Photoshop is arguably the most powerful image editing program on the market. Many of its features are well known but it goes without saying that there are a lot of features hidden under Photoshop’s hood that will make your experience with the program that much more enjoyable. Here are 5 of my favorite Photoshop Hacks, Tips, and Best Practices.

If you make a lot of mistakes (like me) then being able to step back in time with the History Palette can be a lifesaver. My first tip (see 0:00 in the video) is to increase the number of history states to give yourself a little more editing flexibility.

Forget clicking those buttons in the Navigator Window! Use Ctrl / Cmd plus +/- to zoom in or out step by step. Use Ctrl / Cmd plus 1 to zoom to 100%, and Ctrl / Cmd plus 0 to instantly fit the image into your window. Check out 1:13 in the video.

Then, instead of dragging around the Navigator on a zoomed-in image, instead press on hold the Space Bar to turn your cursor into the Hand Tool. You can then click and drag to quickly move around your photo. Watch from 2:05 in the video.

Say you want to increase saturation of a certain color in your photo. Or add contrast to one specific tonal region in the image. Use the Targeted Adjustment Tool to adjust exactly what you want. This tool is available in many adjustments such as Curves and Hue / Saturation. Watch from 2:50 in the video.

When painting on layer masks you often find that you need to adjust your brush’s size and hardness over and over. While it is possible to do this via the Brush Tool Bar, there’s a much better and faster shortcut. With the Brush tool selected, hold Alt / Option on your keyboard, then right-click and drag your mouse. Dragging to the right makes the brush bigger; dragging to the left makes it smaller. Dragging up makes it softer, and down makes it harder. Presto! Brush adjustments almost instantly. See 4:30 in the video to see what I mean.

With selective editing you often need to apply multiple adjustments to the same part of an image, like when you want to add contrast and saturation to just the sky. Instead of creating the same mask for every adjustment you can simply create a mask for one adjustment, then use a Clipping Mask to attach all the other adjustment layers to it. And in one click all your adjustments follow the master mask. Watch from 6:46 in the video.