Photoshop shortcuts cheat sheet

A single printable page with every Photoshop shortcut worth memorizing. Tape it above your monitor, glance at it for a week, and stop reaching for the mouse.

Why this cheat sheet exists

Most shortcut lists you find online have the same problem: they list every shortcut Photoshop supports. That sounds useful and is not. Adobe ships hundreds of keyboard bindings, and most of them you will never press in five years of editing. A reference that includes all of them is a reference that hides the ones you should be using inside a wall of noise.

This cheat sheet only includes shortcuts an editor reaches for in a normal session. We made it by sitting with the menu bar open, watching ourselves work for a few weeks, and writing down only the keys we actually pressed. Then we cross-checked with a couple of professional retouchers and added back the ones we should have been pressing but were skipping. The result fits on one page because there is not actually that much to remember.

What is on the sheet

Six grouped sections, each one designed to be readable from across a desk:

Tools and selection

The single-key tool letters that matter (V, M, L, W, B, E, G, S, Y, T, P, H, Z), the modifier combos for cycling through tool variants, the marquee and lasso speed adjustments, Select Subject and Select Sky, and the four keys for adding to, subtracting from, and intersecting selections.

Layers and groups

New layer, duplicate, group, ungroup, merge visible, merge down, stamp visible, cycle through layers, jump to top or bottom of stack, and the modifier that targets the layer you click instead of the topmost pixel-bearing layer.

Masks and channels

Add layer mask, invert mask, toggle quick mask, view mask alone, view image alone, copy mask between layers, and the trick for previewing a channel as a selection without committing.

Brushes and painting

Brush size up and down, hardness up and down, opacity numerics (1 through 0), flow with shift-numerics, the airbrush toggle, switching foreground and background colors, and the keys for sampling color without leaving the brush.

Transforms and movement

Free transform, scale, rotate, skew, distort, perspective, warp, the proportional and from-center modifiers, nudge in 1px and 10px, and the often-missed key for committing a transform without reaching for the check mark.

View and navigation

Fit to screen, 100% view, zoom in and out without changing tools, hand tool toggle, rotate view, ruler toggle, guides toggle, full-screen mode, and the keys that toggle Photoshop chrome on and off so you can see your image without panels in the way.

Mac and Windows in one file

Every shortcut on the sheet is listed for both platforms. Windows shortcuts are in one column, Mac in another, with the keys spelled out (Ctrl, Cmd, Alt, Opt, Shift, Esc) so there is no symbol decoding to do. If you switch between a Mac at home and a PC at work, this is the only Photoshop reference you need open.

Affinity Photo and Photopea

About 80% of the shortcuts on the sheet also work in Affinity Photo and in Photopea, the free browser-based Photoshop alternative. We marked them with a small bullet so you can tell at a glance. If you are moving between programs (or evaluating whether to switch), the cheat sheet will not become obsolete the day you uninstall Photoshop.

How to actually use it

The honest answer: print it, tape it where you can see it, and force yourself to use the keys instead of the menu for one week. That is it. Muscle memory does the rest. We have handed the sheet to a few hundred readers and the people who report the biggest speed gains are not the ones who studied the sheet hardest, they are the ones who put it somewhere unavoidable and used the keys deliberately for seven days. After that, it stops being a sheet and starts being your hands.

If you prefer not to print, the PDF is fully searchable and looks fine on a phone screen if you want to keep it in your camera roll for reference on the road.

Common questions

Will this work in my version of Photoshop?

Every shortcut on the sheet works from Photoshop CC 2018 through Photoshop 2026. A handful (Select Subject, Select Sky) need 2020 or newer, and we flag them.

What about custom shortcuts?

If you have customized your keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop, your binding wins. The sheet shows the Adobe defaults, which is what every tutorial and every documentation page assumes.

Is the cheat sheet really one page?

Yes. One sheet of letter or A4, printable in landscape, designed to be readable at desk distance. We tested it at 1080p and at 4K, on monitors and on paper.

What email will you send me afterward?

Roughly one short note every two to three weeks, usually a new tutorial or a tool worth knowing about. One-click unsubscribe at the bottom of every send.