I’d met him before – probably twice, maybe three times. But as he walked towards me waving, I completely blanked on his name.
Has that ever happened to you? It’s a terrible feeling when you know that you should remember a person’s name but it just won’t come to you.
I’ll be the first to admit that recalling people’s names is a skill that I could improve upon. I don’t know why, maybe it’s become a mental thing where I’ve convinced myself that I’m not good at remembering names.
Here’s the funny thing: ask me to name any shortcut in Photoshop and I probably can do it.
So how come I can remember Photoshop shortcuts but not names of people? I think it’s because I’ve been using Photoshop for a long time and realized (also a long time ago) that I was working harder than necessary because I wasn’t using shortcuts.
I started with tool shortcuts. These are the easiest to learn because you tap a single letter to activate a tool. It took a while – and initially slowed me down a bit while I tried to memorize them – but pretty quickly I started remembering them and before I knew it it became muscle memory.
If you worry about trying to “remember everything” in Photoshop, you may want to take a look at this video. (log-in required)
Or if you have a bit more time, have a listen to this episode of my Photoshop podcast where I talk about having enough time to learn, and how to remember things you’ve worked with in Photoshop.
My goal is to not only share with you useful, practical Photoshop techniques – but also to help you deal with the typical challenges of learning Photoshop.
Now if everyone would just start wearing big name tags all the time!