In order to speed up your work using Photoshop’s powerful but sometimes quite frustrating text tool, here are a couple of handy keyboard shortcuts you might like to remember:

• Commit text changes by pressing CTRL+Enter. (Pressing Enter on its own will just start a new line obviously!)
• With all text selected, you can hide the selection colour with CTRL+H to see an accurate preview. Useful when working with colour in particular!
• CTRL+Shift+Left or Right arrow keys selects the whole next or previous word.
• CTRL+Shift+< or > decreases or increases the font-size by 2 points.
• CTRL+Shift+ALT+< or > decreases or increases the font-size by 10 points.
• CTRL+ALT+Left or Right arrow keys increase or decrease letter kerning by 100.
• ALT+Left or Right arrow keys increase or decrease letter kerning by 20.
• CTRL+ALT+Up or Down arrow keys move the text baseline up or down by 10.
• ALT+Up or Down arrow keys move the text baseline up or down by 2.
• CTRL+Shift+L, R or C aligns the paragraph of text left, right or center.

Finally, and although not a keyboard shortcut, double clicking on the T icon in the layers panel will actually select all text in that layer.

Useful.

You seriously learn something new every day. I only just found out about keyboard shortcuts to enhance tabbed browsing, something that has been a feature in Firefox (and more recently Internet Explorer) for years already.

And because I fear that there may still be people like me outside there in this great big world of ours, I thought I’d better share these keyboard shortcuts that work across most tabbed browsers with you!

So let’s start then.

In order to open a link in a new tab and jump straight to it, hold down CTRL+SHIFT and click on the link. In order to open it up in a new tab but NOT jump straight to it, simply hold down CTRL and click on the link. CTRL+T will simply open a new empty tab and jump you straight to it.

To jump to the next open tab in your tabbed browser, simply press CTRL+TAB. To reverse through your open tabs, use CTRL+SHIFT9TAB.

CTRL+W will close the tab you are currently focused on.

If you want to jump to a specific tab and you have 8 tabs open, pressing CTRL+n where n is a number between 1 and 8 will jump you directly to that particular tab based on the order in which it currently sits. CTRL+9 generally takes you to the last open tab.

And finally, in Internet Explorer, pressing CTRL+ALT+F4 will close all tabs except for the one you are currently viewing. Also, and probably the coolest of the lot, CTRL+Q opens up a new tab which lists all your currently open tabs with a thumbnail, similar to the way Chrome displays its blank tabs.

So now you know! ;)