The touch shortcut in Photoshop on your iPad is a great way to streamline your workflow because it lets you quickly access additional features.
This can be especially useful if you're not using a keyboard with your iPad.
Let's check this out.
I have the Brush Tool active in the Toolbar and I'm just going to come in and paint a stroke over the sky.
Now with the Brush Tool still active I can press and hold on the touch shortcut in the lower left and it lets me erase without having to come out to the Toolbar and choose another tool.
When you're using a tool with the touch shortcut pressed down, you'll see a blue label in the upper right that tells you what the shortcut action is with the selected tool.
The function of the touch shortcut is active as long as you keep it pressed down.
If you move your thumb or finger to the outer part of the touch shortcut you can access the secondary function for the active tool.
With the Brush Tool this lets me use the Eyedropper to sample color from the image.
So, as I'm pressing down on the outer ring of the touch shortcut, I'm going to come over and tap on the clouds to the left of the ship to sample that color and place it into the foreground color chip.
Now I can release the touch shortcut and paint with that color just to suggests that there's a little bit more fog obscuring the ship.
By default, the touch shortcut is located in the lower left, but you can drag it anywhere on screen that makes sense for how you like to use the app.
The touch shortcut is not just for changing the behavior of the active tool, it also works with other features.
For example, you can use it as a quick way to select multiple layers.
In this composite the ship is on one layer and its reflection is on another layer underneath.
No matter what tool is active in the Toolbar, I can use the touch shortcut to select multiple layers.
I'll tap on the ship layer to make it active and I'll come and press and hold on the touch shortcut and now I can tap on the thumbnail of the reflection layer underneath to add that to the selection.
And you can see that they're both selected from the blue outline around the thumbnails.
I'll release the touch shortcut and now with both the ship and its reflection layer selected, I'll choose the Move Tool at the top of the Toolbar and now I can move both layers together and reposition them in the image.
We've only covered a couple of examples for how you might use the touch shortcut.
There are a lot of ways that you can take advantage of this very useful feature.
If you tap the Help menu in the upper right corner, you can view a list of the available touch shortcuts.
Once you get used to how it works the touch shortcut can be an effective way to speed things up and easily access common functions in Photoshop on your iPad.
