Good hotkey setup in PS?

jeremiah_bigley

How common is it for you guys to change your photoshop hotkeys?

There are a lot of hotkeys but just about everything takes 2 hands... And I am trying to switch things up but shortcuts in photoshop seem so limiting compared to what I am used to in 3ds max.

oh sorry you can't use that as a hotkey...
oh sorry you can't use alt for that set of functions.
oh sorry that would blow up photoshop if you changed that...

Anyone have suggestions for a good hotkey setup in photoshop? Creating Layers, Layer Masks, Leveling, Hue/Saturation, Cycling through layers without clicking on them...

pior

Yeah, it takes a bit of tweaking to get it to work but there are a few things you can do. I was actually thinking of writing a few things about that.

The hardcore way would be to write .JSX scripts performing the commands you want. Once they are put in the proper Presets folder, they show up at the bottom of the file menu and can be given regular shortcuts from the shortcuts assignment window.

You can also create actions for pretty much anything, including menu items (to do that, you have to enable menu item input from the action panel menu ; it then waits for you to hit a specific menu item that is not usually recorded by regular actions, like Zoom to fit, and so on.)

I personally record actions for the tool presets I use the most (brush presets combined with pressure and flow options), and assign these to the F keys, with the control and shift modifiers when needed. For instance, F3 is my black sharpie brush, F2 is my .5mm warm marker, ctrl F2 is thick paint, F10 is a bright value in overlay mode for airbrushed highlights, and so on. Super useful!

As for manipulating layers : I have move layer up/down set to ctrl [ and ctrl ] ; select higher/lower layer set to alt [ and alt ] ; and I am still looking for a shortcut to toggle the visibility of the currently selected layer (typing the opacity value is just annoying since it's not really a visibility option and would mean loosing the custom opacity value of a 30% layer for instance)

haiddasalami

O thats a nice workaround Pior! Definitely useful. Also might try and write a toggle for the visibility on Wednesday. Im probably going to be dead on tuesday lol. (all nighter sigh)

LoTekK

Had a few minutes, so here's a really simple layer toggle script

Create an action to load the script, bind to hotkey, and you're good to go.

If I have time later, I'll add a bit to have it show up properly in the File->Scripts menu if you've got the script in your presets/scripts folder.