You can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by learning a few of the Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts that you will probably frequently use.

Cmd/Ctrl and Z - undo the last step
B -  brush, selects the brush tool
[ - decrease brush size/diameter
] – increase brush size/diameter
Shift  [ - make brush edge softer
Shift  ] – make brush edge harder
Z – zoom in
Z and Option/Alt – zoom out
Cmd/Ctrl and 0 (zero) – fit image on screen
Cmd/Ctrl and + zoom in
Cmd/Ctrl and - zoom out
V – Move Tool
Space Bar – toggles the Hand tool on for moving around a large image
Tab – hides the panels
Shift & Tab – hides panels but leaves Tool bar visible
Cmd/Ctrl R – hide or show rulers

You’re working on an image, using a brush, clone stamp tool or healing brush and the shape changes from a nice round brush circle to a tiny cross hair you can barely see, especially if you’re past 50. You probably bumped the Caps lock key and it’s turned on, turn it off and the round brush shape returns. The other thing that happens, especially if you’re’ interrupted and you take your eyes off the screen is that the cursor or brush disappears.  Press the space bar which activates the Hand tool and hold it down and move it around until you’re be able to spot the location of the cursor/brush, the release the space bar and back in business.

Normal Brush                                                           Caps Lock on                                                           Space Bar

Here’s an image that was converted to B&W and then we applied a few of the Uber BW Tones to see what we might come up with.

Here’s a work flow that we have found useful when working on images.

The basic idea is to move from big to small -  fix the biggest problems first then move to the details.

1. Adjust exposure and contrast
2. Adjust tones – white balance, overall color corrections, saturation
3. Adjust specific areas that need exposure, contrast or color correction
4. Clean up and retouching
5. Special effects, tones. softening, edges etc.
6. Crop – Robert Capa said, “If you’re pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. Even though I’ve been a commercial photographer for over 20 years I still find the need to crop my images to improve them. Many times I’m hesitant to crop too tight when I shoot because I’m concerned I  might need to change the proportions of the image to something other than 2×3 which the camera produces, so I shoot loose and crop later. If you’re not certain about cropping then make your image adjustments and corrections and crop later.

See the steps below used  to create this image.

1. Uber Adjustments – Darken Minus 1/2 – Gritty Neuvo 3 brightens images a bit so I had to tone it down
2. Uber Color Tones – Gritty Neuvo 3

Original                                                   1.  Darken Minus 1/2                               2. Gritty Neuvo 3

3. Uber Color Tones – Blue Tint
4. Uber Color Tones -  Pastel H&S
5. Uber Edges – Vignette Darken Medium
6. To finish it off I ran Uber Edges – Edge Scumbled, ran Gaussian Blur set to 4 to blur the edge effect only and then used an Uber Texture to add the final touch.

3. Blue Tint                                                    4. Pastel H&S                               5. Vignette Darken Medium

Here’s how to make a soft pastel image.

Here are the actions I used to get this look.

1.  Uber Recipe – Knockout to brighten the center and vignette the edges.
2. Uber BW Conversions – BW Channel Mix 2 to convert to black and white, set layer to 85% opacity
3. Uber BW Tones – Selenium Brown

Knockout                                                 BW Conversion                                   Selenium Brown                                Final