Eleven shortcuts and a scratch disk

Speed is not typing quickly

The difference between someone who edits for a living and someone who does it occasionally is not talent at the brush. It is that the professional never leaves the keyboard to change a brush size, never hunts a menu for a command they use forty times an hour, and has set the application up so it does not stall.

The shortcuts that pay for themselves in a week

Photoshop and Photopea share almost all of these; GIMP and Krita differ on some and can be remapped.

• [ and ]: brush smaller and larger. You will use this more than any other key.
• Shift + [ / ]: brush hardness down and up.
• X: swap foreground and background colour. Masking is painting black and white, so this is the mask toggle.
• D: reset to black and white.
• B, E, S, J, P, L, W, C: brush, eraser, clone stamp, healing, pen, lasso, quick selection, crop.
• 0–9: set the current tool’s opacity. 5 is 50 per cent, 55 typed quickly is 55.
• Alt/Option + click on a mask thumbnail: view the mask alone. \ shows it as a red overlay.
• Ctrl/Cmd + J: duplicate the layer.
• Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + Shift + E: stamp visible onto a new layer.
• Ctrl/Cmd + I: invert. On a mask this is the single most-used command in local adjustment work.
• Space bar held: temporary hand tool, from inside any tool. Releases you from ever clicking the scroll bars.

Add Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + Z for step-backwards-through-history, which is different from plain undo in Photoshop and is the one people miss.

The method that makes these stick: pick three, force yourself to use only those for a day, then add three more. Trying to learn all eleven at once fails.

The settings that stop the stalling

Scratch disk. When the application runs out of memory it writes to disk. If that disk is the same nearly-full drive holding your system, everything crawls. Preferences > Scratch Disks in Photoshop; GIMP has a Swap folder in Preferences > Folders. Point it at the fastest drive with the most free space, and keep at least 20 GB free, more like 60 for large documents. The rule of thumb is that scratch use runs to several times the document size once you have a deep history.

Memory allocation. Photoshop defaults to about 70 per cent of RAM. On a machine where you also run a browser with thirty tabs, that fights. Setting it to 60 per cent often makes the whole system feel faster. GIMP’s Tile cache size does the same job and defaults conservatively; raising it to half your RAM is usually a clear improvement.

History states. Lowering from 50 to 20 on a machine short of memory frees a surprising amount, at the cost of a shorter undo runway.

Turn off what you do not use. Photoshop’s Home Screen, font previews on a machine with 900 fonts, and live thumbnail generation for large layer stacks all cost time.

Workspace and tool presets

Arrange the panels you actually use (Layers, Channels, History, Properties) and save the arrangement as a named workspace. On a small laptop screen, collapse everything else to icons and use Tab to hide all panels while judging an image.

Tool presets are underrated. A soft round brush at 30 per cent opacity and 0 per cent hardness, saved as “mask brush”, is a click instead of three slider moves, forty times a day.

Tablets, and the honest case for and against

A graphics tablet gives pressure sensitivity: press harder, paint more opaquely or more widely. For masking, dodging and burning, and any retouching that involves building up an effect gradually, it is a genuine improvement and not a luxury. A small Wacom or Huion is £40 to £70 and lasts years.

What it does not improve: pen-tool paths, selections, crops, sliders, and anything geometric. A mouse is equal or better for all of those. Plenty of professional retouchers who work mostly on products use a mouse and do not feel disadvantaged.

If you do buy one, spend ten minutes on the pressure curve in the driver. The default is usually too firm, and adjusting it to reach full opacity with less pressure reduces the hand strain that otherwise builds up over a long day.

On that subject, and it belongs in a lesson about working fast: the injuries from this work are real. Wrist and shoulder pain from a badly positioned mouse, and eye strain from a bright screen in a dark room, both accumulate quietly. Screen at arm’s length, top of the screen at eye level, elbow supported, and a break every 40 minutes. Nobody regrets this and plenty of people learn it the hard way.

The limit

A fast setup makes you quicker at what you already know how to do. It does not improve a decision. The editor who masks in half the time still has to decide whether the picture is better, and no shortcut helps with that. Spend the time you save looking at the image at fit-to-screen, which is the view your client will see it at.