Sickdesigner

My name is Radu Chelariu, I'm a web designer and here you can get to know me better.

Photoshop Quick Tip: Handling complex files

Ever worked on a really complex design? One of those suckers that stretch for hundreds of layers? If you’re like me, you probably reach the point where understanding what’s going on feels like a task best suited for supercomputers pretty quick. Well, here’s a quick pro tip that’ll help you stay on top of the situation.

Alt+Click / Option+Click

If you want to quickly contract/expand a group tree in Photoshop’s Layer palette, just Alt+Click the little arrow next to the parent group. This little thing:

This may be a familiar feature to some of you, but what few of you know is that if you just created a bunch of Layer Styles via the Blending Options panel, minimizing the group will take care of minimizing the little “fx” drop. I don’t know about you but leaving an fx drop down open just drives me nuts, so this little tip takes care of manually fixing that.

Ctrl+Alt+Click / ⌘ + Option + Click

This one’s the daddy version of the Alt+Click trick. No matter which arrow you Ctrl+Alt+Click, the entire tree structure of your document will contract/expand. Yes, even groups that are not children of the group you were clicking on. How cool is that!

Happy clicking!

by Radu Chelariu

10 Comments

  1. Great find Sick! Could get quite annoyed clicking those little arrows..

  2. Uncleserb says:

    Nice one ;) Can’t stand expanded (fx) sub-menus but it was a real pain when you had to go thru 40+ layers. Cheers!

  3. dip says:

    Thanks for sharing your findings. Cheers!!

  4. bps says:

    did you know you can disable that fx drop?
    go to palette options for Layers, uncheck “Expand new effects”, voilá!

  5. Navin says:

    Nice Share.

  6. Luis says:

    You’re quickly becoming my hero!

  7. Dezzine says:

    Amazing! Thanks a million :)

  8. PS4 News says:

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