101. All Photoshop Brush shortcuts

Сhange brush size, hardness, and opacity quickly

Adobe Photoshop, like all the major software, has many keyboard shortcuts to speed up and optimize your work process.

In this article, we make a review of the hotkey combinations for the brush tool settings. The brush tool, or more simple brush, is one of the most used tools in Photoshop CC. So let’s look on it)

At first, we group all keyboard shortcuts in the three general categories:

• 2 Keys: key pairs or a single key.
• Drag a mouse: key pairs with drag a mouse. These combinations provide interactive display changes in the setting of painting tool, based on the drag movement option in HUD, as shown below:

Setting changes in the brush HUD (Heads-Up Display)

Although the brush HUD display has three parameters such as diameter, hardness, and opacity, two of them (hardness and opacity) cannot be used at the same time.

• Number Keys: a combination of number keys or a single key.

Here is the keyboard shortcuts full set for brush tool in Photoshop CC.

Brush Size

-2 Keys/
Press [ ] to decrease~increase brush size.

-Drag a mouse/
Control(Ctrl) + Option(Alt) + Click(Right click) and drag a mouse to the left right to decrease~increase brush size.

Brush Hardness

-2 Keys/
Press Shift + [ Shift + ] to decrease | increase brush hardness.

-Drag a mouse/
Control(Ctrl) + Option(Alt) + Click(Right click) and drag a mouse to the up down to decrease | increase brush hardness.

Brush Opacity

-2 Keys/
Photoshop doesn’t have two keys for brush opacity or possibility to customize these keys by default. About the solution read in The Brush Opacity Hotkeys.

• Drag a mouse/
  Photoshop enables the change brush opacity by the drag movement. For this uncheck “Vary Round Brush Hardness based on HUD vertical movement” in Preferences > Tools.

Opacity setting in the brush HUD (Heads-Up Display)

Note: The Drag movement for hardness switch off than box unchecked. To switch on hardness instead of opacity, recheck the box.

-Number Keys/
You can control brush opacity by the number keys on the keyboard.

• Press a number key from 1 to 0 for changing to tens from 10% to 100%.
• Quickly press two numbers, for example, 2 to 7 get the exact percentage amount — 27%.
• Сombination of 0 and keys ( 1 - 9) shows amounts from 1 to 9.
• Press Enter and tap any amount of opacity from 1 to 100 by number keys.

Note: The Brush Tool has to be selected. If the selected tool hasn’t the opacity setting, shortcuts affect the opacity on the Layers panel.

The enabling Airbrush attribute change default keys combination between opacity and flow. Add shift to numeric keys to change the opacity.

Flow and Smoothing

Number Keys/
You can control flow and smoothing settings by the same number keys combinations like in opacity with adding one more key:

For flow — shift and the number keys.

For smoothing — Option(Alt) and the number keys.

If the Airbrush attribute is enabled, pressing the numeric keys changes the flow (without shift key).

The Airbrush Attribute

Instead of conclusion —

All shortcuts for brush works the same in other painting tools. Eraser for example;)

Another article about photoshop

101. The Brush Opacity Hotkeys