). Shift and a number will change the percentage of the flow. You can do the same with the layer opacity (just use the move tool)
05:24 7. Move selections – You can move the selections you make by pressing the mouse and the spacebar and moving the selection across your image to a new location.
05:49 8. Rubberbanding the Pen tool – in the pen tool, you can use the cogwheel on the upper bar and check rubber band this will give you an easier way to set your points (plus you can move than with by holding the spacebar).
06:48 9. Smoothing for brushes – this makes the brush (well you guessed it) a little bit smoother you can change the amount and there are a few options in the cog that you can play with to see how they affect your brush as well.
07:32 10. Instant image export – in the file export file format you can choose what your quick export file type is and then just right click on the layer and choose quick export. You can even choose a default library to quickly save it to without asking you – this can be super fast for quick workflows.
08:20 11. Export multiple layers as an image – just group all your layers and you can quickly export all of them as a single jpeg.
08:50 12. Duplicate anything – the alt is used to duplicate anything just press it and drag and drop a layer or effect.
09:33 13. Straighten images with the ruler – you can use the roller and the straighten layer and fix it with the crop tool and straighten the layer.
10:01 14. Straighten perspective in seconds – in the camera raw filter and click the transform tool and choose guided and paint what will be the vertical and horizontal lines and Photoshop will straighten it again.
11:43 15. Fill type, shape, and fill layers –  you can text and vector shapes with alt and space by choosing the layer and selecting the color you want with the eyedropper and pressing Alt + delete (when the text layer is selected) and you change the color immediately.
12:52 16. Merge selected layers to a new layer – CTRL+Shift+ALT+E – this will merge down all visible layers. If you choose specific layers CTRL+ALT+E will marge only them down.
13:48 17. Healing edges – using the healing brush start with the edge and sample as close to it as possible to avoid problems (you can drop the diffusion to 1 in the top bar).
15:00 18. Color replacement – you can use the color replacement brush (in the different brush options) to change a specific color.
16:05 19. Isolate a single layer – if you are working with many layers and you want to quickly view only one – just choose the layer that you want to see and click the alt and the eyeball and it will show you just that layer – click again and you are back to viewing all the layers.
16:25 20. Switching document hotkeys – CTRL+TAB on mac and windows will move between images forward and CTRL+shift+TAB will go backward.
16:51 21. Copying layers – select the layers you want to copy and paste them into a different image.
17:14 22. Temporary rotations – press R and with the mouse you can rotate the image to work on it from a different angle you can get back to the original view with the reset view option on the top bar.
17:56 23. Hidden scrubby sliders – just hover on the latter/icon next to a tool that has a percentage bar and you can change it (using ALT will move those number slowly and shift – fast).
18:54 24. Gray point eyedropper – if you need to fix white balance quickly there are many tools that have the middle grey option and by choosing it and clicking on a 50% grey part of your image (if it has one) you can fix the white balance of the image.
19:47 25. The banana tool – this is just a funny easter egg – go to the 3 dots under the magnifying glass tool and right-click edit and shift-click done and you get a banana tool (it doesn’t do anything just a funny hidden easter egg).
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This isn’t the first time that Dodson does this sort of list – in the past we published his 10 Best and Worst Things in Photoshop CC and his 31 Hidden Hotkeys in Photoshop CC and more recently 10 Things You Never Knew About Photoshop CC and 10 Fast Photoshop Tricks to Improve Any Photo.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section. You can also check Dodson’s previous videos here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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