Keyboard shortcuts

Chapter 12 · Keyboard shortcuts

Reviewed 4 November 2026 · Sources: Photopea keyboard shortcut documentation; in-app shortcut list; cross-checked against Photoshop defaults

Photopea's shortcut map is deliberately close to Photoshop's, which is the single biggest reason Photoshop users feel at home within an hour. The differences are concentrated in the places where a browser cannot behave like a desktop application: file operations, print, and anything that would normally open a native dialog. This chapter is the verified map, grouped the way you actually reach for keys rather than alphabetically.

File and document

The one shortcut that behaves differently from Photoshop is Ctrl+S. In Chromium with the File System Access API it writes back to the file you opened, exactly as you expect. In Firefox and Safari it triggers a download, because the browser will not let a page write to disk silently. Photopea cannot work around that, so the behaviour follows the browser rather than the application.

Edit and history

History in Photopea is a linear state list with a configurable depth, not a non-linear document history. Ctrl+Alt+Z steps backward while preserving the ability to step forward, which is the behaviour Photoshop users expect from the History panel. There is no history brush, so you cannot paint from a past state; chapter 6 covers that gap.

Image and canvas

Layers

Layer selection has a set of modifier behaviours that are worth memorising because they are the difference between slow and fast compositing. Alt+click on the eye icon isolates a layer, hiding all others. Alt+click on a mask thumbnail enters mask editing. Shift+click on a mask thumbnail toggles the mask on and off. Ctrl+click on a layer thumbnail loads its transparency as a selection, which is the single most-used shortcut in retouching.

Selections

View, zoom and navigation

The Space-to-pan behaviour is the one shortcut that separates fluent users from struggling ones. Holding space temporarily swaps any tool for the hand, releasing it returns you to what you were doing. It works while a selection is in progress and while a transform is active, which is when you most need it.

Tools

Tools with variants are grouped under one key. Pressing the same key repeatedly cycles through the group, which is how Photoshop users reach the elliptical marquee from M or the magnetic lasso from L. Holding Shift while pressing the key cycles backwards through the group.

Brush size and hardness have their own pair of keys, and they are the ones you will use most. [ decreases brush size, ] increases it. Shift+[ decreases hardness, Shift+] increases it. For opacity, the number keys set it directly: 1 is 10%, 5 is 50%, 0 is 100%, and pressing two digits quickly sets an exact value, so 35 gives 35%.

Text and vector

Customisation, and the gap that matters

Photopea does not expose a shortcut editor in the way Photoshop does. You cannot remap a key through a preferences panel, and you cannot save a custom shortcut set. The in-app list under Help > Keyboard Shortcuts is documentation, not configuration.

The absence of remapping is the one place where Photopea's shortcut story is weaker than a desktop editor's. Everything else — the tool keys, the modifier behaviours, the brush resizing, the number-key opacity — matches Photoshop closely enough that muscle memory transfers. If you are coming from GIMP, the mapping is different enough that you will spend a week retraining, because GIMP uses Ctrl+Z for undo but assigns tools to different letters.

A minimal set to learn first

If you learn only ten shortcuts, learn these, because they cover the majority of the keystrokes in a normal retouching session: V to move, B to brush, M to marquee, L to lasso, Ctrl+J to duplicate, Ctrl+T to transform, Ctrl+D to deselect, Ctrl+Z to undo, [ and ] to resize the brush, and Space to pan. Everything else is refinement.

Chapter 19 turns to the limitations, which is where the decision about whether Photopea fits your work actually gets made.