Paint Shop Pro X2 Keyboard Shortcuts for Brushes and Tools

This article is Part 3 of a three-part series on keyboard shortcuts for Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 and covers shortcuts relating to brushes and tools. Part 1 (https://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/publishing/articles/5989.aspx) deals with keyboard shortcuts found in the File, Edit, and View menus. Keyboard shortcuts relating to the Image, Adjust, Layers, Selections, and Window menus are discussed in Part 2 (https://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/publishing/articles/5990.aspx) of this series.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Tools and Brushes

As brushes and tools are some of the most-used tools in Paint Shop Pro, we will cover what they do along with the keyboard shortcuts for accessing them in this section.

• Clone - C –The clone brush is used to create strokes that duplicate part of an image. This tool is very useful if you’re creating an image with repetitive areas.
• Crop - R – With the crop tool, you can select the important parts of your image that you want to retain and eliminate the rest.
• Deform - D – Use the raster deform tool to change the appearance of a selection by rotating, resizing, skewing, or distorting.
• Dodge - J –The dodge brush is used to bring out details in areas that are currently shadowed in images and layers. It can also be used to darken areas with too much brightness.
• Dropper - E - The dropper tool allows you to choose active foreground and background colors for the materials palette from an open image. This is an excellent tool to use when you want to “grab” a color from one selection to use in another.
• Ellipse - Q – The ellipse tool is used to construct elliptical and circular shapes.
• Eraser - X – The eraser tool is used to make changes to the background color. It can either make the background transparent or replace it with an entirely new color.
• Flood Fill - F – The flood fill tool is used to fill an entire selected area with a color, pattern, or gradient. When working with layers, this tool can be used to easily change the background color and texture.
• Lighten/Darken - L – The lighten/darken brush makes changes to the HSL values and is used to increase or decrease the lightness of an image. This is another handy tool as the left mouse button will lighten while the right one will darken.
• Move - M – Use the move tool to move a selection from one area of the image or layer to another.
• Object Selection - O – The object selection tool can select, move, resize, reshape, and rotate vector objects.
• Paint Brush - B – The paint brush is a freeform tool used to paint strokes on a raster layer in an image.
• Pan - A – The pan tool is an extremely helpful tool when working with large images that won’t fit on the viewing screen. With this tool, you can quickly pan to different parts of an image for easy editing.
• Pen - V – With the versatile pen tool, you can draw lines, polylines, point-to-point figures, and freehand representations.
• Pick - K – Use the pick tool when you need to select, move, resize, reshape, and rotate layers and vector objects.
• Picture Tube - I – With the picture tube tool, you can paint with images instead of color. This tool also allows you to add several types of themed pictures to an existing image.
• Preset Shape - P – The preset shape tool helps place shapes as raster or vector objects on corresponding layer types.
• Rectangle - G – With the rectangle tool, you can draw standard and rounded rectangles.
• Selection - S – The selection tool is used to create selections of precise shapes. After using this tool, any changes made with other brushes or tools will only be applied to the selected area.
• Symmetric Shape - H – The symmetric shape tool draws a variety of symmetric shapes such as stars, polygons, or any saved user creations.
• Text - T – Use the text tool to create or modify a text area within an image.
• Zoom - Z – The zoom tool allows you to zoom in and out of images in order to get a better view of your document.