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.