Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts
Photoshop | For what has seemed like centuries, Photoshop users have been clamoring for the ability to edit keyboard shortcuts. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that day has arrived. No longer does the healing brush have to rely on the letter J to summon it from its quarters. And the days of typing Ctrl+Shift+E (z -Option-E on the Mac) to merge all visible layers can be a thing of the past. Photoshop CS gives us the ability to simply and easily edit existing keyboard shortcuts, as well as assign shortcuts to commands that formerly had none. Choose Edit Keyboard Shortcuts to bring up the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box shown in Figure A-3. You can access this command also by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+K (z -Shift-Option-K on the Mac), which ironically is one of the most difficult and convoluted shortcuts in all of Photoshop. But not for long, if we deem it so. Feel the power! ![]() Figure A-3: Photoshop CS's new Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box lets you assign complicated and arcane shortcuts to commands you never even wanted to know existed. |
The Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box is quite easy to use. First, from the Set pop-up menu, select the collection of shortcuts to which you'd like to make edits. You can modify the default set or create new ones for different users or types of image- editing work. Use the three icons to the right of the Set pull-down menu to save the set, create a new set, or discard the entire set, respectively. From there, select a category from the Shortcuts For pop-up menu and then simply explore the various subsections in the list below. If you dig around enough, you can find almost every single command, function, and filter in the program.
To assign a new shortcut to a command, simply click in the blank area labeled Shortcut to the right of the command name and press the desired shortcut keys. If the command already has a keyboard shortcut assigned, click on it to highlight it, and then overwrite it. If you happen to enter a keyboard shortcut that is already assigned to another function in the program, Photoshop displays a warning at the bottom of the dialog box, as shown in Figure A-3, and gives you the option to accept or undo your changes. You can also use the buttons along the right side of the dialog box to save and discard changes, as well as add and delete shortcuts. Lastly, you can click the Summarize button to generate and display an HTML Web page that lists the currently active keyboard shortcuts.