in this video i'll be using affinity photo to explain how to change keyboard shortcuts as well
as add new ones whilst i'm using affinity photo the process is the same in both affinity designer
and affinity publisher if we look at the menu in affinity photo you can see that some of the
options have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them which are listed on the right in grey
for example if i hold down the command key and press c on my keyboard i can copy any selection
to the computer clipboard keyboard shortcuts like this though are common across lots of
software packages so you probably don't want to change those or you might become confused
but you'll also notice that some of the menu items don't actually have a keyboard shortcut assigned
to them yet if one of these is a command you use a lot then you might want to consider assigning your
own custom keyboard shortcut a good example of this for me is applying the frequency separation
filter which i do a lot let's look at how to do this now in the affinity photo preferences when
i click the affinity photo menu item i can select the preferences option on a windows pc you'll find
the preferences under the edit menu you can also open the preferences dialog using the keyboard
shortcut of pressing command and comma together on a windows pc that's the control key on comma
the preferences dialog is organized into eight groups this is the same in affinity
designer and publisher applications although the groups may differ you can then select the group
to change by clicking the icon or choosing it from the drop down list at the top left
we want to use the keyboard shortcuts group to create our custom shortcuts after opening
the keyboard shortcuts group you'll see two drop down lists at the top left of the dialog
in the first you pick the persona that you want to edit the shortcuts for
as the frequency separation filter is part of the photo persona i'll select photo in the drop
down the second drop down then lists the main menu options that you'll find along the top of
that persona as well as menus it also lists the affinity tools in the persona that you've chosen
many of the affinity tools also have keyboard shortcuts associated with them
for example if i select the paint brush tool you can see the list has two shortcuts in it
these allow you to use the left and right square brackets to decrease and increase the size of
the brush if you want you can change these to say using the up and down arrow keys on your
keyboard instead now before i make any changes to my keyboard shortcuts i'm going to save my current
settings then if i mess things up i can reload them from the file that i've saved i could also
use the apple defaults or serif default buttons to reset my keyboard shortcuts back to those defaults
but if i did that i'd also lose my current custom shortcuts that's why i'm starting by saving my
settings by clicking the save button then i can navigate to the folder where i want to save them
i have a folder set up for each of my affinity applications where i save these settings to
i also add the current date to the start of the name so that i know when i saved it
having done that i'm now happy to make my changes to the keyboard shortcuts
as the frequency separation filter is part of the filter menu i'll choose that in the second drop
down you can now see the different filters listed and if i scroll down to the bottom you'll see the
entry for frequency separation i'll set this to use the keyboard shortcut of shift command and
f by clicking the empty field and then pressing those keys together on my keyboard affinity photo
then recalls the keys in the field but notice this has a yellow warning triangle next to it
this is a warning that the keyboard shortcut i've just entered is already being used elsewhere in
affinity when i hover my mouse pointer over the field it lists the conflicting entries which
in this case is fade rather than risk making lots of shortcut changes to different personas
i'll choose a different shortcut which is shift and f this time there isn't a warning triangle
so i'm good to use that now i want you to notice the apply to all option below the second drop down
this is an important time saver when creating custom keyboard shortcuts you probably already
know that affinity products use personas and that each persona has its own set of menus whilst the
menus are different in each persona it's quite possible some elements are repeated if you want to
use the same keyboard shortcut across all personas you need to find and edit every menu entry
but by ticking the apply to all option it's done automatically for you after making your changes
click the close button to close the preferences dialog if we then check the filter menu we can see
the new shortcut we've just created now there's something else that i want to share with you
which is about setting up keyboard shortcuts for plugins in affinity photo as you might know you
can run some photoshop plugins inside of affinity photo a good example of this is the nik collection
which contains plugins like the vaser and silver effects pro if we look at the menu none of these
have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them let's open the affinity photo preferences again and try
to create a shortcut for nik silver effects pro i'll press command and comma to open the dialog
then in the filters menu i'll find the plugin entry but there isn't an entry for that plugin if
you want to load the plugin filters into the list you need to do something very specific the first
step to this is to quit and then restart affinity photo once affinity photo restarts open an image
before you do anything else after opening an image create a duplicate layer for that image then apply
one of your plugin filters to that layer i don't know if this step is essential but it's the only
way that i could get this to work consistently you can then reopen the preferences dialog and
check the keyboard shortcuts you should now find the table as populated with a list of your plugins
unfortunately that's as far as i've been able to take this currently it looks like there's a bug
here or at least there is on my mac notice that all my plugins are listed as being part of the
alien skin folder but they aren't also if i assign a shortcut to the plugin the warning appears
suggesting the same shortcut has been applied to all the plugin filters i won't go any further at
this point because trying to use the new shortcut crashes affinity photo if anyone has managed
to get this working please do let me know in the youtube comments below and exactly what you did to
do this despite this hiccup though the ability to define your own keyboard shortcuts is a powerful
feature in affinity products it's also great to be able to run photoshop plugins in affinity photo if
you want to know how to set that up watch this video next it explains the key steps you'll need
to follow thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe i'll see you soon in another video