The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore:

The Option key in Photoshop (Alt in Windows) has a wealth of uses. It's typically used to change the behavior of a common feature. Let's take a look at a few things you might not know about:

The standard keyboard shortcut for zooming in and out on your image is Command-plus and Command-minus (use the Ctrl key in Windows). Next time you use those shortcuts, try holding the Option key, which should prevent the document window from resizing as you zoom (it does the opposite in Windows).

Whenever you use Levels, Curves, or Hue/Saturation, Photoshop always starts with the default setting which doesn't change your image... It's up to you to move the sliders to make a change. But if you choose one of these adjustments while holding the Option key, Photoshop will use the last settings applied during this session in Photoshop.

If you're ever in one of those adjustment dialog boxes and you find that you've really screwed up your image, then hold the Option key and take a look at the Cancel button. It will change to Reset which will bring everything back to default settings so you can try again.

The Option key is also useful when playing around in the Layers palette. If you're used to applying the Merge Visible and Merge Linked commands from the Layers Menu, then next time, try holding the Option key. That will keep the original layers intact and will instead merge a duplicate of those layers into the currently active layer. Try it for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

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I'm happy to say that the The Photoshop Tip of the Week list has doubled in size over the last week. 1,328 people are now signed up. If the list continues to grow at a similar pace, then I'll be able to make it a priority in my schedule and you'll consistently get well thought out and extremely useful tips (instead of short one-liners). If you get just three people to sign up for the list and everyone else follows suit, then we'd have over 5,000 people signed up. That would be well on the way to my goal of 8,000. So, if you're enjoying these tips, spread the word--I will reward you with some of the most useful tips you can imagine.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery