Cycle through blend modes

[gcherry]

I apologize if this has been posted before, but I though newer members might find this helpful. The PSE online help file has a mistake regarding the keyboard shortcut for cycling through blend modes. They show the keyboard shortcut as Shift plus + or - ... I couldn't understand why this wouldn't work for me. I found out that Alt-Shift plus + or - actually does the trick. Really useful if you want to quickly cycle through the blend modes to see the effects.

Another handy one I didn't know about ... double-clicking on a text layer will switch to the text tool and highlight all the text in that layer. Neat!

[TonyW]

I didn't know that one - I usually just click on blend mode box and use the up/down arrow keys - that works in PSE7 but I seem to recall not all versions are the same - I think I could do it with the mouse scroll wheel in one of the versions. The one thing that I'd really like to be able to do is scroll through the blend modes and not have it fill up the Undo History - I find it slightly annoying that after a couple of up and down scrolls I have to do a lot of searching in the Undo History to go back to where I started (even though I have the Undo History set to the maximum states)

Toiny

[Simenon]

Hi Tony - I use the scroll wheel on my mouse (in PSE 4) to cycle through the Blend modes. The scroll wheel works well in other menus too, as well as in many menus for other programs which I use. Couldn't agree with you more about the Blend modes sucking up the Undo History, especially since that wasted effort accomplishes virtually nothing. I limit my Undo History to 100 which seems to work pretty well.

~ Simenon

[elwoodsusanm]

This is handy to know. I have gone from 5 to 7. In 5 I could scroll the blend modes seeing how each one affect the photogaph but I can't do it in 7:( So your tip will come in handy, thank you :)
Sue

[Bayla]

In PSE3 I used the scroll wheel on my mouse, in PSE6 I do as Tony suggested - use the arrow keys. Glenda's tip of Alt-Shift- +/- seems only to work with PSE7.

Bayla

[elwoodsusanm]

It's so annoying when they make these little changes:(

[TonyW]

Curiously I did just try the official shortcut in PSE7 (Shift + ) and it worked - it does depend on what tool you've parked on though - if you happen to be on the brush tool it changes the brush blend mode, not the layer blend mode.

For anyone with an excellent memory who uses one or two blend modes a lot you can also use Shift+Alt+Letter but you have to remember which letter corresponds to which blend mode and they aren't all very logical (at least N is Normal ;))

For a complete list see here:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/11.0/WS17DDC46E-8F05-4250-8CFC-EE0AB2E6EF84a.html

That's the CS-4 list - the PSE7 list is here but the CS-4 one is slightly more helpful (and I think they all work the same)

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PhotoshopElements/7.0_Win/WSae2ea3b149d0c3591309e871039f8bc68a-7ff1.html

Tony