Adobe Photoshop has become the de facto program for countless designers from the humble beginner all the way to professional print media designers, and everything imaginable in between. In saying this, there are countless ways to use this program. Luckily the folks at Adobe were kind enough to allow the users of its products to customize their workspace to efficiently use the tools and options quickly and comfortably, maximizing creativity and minimizing the tedium of navigating menus to accomplish simple tasks. There is a list of keyboard shortcuts that come preset from Adobe (Click here to find out how to access these), but these shortcuts may not always suit your needs. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to make your own shortcut for one of my most commonly used commands, the image “Crop” feature. Keep in mind this method works for almost every menu command, so I encourage you to use this process as needed. You will be amazed at how much time you can save by using the shortcut keys and the mouse together.

1. Open Photoshop CS4 and find the “Edit” menu. Towards the bottom you will find “Keyboard Shortcuts”, select this option. You can also use “Alt+Shift+Ctrl+K”.



2. Select the drop down menu “Shortcuts For” and choose “Application Menus”.



3. Select the drop down menu for “Image” and scroll near the bottom where you should find “Crop”.



4. Click on “Crop” and an input field will open up just to the right.



At this point you should experiment with key combinations that will be easy for you to remember but do not conflict with other commonly used shortcuts. I made a compromise at this stage with my choice to use “Ctrl B”. By default this shortcut was associated with the command “Color Balance” which I use far less frequently than “Crop” so I felt fine replacing it. To do this, just click in the input field and type the desired keys.



5. From here all you need to do is click “Accept” and save this new key set as “(your name) Default” or something similar so in the future you can easily revert to the factory default set by selecting “Default” from the “Set”drop down menu.

And now it is time for you to put your efforts to good use!