AAdobe Photoshop keyboard shortcuts

Move a selection while you are still drawing itspace

While dragging out a rectangular or elliptical marquee, hold the spacebar without letting go of the mouse. The selection stops resizing and moves with your cursor so you can line it up precisely; release Space and keep dragging to continue sizing it. This turns fiddly selections around tight crops into a one-pass job.

Merge everything to a new layer without flattening⌘+⌥+⇧+E

Cmd+Alt+Shift+E (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E on Windows) creates a new layer containing a merged copy of everything currently visible, while leaving all your original layers untouched below it. Use it before sharpening, Camera Raw filtering, or any destructive step — you keep the full editable stack and can always delete the stamped layer and re-stamp.

Alt-click a layer mask to see what you actually painted⌥

Alt-click (Option-click on Mac) a layer mask thumbnail in the Layers panel to view the mask itself as a grayscale image in the document window — perfect for spotting stray brush strokes and gray patches you cannot see in normal view. Alt-click it again to return. Shift-click the same thumbnail to temporarily disable the mask entirely.

Drag on a value's label instead of typing numbers

Nearly every numeric field in Photoshop — Opacity, Fill, font size, filter settings — has a hidden scrubby slider: hover over the field's text label until the cursor becomes a pointing finger with arrows, then drag left or right to decrease or increase the value smoothly. Hold Shift while scrubbing to change the value ten times faster.

Jump across a zoomed-in image with Bird's Eye ViewH

When you are zoomed far in, hold the H key and press and hold the mouse button: Photoshop instantly zooms out to fit the whole image and shows a rectangle marking your viewport. Drag the rectangle over the area you want, release the mouse, and you snap back to your previous zoom level at the new spot — far faster than scrolling or using the Navigator panel.