Customizing Photoshop

Photoshop is a great tool, and can be made even more effective by making your own shortcuts, actions, and even custom panels.  You can also download scripts to do more complicated actions, and also batch process many files with your own custom actions.

Game Art Focused

Personally I use a tablet and paint digitally, and often create texture sheets for game assets.

Ctrl, Alt, and Shift Keys (Modifiers).

Combinations of holding these three keys gives the user many more options.  You should always have your hand over these.

Here are some examples of using Ctrl, Alt and Shift with just the brush tool (for painting)
Alt + Right mouse drag = Alter brush size
Alt + Left mouse click = Eye dropper (colour sample)
Alt + Shift, + Left click = create info point (provides colour and positional information for that point)
Alt + Shift + Right Click = Colour Wheel.

There are even more uses and changes for each tool or button you use or hover over.  For example Alt+Left Clicking between layers creates a clipping mask.  Shift+Left Click on a mask hides it (while keeping it).  There are many, many more uses to discover.

Using the Alt, Ctrl, and Shift are used in most software today - Providing the user with many tools for a quick and intuitive work flow.  Basically, if you don't use these "modifier" keys you are doing it wrong!

Shortcut Keys

Find out what shortcut keys you use and need to increase your speed and reduce the number of times you have to glance at the keyboard.  For instance the Escape key always exits your current process or text box (no need to look for its location on screen).  B is for brush.  Holding Shift and clicking B (or any other shortcut that is for a tool, like the marquee or lasso) you cycle through the tools.

You should change any shortcuts keys so tasks you use often are very easy to do.  For example in Photoshop I have made A and S decrease and increase brush size - This means I can keep one hand on the stylus and accurately change brush size.

A handy shortcut to make is to "Flip Canvas" - This is for mirror checks and getting a correct image.  I use Ctrl + F.

Actions

Actions are very easy to make, and are a recorded sequence of actions.

One handy one to make is "Offset" - this can offset your texture so you can easily paint over the edges and fix seams on tiling textures.

Scripts

Scripts can perform more complicated actions, but take a little coding knowledge to create.

There is a great one that is very simple - It saves out a texture and names it for you with one click.  With this you can save out a diffuse, normal or whatever map without having to do anything.

Plugins

The most useful plugin I have is Coolorus 2.  It adds a whole bunch of colour features to PhotoShop, and makes colour theory a lot quicker and simpler to apply to your painting.

Coolorus 2, cheap, and fantastic - Go try it for free!

Configurator

Configurator is a program used for creating your own custom panels.  Many concept artist put their favourite brushes on it, or their most used tools.  For me I made one with buttons for tasks I used a lot, but normally takes a while to find the option.  For example I have a + and - button for expanding or contracting my current selection.

Create your own panel with Configurator 4 and streamline your work process.
Turn your "actions" into buttons!

A great feature on Configurator is making buttons to run any actions or scripts you have.  So now I have a panel with many buttons to export all my texture maps.  I also make a lot of new documents, so created buttons for a 1080p image, an A4 print size, and a square texture sheet at 1024px.