71 Photoshop shortcuts you need to know

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Working with your images

We love Clipping Masks. Does that make us weird? DOES IT?! Ok. Fair enough

44. Levels

MAC: Cmd+L
WINDOWS: Ctrl+L

When editing your images, you'll be using the Levels box regularly. Save yourself some time with this Photoshop shortcut.

45. Free Transform

MAC: Cmd+T
WINDOWS: Ctrl+T

This command opens Photoshop's Free Transform tool for resizing, rotating, and skewing an image using a draggable outline.

46. Curves

MAC: Cmd+M
WINDOWS: Ctrl+M

This Photoshop shortcut enables you to quickly edit the Curves on an image.

47. Colour Balance

MAC: Cmd+B
WINDOWS: Ctrl+B

This is the perfect Photoshop shortcut to edit the Colour Balance of your images.

48. Hue/Saturation

MAC: Cmd+U
WINDOWS: Ctrl+U

These two powerful Photoshop tools will aid you in the colour balance battle, and decrease the amount of crossover.

49. Desaturate

MAC: Cmd+Shift+U
WINDOWS: Ctrl+Shift+U

Convert your colour image to grayscale values, leaving the image in the same colour mode.

50. Quick image fixes

Auto Tone

MAC: Shift+Cmd+L
WINDOWS: Shift+Ctrl+L

Auto Contrast

MAC: Opt+Shift+Cmd+L
WINDOWS: Alt+Shift+Ctrl+L

Auto Color

MAC: Shift+Cmd+B
WINDOWS: Shift+Ctrl+B

After a quick fix for a photo? While they're not reliable cure-alls, these tools are usually worth a go for automatically improving your images.

51. Lens correction

MAC: Shift+Cmd+R
WINDOWS: Shift+Ctrl+R

The camera always lies, particularly where lens distortion is involved. Use the lens correction filter to reduce the effect of barrel distortion, pincushion distortion and vignetting.

52. Adaptive Wide Angle

MAC: Opt+Shift+Cmd+A
WINDOWS: Opt+Shift+Ctrl+A

Wide-angle lenses can bring their own particular distortions, and Photoshop has a filter for this. The Adaptive Wide Angle filter can quickly straighten lines that appear curved in panoramas, or photos taken with fish-eye and wide-angle lenses.

53. Camera Raw Filter

MAC: Shift+Cmd+A
WINDOWS: Shift+Ctrl+A

With older versions of Photoshop you have to run Adobe Camera Raw as a separate program. But in Photoshop CC it's available as a filter, enabling you to non-destructively apply sophisticated adjustments to any image type.

54. Content Aware Scale

MAC: Cmd+Shift+Opt+C
WINDOWS: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+C

Scale your image to your preferred state with this super-quick Photoshop shortcut.

55. Content-Aware Move

MAC AND WINDOWS: Shift+J (cycle through tools)

The latest content-aware tool in Photoshop CC enables you to move objects around in a photograph, and it'll intelligently fill in the gaps where they used to be.

56. Create clipping mask

MAC: Cmd+Opt+G
WINDOWS: Ctrl+Alt+G

A great way to keep shadows and shading where they belong, the clipping mask tool is basic but useful.

57. Blending modes

MAC: Shift++ or -
WINDOWS: Shift++ or -

Photoshop has a variety of blending modes to create cool effects. Use this command to cycle through each.

58. Black and white dialogue box

MAC: Shift+Cmd+Opt+B
WINDOWS: Shift+Ctrl+Alt+B

Speed up the process of converting colour photos to black and white with this Photoshop shortcut, which opens the black and white adjustment dialogue box.