Julieanne Kost's Blog

When using the Type tool, Command (Mac) / Control (Win) + Shift + < or > will increase/decrease the point size.

Select Preferences > Cursors to control the look of your painting tool icons. Choose between Standard, Precise, Normal Brush Tip (which displays the brush size based on those pixels in the brush that are painting with 50% or greater opacity), and Full Size Brush Tip (which displays the cursor size around any pixel that is painted regardless of opacity). With any of the above options, you can also chose to Show Crosshair in Brush Tip to display a center point in a brush. Personally, I use set the painting Cursors to Normal Brush Tip and then use the “caps lock” key to display precise cross hairs for brushes as needed.

For Other Cursors, choose to see the Standard Photoshop icon, or choose Precise to display the cursor as a target with crosshairs. Note: clicking on any of the radial buttons will show a preview in the preferences.

‘<’ or ‘>’ moves to the “previous” or “next” brush in the list on the Brushes Panel. ‘<’ or ‘>’ + Shift goes to the first or last brush in list. (At first glance these shortcuts may appear to be making the brush larger and smaller, but that would be because you’re moving from a smaller to larger brush (or vice-versa) in the Brushes panel).

Holding the Shift key will constrain the painting tools to a straight line. In addition, To have a painting tool connect (draw a line) between two points, click once to start a line, hold down the Shift key and click again to set the end point.

To access the Brushes preset picker while anywhere in the image area, control (Mac)/ right mouse (Win) -click with a painting tool selected.

All blend modes have their own keyboard shortcut. They all begin with Option (Mac)/ Alt (Win) + Shift + a letter – most often the letter is the first letter of the name, N = Normal, M = Multiple, O = Overlay etc. If you want to quickly cycle through the painting tool’s blend modes, hold the Shift key and hit the “+” (plus) or “-” (minus) to move forward or backwards. Note: If you have a tool selected that is not a painting tool, these shortcuts will affect the blend modes on the Layers panel.

When using Free Transform, the "Reference Point Location"(or center point) can be changed to determine the location around which transformations occur.  You can drag the center point freely within the image area, or set it numerically using the Options bar. This can be particularly useful when trying to align objects or rotate around a point that is off-center.