33 Adobe Photoshop Shortcuts for Designers

Learning Photoshop shortcuts is an excellent way to improve the efficiency of your workflow. Rather than provide a long list of all the shortcuts, I have picked out a useful selection that you can learn as a starting point.

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Try to practice with a couple of these every week and you’ll be using Photoshop like a boss in no time!

For further reading, I have written companion posts for Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, and macOS.

General Tricks

Action	Mac	Win
Increase/Decrease brush size	] / [	] / [
Increase/Decrease brush hardness	} / {	} / {
New Layer as a copy	Cmd + J	Ctrl + J
Temp. select Hand Tool	Spacebar	Spacebar
Cycle through open documents	Cmd + Tab	Ctrl + Tab
Create new Layer	Cmd + Shift + N	Ctrl + Shift + N

Tools

Action	Mac	Win
Move	V	V
Marquee	M	M
Lasso	L	L
Magic Wand	W	W
Crop	C	C
Eyedropper	I	I
Spot Healing Brush	J	J
Brush	B	B
Eraser	E	E
Gradient	G	G
Dodge	O	O
Type	T	T
Hand	H	H
Zoom	Z	Z
Cycle through hidden tools	Option + click on tool	Alt + click on tool
Cycle through hidden tools	Hold Shift and press the corresponding key above	Hold Shift and press the corresponding key above

Adjustments

Action	Mac	Win
Curves	Cmd+M	Ctrl+M
Levels	Cmd+L	Ctrl+L

Selections

Action	Mac	Win
Move selection x1 unit	Arrow keys	Arrow keys
Move selection x10 units:	Shift + Arrow keys	Shift + Arrow keys
Add to selection:	Shift	Shift
Subtract from selection:	Option	Alt
Feather selection:	Shift+F6	Shift+F6
Select opaque pixels on layer:	Cmd + click on layer panel	Ctrl + click on layer panel