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10 tips to maximize efficiency in Photoshop

by Tom Lynch - Articles, Tutorials

We all have to do a lot of things, so every split second you may save by not having to drag that mouse across the table, in fact, counts! Today Tom presents a few tips on how to make working in Photoshop more efficient. Read on and save time!

I’m sure any of you who have used Photoshop have spent a lot of time working on individual designs or layouts etc. What I aim to do today is to give you 10 techniques and tips to help you cut down that time by maximizing your efficiency. You can use these techniques in pretty much everything you do in Photoshop

One – Keyboard Shortcuts

Pure and simple, learning, using and setting your own keyboard shortcuts will save you endless amounts of time in your designs. For one or two simple actions, it will save you a few seconds, but over the course of a full project, you can save yourself a fair amount of time

So, if you hover over the tools in the toolbar, you will see a letter pop up in brackets, for example, the pen tool. If you hold your mouse over that for a second, you will see this “Pen Tool (P)”. You should be aware, that instead of clicking the icon in the toolbar, pressing P will also whip out the pen tool. Over time these will become second nature to you, and you’ll be using them without a second thought.
There are some tools that you have to click and hold another option to find, for example to alternate between the Blur, Sharpen and Smudge tools. To alternate through these options, hold down the shift key and press the corresponding shortcut key, each press will cycle through to the next tool

Now of course, there is an inordinately large amount of tools and options available in Photoshop, some of which do not have a shortcut already assigned. However, being the cunning designers we are, this won’t stop us. You can change any preset keyboard shortcut you like, as well as adding any new ones for existing functions. To do this, go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts (or you can use it’s own shortcut Ctrl + Alt +
Shift + K). From here you will see a dialogue box which allows you to go through all the menu options and set/change shortcuts for anything

Two – The Actions Tab

The actions tab is, in my opinion, one of the most under-used tools that Photoshop has to offer. It can be used to replicate any actions you need to perform as many times as you like. For example, if you have 50 images that you want to resize to 200 x 200 pixels, doing that on it’s own will take a long time to do. Using the actions tab you can simply record one action of you resizing an image, then just click that each time you want to resize an image. It is a huge time saver, and getting to know it will save you a massive amount of time.

You can see from the image above what the actions looks like, and it’s main buttons. To record an action, hit the New Action button and give it a suitable name. From there your action will automatically start recording, and every action you perform will be recorded, so if you resize something to 100px square, it will remember that. If you then move it 50px to the right, it will record that. Once you’ve finished hit stop and you can start the fun. Ordinarily, you used the actions on a particular layer, change the selected layer, and hit play on your action. Step back and see all that hard work done for you!

Three – Guides and Smart Guides

These are more useful in the web design field. Any of you that have designed a web page in Photoshop will appreciate that when the content is lined up nicely with the other elements it looks a lot nicer than when it’s just random. Guides make this task a lot easier. If you have the rulers set up on your workspace (which I highly recommend) then all you need do is choose your move tool and drag out from the side or top ruler, to bring a guide line out. By lining these up with the edges of elements you can line up your page perfectly. You may find also that elements will snap to your guides, making it nice and easy. To hide these, just hit Ctrl + H and they will disappear, same again will bring them back

Even better than guides, are smart guides! That’s right, these ones are smart, keep an eye on these. Back to business however, in order to use the smart guides, you first have to turn them on. To do this, go to View > Show then choose Smart Guides. Now, in order to demonstrate how these work, you need to create two shapes. Go ahead and make two layers and draw a shape on each one, completely irrelevant what they are, but it lets me explain to you the process. Once you’ve enabled the smart guides, drag one shape so that it seems to be level with the other shape. Once two edges are in line, a smart guide will pop up showing you it is aligned on the edge, or centrally. These are
brilliant for aligning content without cluttering your page up with guides

Four – Smart Filters and Smart Objects

Sticking with the smart theme, we move on to smart objects and filters. I’m sure you’ve run a sharpen filter, or blur on an object and thought later on that you wished you could reduce the effect a little, but of course you’ve got new layers above that, and it’s too far to hit Undo. Well have no fear, smart objects and filters will save you here. Right click on the layer in question and select ‘Convert to Smart Object’. This will change the layer icon to the one you see below. If you then try blurring it or sharpening it, the box will appear in the same way as before, but once you hit Ok, you will see the filter on the layer. From here you can double click the filter and edit the settings. You can do this any time you like once you have used the effect, saving you endless amounts of time redoing certain elements of your work

Five – Styles

If you’ve not used layer styles in Photoshop, you’ve either had it for 5 minutes, or you’re not using it properly. I’m sure you know that double clicking on a layer, will bring up a big list of options to style the layer with, things like Drop Shadows, Glows, Bevels and much much
more. Though I’m not trying to sell Layer Styles here, just one option of it, the save option. If you have an effect you want to use on a lot of areas of your image/design, you can save the style and use it anywhere else you like at the click of a mouse. Click the ‘New Style’ button to save your style, just give it a name, and hit ok.

Once you’ve saved your style, you can select it from the styles palette on the workspace. Select your layer, and then just click the relevant style to apply it to that layer. If you don’t know what or where the styles palette is, it looks something like this;

Six – Alternative Tool Options

A lot of tools, have more options than it seems. One very useful one, is the alternative options on the move tool. Select it by hitting V and you will see this pop up at the top of the screen

The image may look slightly blurred, it was resized to fit the screen properly. The tools to the right hand side, allow you to align layers by their tops, or centers etc or even to evenly space items. I’d strongly advise experimenting with these until you know how they work. They can be used in countless different situations, which I can vouch for myself, using them in all sorts of things.

Seven – Groups

A very simple one, but a huge time saver in larger works. If you’re designing anything, put similar layers into groups, it will help you later on if you need to find layers, saving you lots of time that could be used working on other things. As we all know, time is money.
As an example, one of my pieces in particular has just under 500 layers. To find an individual layer on a piece with that many layers is an amazing task, unless like me, you have named each layer and grouped them in logical groups

Eight – Saving Tool Settings

This is similar to the 5th point I mentioned, about saving styles. Another thing you probably have all done is altered the settings on a brush, or on the eraser or perhaps the smudge tool. And sometimes these settings can be hard to reproduce if you want to recreate the original style/effect. So what we can do to remedy this, is save our settings as a tool preset. I will demonstrate this with the brush tool, take a look at the image below, which shows where the option to save the settings is. From there it’s rather self explanatory, just name the preset and hit ok. After that you can find your settings in the presets option on the tool settings

Nine – Organizing Your Workspace

A lot of people are happy to stick with the standard workspace, although if you sit back and think about it, I bet you don’t use the majority of the functions that are already on the workspace. I say this, even I have windows like Histogram and Info open on the workspace,
which I either rarely use or never use at all. In fact, I believe I’ve only used the Info box once, and the Swatches palette a couple of times for some clothing designs. My main point here is that there are windows for things that you most likely use a lot. Therefore, to maximize your
efficiency when using Photoshop it’s a good idea to save a new workspace with your custom windows. Also, if you go to Window > Workspace you will see a set of preset workspaces at the bottom. These are specifically designed by Photoshop’s internal genius people to have the crucial tools at the front for certain tasks, such as Color and Tonal Correction and Web Design, which give you the best tools for those applications.

Ten – External Plugins

Lastly, there are a wealth of plugins out there that can assist you in touching up old photos, smoothing out grainy photos or just resizing images etc. One such plugin I use is called Topaz Vivacity from the guys at Topaz Labs. It does a great job of reducing noise, sharpening images and adding a nice gentle feel to certain parts. Now I can reproduce the effect by using Photoshop’s preset filters, but it’s a long and laborious effort, so this plugin helps enormously. Lots are either free or inexpensive, the Topaz filter being the latter, when I purchased it it was less than $50. So do look around and see if there’s a plugin around that could just help you out a little.

So hopefully there’s something in there that will save you guys a lot of time when you’re using Photoshop, any questions on any of the stuff mentioned above, then please feel free to visit my site via the link above and get in touch with me. Otherwise leave a comment here and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible with an answer.