{"id":12868,"date":"2008-09-07T10:21:21","date_gmt":"2008-09-07T10:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2008\/09\/obscure-shortcut-tips-o-the-day.html"},"modified":"2008-09-07T10:21:21","modified_gmt":"2008-09-07T10:21:21","slug":"obscure_shortcut_tips_o_the_day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/07\/obscure_shortcut_tips_o_the_day\/","title":{"rendered":"Obscure shortcut tips o&#039; the day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">At Photoshop World this week, an attendee asked me why, after switching from Windows to Mac, she was having trouble changing layer blending modes via the keyboard.&#160; It turned out the choice of OS had nothing to do with it.&#160; Rather, she was missing a subtlety in how these shortcuts work: their target <em>depends on which tool is active<\/em>. <\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">&#160;<\/p>\n<ul style=\"margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n<li>With the Move tool (V) selected, you can:\n<ul style=\"margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n<li>change a layer&#8217;s blending mode by hitting Shift-plus\/minus, cycling forward\/backward through the available options;<\/li>\n<li>apply a specific mode via Shift-Opt\/Alt-letter (e.g. Shift-Opt-O for Overlay);<\/li>\n<li>change layer opacity by hitting number keys: &quot;5&quot; sets it to 50%, &quot;6&quot; to 60%, etc., while &quot;55&quot; sets it to 55%, &quot;66&quot; to 66%, and so on.&#160; (Insert joke about &quot;666&quot; erasing your hard drive.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>With other tools selected (Brush, Eraser, Gradient, Clone Stamp&#8211;anything that can be applied with its own blending and opacity options), these shortcuts apply <em>to the tool options<\/em> instead of to the layer.&#160; Therefore you can quickly alter your brush opacity by tapping the number keys, but to change the opacity of the layer, you&#8217;ll have to switch to the Move tool.<\/li>\n<li>For completeness I should point out that you could also switch to another tool that doesn&#8217;t have it&#8217;s own blending options, such as Crop, and have the shortcuts apply to the layer.&#160; Really, though, it&#8217;s easier to say that Move = layer, and brush = brush where these shortcuts are concerned. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">&#160;<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">Hopefully that&#8217;s of some value\/interest.&#160; For reference, here (bottom of the page) is a list of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sitepoint.com\/article\/photoshop-shortcuts-glance\/\">specific blending mode shortcuts<\/a>.&#160; For further geekery I recommend scoring a copy of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Photoshop-Power-Shortcuts-Michael-Ninness\/dp\/0735713316\">Photoshop Power Shortcuts book<\/a> on which I collaborated with Michael Ninness.&#160; Skim it and you&#8217;ll quickly see why finding shortcuts for new functions in PS is, ah, non-trivial. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Photoshop World this week, an attendee asked me why, after switching from Windows to Mac, she was having trouble changing layer blending modes via the keyboard.&#160; It turned out the choice of OS had nothing to do with it.&#160; Rather, she was missing a subtlety in how these shortcuts work: their target depends on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}