- Accessing Photoshop's Preferences Settings
- General Preferences
- File Handling Preferences
- Setting Display & Cursors Preferences
- Understanding How to Choose Transparency & Gamut Settings
- Setting Units & Rulers Preferences
- Checking Out the Guides, Grid & Slices Preferences
- Getting Some Control Over Screen Appearances of Elements!
- Optimizing Photoshop's Performance with the Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks and Memory & Image Cache Preferences Settings
- More Choices and More Control with the Preset Manager
- Who Wants So Many Palettes in a Group?
- Customizing the Shapes Feature
- Exploring Near-Infinite Brush Variations and Creating Custom Brushes
- Customizing Layers
- Using the Tool Presets Palette
- Using Actions to Add Keyboard Shortcuts
- Setting Selection and Mask Modes
- Spell Checking and Photoshop
- Customizing Your Workspace with the Palette Well
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Using Actions to Add Keyboard Shortcuts
After some tough Photoshop artistic challenges, you might already know how valuable keyboard shortcuts are—especially ones such as F7, which is used to hide and display the Layers palette.
Well, Contrast/Brightness was demoted a few versions ago, and I use it a lot for special effects, such as those found in some of these screen figures. The drawback is that I could have a birthday while wading through Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast... accessing it from the main menu just takes me too far away from my work.
The good news is that Photoshop CS now lets you assign your own keyboard shortcuts to items that don't currently have keyboard shortcuts (from the main menu, choose Edit, Keyboard Shortcuts). The bad news is that very few keyboard shortcut combinations are available because just about every possible shortcut combination is already in use for one feature or another. You can attempt to wade through all the possible combinations until you find one that doesn't display a warning that it's already in use, or you can consider making an Action as an alternative solution.
So let's invent a Photoshop Action that assigns Brightness/Contrast to the F11 key—a key few people use in Photoshop.
Actions for Keyboard Shortcuts
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Open the Actions palette from the Window menu. Click on the menu flyout button (circled in Figure 3.45), and then choose New Action. In the New Action dialog box, type Brightness/Contrast in the Name field, leave Set at its default, assign the action a function key (F11), and then click on Record.
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Click on the menu flyout button again on the Actions palette, and then choose Insert Menu Item, as shown in Figure 3.46. The dialog box stays onscreen.
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Follow the numbered callouts in Figure 3.47. The first step is to reconfirm the Insert Menu item. As you can see in this figure, you need to mouse your way to the desired command. Choose Image, Adjustments (callout 2 in the figure).
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Click on Brightness/Contrast (callout 3), and then click on OK in the Insert Menu Item dialog box (callout 4).
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Finally, click on the STOP button at the bottom of the Actions palette (callout 5). You're done. In fact, you can close the Actions palette now, and the command will work!
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Figure
3.45 Record an action that is activated with a function key.
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Figure
3.46 Later in this book you'll learn to create really fancy Actions,
but for now, we want Brightness/Contrast to pop up at a keystroke!
Coming up: Selections versus masks. Don't put your money on a winner yet....
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Figure
3.47 A few simple steps make the Brightness/Contrast command pop up when
you press F11.