For several years now I’ve been using a few actions in Photoshop for cropping and saving images. The one I use most is called “Flatten, Crop and Save for Web,” and it does just that. If I need to save an image with transparency, I turn the background layer off and use another action called “Crop and Save for Web.”

This has been working great for me but yesterday I read a post by Noah Stokes about using function keys as custom keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop for frequently used menu items. He assigns Crop to F1 and Save for Web to F2. Then it hit me, I could the same technique, but apply it to my existing actions! Now when I first make a selection in Photoshop, I can hit F1 to Flatten, Crop and Save for Web all at once!

To set this up, first you’ll need to set up your actions as shown below.

Then select the action in your actions palette. In the actions palette menu, select “Action Options.” This is where you can assign a function key to the action.