The Extra-Strength Tips for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

I bet you'll be surprised to find out how many things you can control when working with Photoshop's everyday tools.

Last week I mentioned that you can use the number keys to change the opacity of the Paintbrush tool, but did you know that you can Option-Click (Mac), or Alt-click (Win) on your image and you'll end up changing your foreground color to the color you clicked on? Or that holding the Command key (Mac), or Ctrl key (Win) will temporarily give you the Move tool (just for the length of time you hold down that key).

When you're in the middle of making a selection or creating a Shape layer, you can hold the Spacebar to move the selection or shape you're currently creating.

When using the Crop tool, you can press / to toggle the visibility of the shading that appears outside of the cropping rectangle.

When using the Type tool, you can type Command-T (Mac), or Ctrl-T (Win) to toggle the visibility of the Characters palette.

When using most of the retouching tools, you can hold Shift and Option (Mac), or Shift and Alt and type the first letter of the mode you'd like the tool to be in (Highlights/Midtones/Shadows, Saturare/Desaturate). You can also hold Option (Mac), or Alt (Win) to access the opposite tool (Dodge becomes Burn, Blur becomes Sharpen, etc.). Also, holding Option or Alt when using the Eraser tool will turn it into the History Brush, which usually paints with what your image looked like when you first opened it.

When using the History brush, you can Shift-Ctrl-click (Mac), or Shift-Right-click (Win) to choose the blending mode you'd like to use, or to choose a Snapshot to paint from.

I think that's enough for now, I'll share other tool tips in later installments of my Extra-Strength tips. While you're waiting for your next tip to arrive, why don't you send this tip off to at least three friends so we can get the tip list to grow beyond the 30,000+ people that have signed up already.

-Ben Willmore