The Photoshop Productivity Series: Customizing Photoshop

Customizing Tool Shortcuts

Here’s another example of changing keyboard shortcuts: tool shortcuts. Every major tool in Photoshop has a single letter shortcut you can press to activate the tool. Many are very logical such as C for Crop, M for Marquee, L for Lasso, B for Brush, and T for Type. Others require you to stretch your imagination a bit, such as I for Eyedropper, W for Magic Wand, and O for Dodge.

You’re not likely to want to change many of the tool shortcuts, but there’s one function in the toolbox I always wished had a shortcut and that’s the Color Picker. I use the Color Picker many times a day, and was very happy to see that, as of Photoshop CS5, you can assign a single-letter keyboard shortcut to open the Color Picker. Once again, ...