In order to speed up your workflow, learning the keyboard shortcuts for the programs you use is an essential skill for any creative professional wishing to take their work to the next level. As a result of keyboard shortcuts, you are able to quickly access the tools and commands you need without having to search through menus to find what you need. In addition, it simplifies and speeds up the process of performing complex tasks.
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In this article, I am aiming to cover some of my frequently used programs, such as Photoshop, Lightroom, iMovie, and Illustrator. I also intend to cover keyboard shortcuts for both the Mac OS and Windows operating systems. These tips are also intended to help you work more efficiently, so I hope you will be able to benefit from them.
Furthermore, you can now customize the keyboard shortcuts to suit your needs rather than being restricted to the default ones.
Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular and widely used software by photographers and graphic designers.
Download the PDF of shortcuts for both MAC and Windows
Click here for the keyboard shortcuts for Photoshop on the web beta
The following video will take you through the steps for customising or adding keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop.
Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a popular tool used by graphic designers to create scalable vector art.
The following video will take you through the steps for customising or adding keyboard shortcuts in Illustrator.
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Apple iMovie
iMovie is a simple-to-use video editor on the macOS. There is no shortcut customisation allowed on the app.
Click here for the Shortcuts on the Apple Help site. Categorised in sections 'Select and edit Video, 'edit text', 'Word with audio' and more.
Adobe Acrobat
Acrobat is a family of software and web services designed to let you view, create, manipulate, print, and archive Portable Document Format files. Created by Adobe.
Click here to view the shortcuts for both macOS and Windows, categorised by main sections
Apple macOS
For the macOS keyboard shortcuts list click here. To find out how to create your own shortcuts on a MAC click here.
Microsft Windows
At the time this article was published Windows 10 and 11 were in the market.
Click here for the keyboard shortcuts for both Windows Versions
This article only looked at a handful of Apps. If you want to find shortcuts for other apps, start with Google Search. I used the following search query 'Shortcuts for application name by producer' - 'Shortcuts for Photoshop by Adobe' or you use something similar or visit the help section of your application developers.
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