Selecting Colors from an Image Quickly To turn any color into the foreground color Press I to activate the Eyedropper Tool and then click on any color in your image. To turn that color into the background color, press the ALT Key and click on any color in your image.



Change Brush Tip Sizes Quickly If you wish to change your brush tip size you can, with any brush selected, press the Right Bracket Key "]" in order to increase the size of the brush tip, or you can press the Left Bracket Key "[" to decrease the size of the brush tip.

The Move Tool & The Arrow Keys Get in the habit of calling up the Move Tool with the keyboard shortcut, which is the letter V. Also, once the Move Tool is active you can use your Keyboard Arrow Keys to nudge a layer or selection in 1 pixel increments. To speed things up, Press Shift along with an arrow key to nudge in 10 pixel increments.

Hide Your Palettes Press Tab once to hide all your palettes. Press Tab again to bring them back. Press Shift+Tab to hide all your palettes except the toolbar.

Zooming In & Zooming Out You can zoom in on your image by pressing CTRL and the plus sign "+" (Mac: Command and the "+" sign). Conversely you can zoom out by pressing CTRL and the minus sign "-" (Mac: Command and the "-"sign).

Navigating In Magnified Images If you are magnifying your image using the zoom tool and lose your bearings you can jump quickly to specific views using the following shortcuts: To change the view to the top left hand corner of your screen or image press the Home Key. You will want to press the End Key to set the view to the bottom right hand corner of your image. To move the view down one full screen view press the Page Down Key. Press CTRL+Page Down (Mac: Command +Page Down) to move the screen view one full screen to the right. Press CTRL+Page Up (Mac: Command +Page Up) to move the screen view one full screen to the left.

Selecting Just the Pixels in a Layer One easy way to highlight an object that is contained on a transparent layer is to press the Control Key (Mac: Command key) and then click on the layer that contains the object in the Layers Palette. Doing it this way ensures that only the visible pixels will be highlighted.

Tile Images for Better Visibility When open multiple files simultaneously in Photoshop they automatically cascade and it can be quite difficult to find the particular image you are looking for within all of the overlapping files. To avoid this problem you can choose Window> Arrange> Tile and all of your open files will rearrange themselves to be visible all at once. When you're ready to close the windows you don't have to spend time closing them individually, instead use the Close All shortcut Control+Option+W (Mac: Command+Alt+W).

Getting Rid Of the Welcome Screen - And Bringing It Back When you first open Photoshop CS you will probably see a Welcome Screen that has links to Tutorials, Tips and Tricks, and a set of Color Management Help Files. At some point you might want to stop this screen from coming up. You should see a check box at the bottom of the screen that you can click to hide the screen at startup. Later on, if you change your mind and decide that you want to have it show up again, you can temporarily bring the screen back by clicking under the Help menu and choosing Welcome Screen.

Cycle through All of Your Open Documents At some point you may want to find one of your open documents that are hidden on your toolbar. You can easily press Control-Tab repeatedly (MAC and PC) to cycle through all of your open documents and switch between them.