Photoshop has several hundred keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps forty of them make a real difference to how fast you work, and the rest are noise. This sheet is those forty, arranged the way you work rather than alphabetically: tools first, then layers, then selections and masks, then adjustments, then view and export.

It is one page, designed to be printed and pinned next to the screen or kept open on a second monitor. Windows and macOS keys are shown side by side, so it works in a mixed studio.

What is on it

  • Tools — the single-letter keys for move, marquee, lasso, object selection, crop, brush, clone stamp, gradient, type, pen, zoom and hand, plus the modifier that cycles through hidden tools.
  • Layers — duplicate, new layer, group, clipping mask, stamp visible, and moving a layer up and down the stack without touching the panel.
  • Selections and masks — deselect, reselect, inverse, feather, Quick Mask, loading a layer as a selection, and viewing a mask on its own.
  • Brushes — size and hardness from the keyboard, opacity from the number keys, and the drag gesture that resizes and re-hardens in one movement.
  • Adjustments — Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation and Desaturate, and the modifier that opens them as adjustment layers instead of destructive edits.
  • Transform — free transform, transform again, and the modifiers for distort, skew and perspective.
  • View — fit on screen, 100 per cent, hide extras, and the space bar trick every retoucher uses without thinking.
  • Save and export — Save As, Export As and Image Size, so exporting stops being a menu hunt.

A sample of what you get

  • Ctrl/Cmd + J — duplicate the current layer, or copy the current selection to a new layer.
  • Ctrl/Cmd + Alt/Option + Shift + E — stamp all visible layers to a new merged layer on top, leaving the originals intact.
  • [ and ] — decrease and increase brush size. Add Shift for hardness.
  • Alt/Option + click on a mask thumbnail — view the mask on its own, which is the fastest way to find the grey patch spoiling an edge.
  • Q — toggle Quick Mask, so you can paint a selection with a brush instead of fighting the lasso.

How to use it properly

Do not try to learn forty shortcuts. Choose three that match something you do repeatedly, use only those for a week, then choose three more. Speed in Photoshop comes from a small number of keys used constantly, not from memorising the panel menus.

The sheet reflects the default keyboard set in current Creative Cloud versions. If your studio uses a customised set, print it, mark your changes on it by hand and keep that copy.

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