This week’s visit to the dekeLounge comes with party favors. Yes, dekeOphiliacs, in addition to spending an hour with the man—shoes off and drinks in hand—you get to go home with a little token of Deke’s affection, his handy dekeKeys shortcut file.

Haven’t you ever thought it would be great if someone would automagically make your Photoshop shortcuts make more sense and serve the commands that you use most often? For instance, who needs Cmd-Shift-L (Ctrl+Shift+L) to control something as seldom-used as Auto-Levels? Wouldn’t it be so much better applied to, say, creating a Levels adjustment layer? The dekeKeys file is chock full of sensible remapping of the Photoshop keyboard shortcuts that is guaranteed to save you time, effort, and brain cell storage.

Here’s how it works:

1. Download the dekeKeys II.zip file to your desktop (just click the link), and unzip it.
2. Right-click on the dekeKeys.kys file and choose Open With > Photoshop CS4.
3. Click “No” or “Don’t Save” in response to the error message, should it happen to appear.
4. Inside Photoshop, choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.
5. Click the smaller of thew two floppy disk icons to the right of the Set option, near the top of the dialog box. Give the new shortcut set the name “dekeKeys.”
6. Click OK. Enjoy.

The zip file will also contain two .htm files (Mac and PC versions) where you can see all the shortcuts original and reassigned by Deke just for you!

We also sit around and discuss the philosophy of keyboard shortcuts in a way that only a guru and his apprentice can enjoy!

Where else can you enjoy classic cocktails and conversation and walk away with a present designed to make your life easier and less painful? Here’s the regular-quality (128kbps) audio file. You can stream, or for best results, right-click and choose Download or Save. For you audiophiles out there, here’s the link to the high-quality (320kbps) version. Be sure to download, don’t stream. And don’t forget the usual suggestion to subscribe via iTunes.

And a toast to Adobe for allowing us to rearrange parts of Photoshop to suit our own personal style (which you know we all have plenty of around here). Cheers!