Photoshop Tool Switching Shortcuts

Single-letter tool shortcuts are unmodified — just press V for Move, B for Brush, L for Lasso, M for Marquee, C for Crop, I for Eyedropper — with no Ctrl or Cmd needed, which is different from most other shortcut categories in Photoshop and is exactly why they're fast: a bare keypress with no modifier is the lowest-friction shortcut type there is. This only works when focus is on the canvas rather than inside a text field, panel input, or layer-name editing box, since letter keys typed into those fields obviously type the literal letter instead of switching tools. Many tool slots in the toolbar actually contain several related tools stacked together — the Marquee slot holds both Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee, the Lasso slot holds plain Lasso, Polygonal Lasso, and Magnetic Lasso. Pressing Shift plus the tool's letter cycles through the variants stacked in that slot (Shift+M toggles between rectangular and elliptical, Shift+L cycles the three lasso variants), letting you reach a less-common variant without ever opening the toolbar's flyout menu with the mouse. The temporary tool-switch convention is worth knowing separately from the permanent letter-key switches: holding Spacebar while any tool is active temporarily turns the cursor into the panning Hand tool for as long as you hold it, then instantly reverts to whatever tool you were using the moment you release it. This lets you pan around the canvas mid-brush-stroke-setup without losing your place or having to manually switch back to the Brush tool afterward. A similar temporary-switch pattern applies to the Eyedropper: holding Alt (Option on Mac) while the Brush tool is active temporarily samples a color from the canvas instead of switching tools outright, which is how most digital painters pick up colors mid-stroke without breaking flow. One practical gotcha: if you've accidentally clicked into a text field — the opacity percentage box, a layer name, a numeric input in a dialog — letter-key tool shortcuts stop working entirely because the keystrokes are being typed into that field instead. Clicking back onto the canvas itself (or pressing Escape to exit the field) restores normal tool-switching behavior. S for Clone Stamp and J for Spot Healing Brush cover two of the most common retouching operations, and choosing between them depends on how much control you need over the source of the painted content. Clone Stamp requires explicitly setting a source point first (Alt/Option-click somewhere on the image), then paints using pixels sampled from that exact location as you brush elsewhere — giving precise, predictable control over exactly what gets duplicated where, useful for replicating a specific texture or pattern deliberately. Spot Healing Brush instead automatically analyzes and samples nearby texture on its own without requiring you to manually set a source point, making it faster for straightforward blemish removal where the surrounding area provides an obviously appropriate texture to blend from, but offering less precise control than Clone Stamp for more deliberate, source-specific retouching work. T for the Type tool creates an editable text layer directly on the canvas, distinct from text that's been rasterized (converted to regular pixel content) either deliberately or as a side effect of certain operations that don't support live text layers. A text layer stays fully editable — font, size, color, and the actual text content itself can all be changed at any point — right up until it's deliberately rasterized or flattened, which is why professional design work generally keeps text layers as text for as long as possible rather than rasterizing prematurely and losing that editability.