H (Hand Tool) — When zoomed in to a portion of your photo, this command brings up the hand tool which allows for quick panning. Also, if the hand tool is active and you hold down the Ctrl key, you can zoom in without changing to the zoom tool. Likewise, if you hold down the Alt key, you can zoom out without changing tools.

Z (Zoom Tool) — This command just brings up the zoom tool, which allows you to zoom in. Like with the hand tool, if you hold down the Alt key, it temporarily switches to the zoom out mode.

Ctrl + 0 (Fit on Screen) — This is a quick-and-dirty command to get the entire photo in front of your eyes. That’s Ctrl + zero, not the letter “O”.

B (Brush Tool) — The brush is an extremely useful tool when working with masks, and I’m constantly using this command along with the hand and zoom tools.

Ctrl + Z (Undo) — Very useful for the little mistakes we all make.

Tab (Hide/Show Palettes) — Hiding the palettes gives you a little more working room, thus decreasing your need to pan and zoom while editing.

Space bar - Press and hold the space bar will temporary bring out the Hand tool, allow for panning.

More shortcuts
G - Paint Bucket
D - Reset foreground and background colour to default, that’s black and white.
X - Swap current foreground colour with background colour and vice versa.

So what is Photoshop Action?

Photoshop Actions are the recordings of commands that can be applied to an image or multiple images. When Photoshop plays an action, it applies these recorded commands to an image sequentially. You can store hundreds of useful actions on your computer and load them into Photoshop whenever you want to apply the commands applied by the action.

So I had a quick search on Google, to my surprised, there are so many good Actions available FREE! But for some, you need to pay for it.

Here are some free Actions I really like.
1. Three free Actions from Addicted to Design – I like the lomo Action.
2. Plenty of Actions from Action Central – I’ve already download the Custom Vignette 2.0 by Galen Evans, and many more!!

Andrew Lee and Anna J also produce some really cool Photoshop Actions suitable for portraits. Check out their websites.

I am going to play with my new downloads, and will consider to get Andrew’s.

Since I decided to make some photoshop tutorials to share with you what I know, I’ll make this top of the list.

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