These days, digital photographers want to edit their photos to crop, rotate, brighten, and otherwise tweak before printing. Below is a list of some basic tricks to speed up your editing and improve you knowledge of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

1) Crop Tool: Crop and Rotate your image at the same time

Cropping allows you to remove unwanted edge areas from your image, thus omitting ugly things in your photo's frame. But did you know that once you have selected the "keeper" part of your image with the Crop tool, you can move your cursor outside this box and rotate the keeper part, too? Just click and drag the cursor once it changes to a curved double-headed arrow, and you'll see your image rotate around the center point. When you're happy with the angle, simply hit Enter to crop and rotate all at once.

2) Brush Tool: Draw straight lines

Hold down the Shift key and click the mouse button once where you want to start the straight line, and once where you want to end it. If you continue to align and click your mouse, more straight lines will be drawn, each time between the last two successive clicks.

3) Selection Tools: Using a brush to select areas of your image

In Photoshop Elements, select the Selection Brush too. In Photoshop, press Q to switch to the Quick Mask Mode, and then double-click the Quick Mask icon in the Tool Box to select the Selected Areas type from the Color Indicates section, and pick the brush tool. Paint over the areas of the image you want to select, and notice that the selected area is covered in a semi-transparent layer of red. Press Q again to switch back to the Standard mode.

4) Selection Tools: Polygonal Lasso tool in combination with the standard Lasso tool to make selections

The Polygonal Lasso tool is great for selection image areas with straight edges, but often only a few sides of your selection have straight edges, so you also need to use the standard Lasso tool for its freeform capabilities. Did you know that you can switch between the two for the same selection? Start by selecting the Polygonal Lasso tool. Use it to select the edge part of your selection. Then hold down the Alt key while you click and drag the Lasso button from the Tool Box to your image. If you want to switch back, simply click to end the freehand selection section.

5) Zoom Tool: Change Image View size quickly

Shortcuts have been provided by Adobe to quickly zoom in and out of your image. I use these myself all the time:
- to zoom in, hold down the Ctrl key while pressing + as many times as you like
- to zoom out, hold down the Ctrl key while pressing - as many times as you like
- to fit the image to screen, hold down the Ctrl key and press the number 0
- to display the image at 100%, double-click the Zoom tool, or hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys while pressing 0

6) Layers Palette: Selecting the Active Layer directly from your image workspace

How many times have you gone to erase part of a layer, only to find out you had the wrong one selected? Rather than trying to figure out which layer you're using, you can hover your mouse cursor over the area you want to edit and right-click to display a pop-up menu of all the layers present at that spot. Select the layer you want to edit from the pop-up list, and you're ready to edit!

7) Layers: Using keyboard shortcuts to move Layers

When using layers to edit images, position within the image stack can make a big difference for a particular layer. Adobe has provided built-in shortcuts that allow you to quick move the layers up and down in the stack.
- to move the active layer up one position in the layer stack, hold down the Ctrl key while pressing the ] key
- to move the active layer down one position, hold down the Ctrl key while pressent the [ key
- to move the active layer to the top of the stack, hold down Ctrl and Shift while pressing the ] key
- to move the active layer to the bottom of the stack, hold down Ctrl and Shift whil pressing the [ key
- to switch active layers, hold down the Alt key instead of the Ctrl key with the key combinations above (e.g. Alt with ] make the layer above the current one active)