30 Photoshop secrets tips that will increase your productivity overnight

If you've determined to give your best pencils a little have a rest and jump into digital art, you will more than likely need some photo editing software. Photoshop is an amazing photo editing software and a popular choice.This software used by thousands of designers worldwide on a daily basis. Photoshop is such a flexible bit of kit that you could spend two week learning new features, doing Photoshop tutorials and experimenting with Photoshop brushes and still have only broken the surface of what's possible.
1st you've overcome the beginners' learning curve, however, there are some real charms hidden inside it can help you speed up your work and get more out for less effort. Here we have round up 50 of the best Photoshop secrets to help power up  your skills and develop your efficiency.

1. Control your panels




                      Did you know about this hidden menu?


In the top right side corner of every panel is a small icon that reveals a fly-out menu, giving extra options that you might not have seen before. You can use this option to set your layer panel thumbnails to be larger, crop to art work and much more experiment.

2. Paste in Place

Paste in Place is one of those functions that you will use all the time if you know about it, but if you do not know it will come as a revelation! After you have made a selection either in your present document or in a 2nd document if you are combining artwork, copy as usual by choosing Edit > Copy, or by using the shortcut keys Ctrl+C (Windows) or Cmd+C (Mac).
When you are viewing the document you want to paste into, use the shortcut keys Ctrl+Shift+V (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+V (Mac).

3. Bird's Eye View

If you are doing total work such as cloning or edge refinement, it can be easy to lose sight of the larger picture. Equally, if you are working at a high zoom level, navigating around the document can become annoying when you need to get back to your high-level zoom.
With the Bird's Eye View feature, when zoomed in you can hold press the H key on your keyboard and click and drag with your mouse to temporarily zoom out to a bird's eye view. When you let go, you will zoom back in to the level you were working at.

4. Interactively set styles


                     Move the shadow around by clicking and dragging on the canvas


When you are adding a drop shadow layer style, move the dialogue box to any side. By clicking and dragging on the canvas you can use your computer mouse to interactively move the shadow around relative to the layer casting the shadow.

5. Repeat Transformations
When you have made a transformation to a layer or object using Edit > Transform, you can very quickly repeat that same transformation on another object or layer. Simply press, Ctrl+Shift+T on Windows or Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac and Photoshop will repeat the same transformation on the currently active layer.

6. Solo your layer 


                                  How to preview a single layer

If you would like to preview a single layer, you can rapidly get a look at it on its own by Alt+clicking on the layer's eye icon in the layers panel. Alt+clicking on the eye icon again will return to the previous layer visibility state. Note that if you unintentionally click on another layer's eye icon you will lose the ability to revert back to the previous state

7. Enable visibility history

                                Enable the  layer visibility history

If you want to avoid such problem of losing layer visibility settings while previewing individual layers, you can mark a setting in the History Panel options dialogue box that will enable history state for layer visibility. When checked, you can use Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+Z to step backwards through your history as you always have, but you will discover changes to the visibility of layers is now included within that history.

8. Merge vector shapes

                                        merge vector shapes

If you are lucky enough to have a photo editing software Photoshop CS6 at your disposal, you can merge two vector shapes together and keep the result as an editable vector. Just select the two shape layers and hit Cmd/Ctrl+E on your computer keyboard to merge them together. In previous versions this would have resulted in a raster zed layer, but Adobe updated the functionality for CS6.

9. Quickly finish editing text


Press Cmd+Return on your computer keyboard to finish editing text and move focus outside the text field

Once you are working with text boxes in Photoshop it can be annoying to move between tools as your shortcut keys won’t work. A great small secret tip is that you can press Cmd+Return on your computer keyboard to finish editing text and move focus outside the text field. This allows you to quickly select other tools using their shortcut keys as appropriate .

10. Organize your files properly
It is easy to become sloppy with the way you name and organize files. But if you have to hand over your work to others, this can bounce back on you, giving you a bad rep as people fight to work out what is going on. Go behind our advice on how to organize your files properly here.

11. Draw dotted lines with the brush tool


                                 Drawing straight dotted lines with the brush tool

It is quite well known that you can use the square bracket keys and to change the size of your brush in Photoshop CS6. What you might not know is that if you hold down the Shift key while tapping these same keys, you can also affect the stiffness of the brush without having to visit the brush panel

13. Change around dialogue boxes
When you are using a dialogue box with a pair off buttons that read Apply/ OK and Cancel, it can be trying to undo changes you have made. Often you will want to hit Cancel and then again-open the dialogue. Many modal pop ups allow you to hold down the Alt/Opt key on your computer keyboard to change the cancel button to a Reset button, recurring the settings to how they were when you opened the dialogue.

14. Scrub values
One of the best time-saving features in photo editing software ‘Photoshop’ is the ability to scrub your mouse over input values. If you would like to change the opacity of a layer, for example, rather than click into the opacity field of the layers panel, take mouse click and drag on the value for opacity. A scrub to the left reduce the opacity; a scrub to the right increases it

15. Copy layer styles rapidly



If you have been using Photoshop CS6 for a while you will know you can copy a layer to a new layer by hold down Alt/Opt and dragging a copy of the artwork across the canvas. You can use this same deception for layer styles: simply holding down the Alt/Opt key and drag the FX icon in the layers panel from the layer with the styles to the target layer, the styles will be copied right over