Here are 15 simple Photoshop tips and tricks to take advantage of .

 Bird’s eye view  ( use with mouse)

Hold down the letter H and just click

and drag and it will zoom you out and

give you the little viewing box and you

can zoom in anywhere on the image. 

 Subject tool

If a picture consists of a main image and a background and you want to change the colour of the background. Click the quick selection tool, then click select subject. Photoshop will automatically select the subject of the image. To select the background, click select then inverse. Change the foreground colour to anyone you wish. Next select the brush tool, set the brush size and use it to paint the background. If the selection is not exactly what you want, select either add to selection or subtract from selection from quick selection options. Then click to add or subtract depending on what option you selected.

Temporary tool ( use with mouse)

If you are using a main tool and don’t want to break the workflow by changing to another tool. You can temporarily select the other tool you quickly want to use. Do this by pressing the letter assigned to that tool. For instance if you were on the dodge tool and quickly want to use the lasso tool, press and hold L to use after then release L to get back to the dodge tool. Whatever you are doing, when you press and hold  the spacebar, it temporarily gives you the hand tool which you can use to navigate, and when done release the space bar to go back to the main tool you were using before.

Use a blank adjustment layer to quickly change the feel of an image.

To use it, place a blank adjustment layer over your image and then use blending mode to quickly change the appearance and feel of the image.

Smarter selections 

When you are making a selection  on an image and you make a mistake, instead of pressing select then deselect to start over you can hold down the spacebar and work around the selection.

Use export as instead of save as

When you have finished editing your image, a better way of saving your image as a picture file is to use the export function.  Go to file , then export, select the type of export file you want in export preferences, then click export. The file is saved in the picture format and location you chose.

Export multiple layers function

You can also export multiple layers as jpeg. Just select the layers, group them right click and select quick export as jpeg and you are done. You can also go through file, export, export preferences, select the file type and other settings and you are good to go.

Use the Alt. Key to quickly duplicate

Holding down the alt key while clicking and dragging out a layer  straight up will duplicate it. It a quick way of creating a copy of pictures in photoshop

Straightening perspective 

This helps to straighten pictures that are in perspective. To do this go to filter, Camera Raw filter. In geometry click on guided. Next Draw straight lines in the bottom, top and sides of the picture to adjust.

Healing brush tool to perfect rough edges

If you have images with rough edges you can use the healing brush tool to remove the imperfections. Make sure to select the source image along the edge 

Colour replacement brush

To change the colour of an object within an image, you can easily do this using the colour replacement brush. Select the brush, play with the options, select the colour you want to change the object to then carefully apply on the object.

 Moving quickly from one open document to the other

When you are working in photoshop there is every probability that you will have several documents open at the same time

To select open document by moving forward, press ctrl tab, to move backwards , press control shift tab

Isolate one layer of an image

Hold down the alt button then click the eyeball of the layer you want to isolate.

Copying layers from one document to another using Ctrl C and V

Layers that you used in a document and you want to use it in another , make sure the documents are open, the select the layers in the documents you want to copy from then press Ctrl C to copy, move to the document you want to paste to and press Ctrl V

Using the Rotate tool

Press and hold down the R key while working on an image to rotate it.