Photoshop Beginners Article #3 Shortcuts

No matter what level you are at with Photoshop, a vast amount of time is spent switching tools and going back and forth between menu items .There is however a way in which you can to some extent streamline your workflow saving time which would be more productively spent on the project itself.
There are a quite a few keyboard commands that help you bypass the time-consuming mouse clicks when doing tool changes or making adjustments to properties. These commands will increase your efficiency and in some cases even allow you to do things you could not otherwise do (e.g., zooming while a dialog box is open). Photoshop makes great use of these shortcuts and although it is difficult to remember all of them with practice it is definately a good a habit to get in to.The list below gives you the main shortcuts used for PC (sorry Mac users) . Firstly you can access the complete list with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K this will bring up the help dialog on keyboard shortcuts.Below is a list to get you started.
Ctrl + Shift + N (New Layer)
D (Black foreground white background)
X (Swap Black to background white to foreground)
Ctrl + N (New)
Ctrl + O (Open)
Crtl + S ( Save)
Ctrl + Shift + S (Save As)
Ctrl + C (Copy)
Ctrl + V (Paste)
Shift + F5 (Fill)
Ctrl + L (Levels)
Ctrl + M (Curves)
Ctrl + J (Duplicate Layer)
Ctrl + A (Select)
Ctrl + D (Deselect)
Ctrl + 0 (Fit on Screen)
G (Gradient Tool)
L (Lasso Tool)
P (Pen Tool)
M (Marquee Tool)
J ( Spot Healing Tool)
T (Type Tool)
O ( Dodge Tool)
I ( Eyedropper Tool)
S ( Clone Stamp Tool)
A (Path selection Tool)
E ( Erazer Tool)
C ( Crop Tool)
B (Brush Tool)
H (Hand Tool)
Z (Zoom Tool)
Alt + Ctrl + 0 (Browse in Bridge)
Alt + Shift +Ctrl + 0 (Open As)
Crtl + W (Close)
Alt + Crtl + W (Close All)
Photoshop also lets you edit and customise these commands in the help dialog it would be wise if this is your intention to use this option to refer to the link below.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-76b8a.html