brush tool keeps changing into pencil

[Richard25848975yyhu]

and it's driving me crazy. Editing photos I constantly and repeatedly enter Q-B-D. Each time I hope to get a quick mask, black, and the same brush I was using 60 seconds ago. But NO... at least half the time I get a different brush tool, usually the pencil. I then hit B to cycle through brushes and sometimes I get stuck on the color picker and it's hard to get rid of. The lasso and crop tool also change on me.

I have hundreds of photos to edit and this problem is slowing me down. When I change tools and then go back to the first one, shouldn't it open with the same settings it had the last time I used it? What is going on?

PS 25.7, Mac OS Sonoma

[Trevor.Dennis · Accepted solution]

Remove the B shortcut from the Pencil tool.

Easiest way is to use the Edit Toolbar panel.

Click on three dots at the bottom of the toolbar, and choose Edit Toolbar.

[Ged_Traynor]

@Richard25848975yyhu try disabling this option in preferences and restarting Photoshop to see if it helps

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Is »Use Shift Key …« enabled? 

[Richard25848975yyhu]

I got nowhere with the three dots -- just got a dialog box that says "no tool selected" but when I select a tool the dialog box goes away and vice versa. I tried the shift-key-to switch-tools" option, which I don't understand (which tool would it switch to?) but it didn't seem to do anything.

Anyway, when I discovered Edit/toolbar... in the Edit menu (duh!) I was able to fix everything -- moved the tools and I didn't want to "extra tools" and turned on the option to disable shortcuts for extra tools and all is well. Thanks for the tips.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Hi Richard.  The Edit > Toolbar is exactly the same as clicking on the three dots.  I think it's primary purpose is to move tools that you know you'll never use over to the right of the panel, to simplify your toolbar.

The Toolbar in my first reply is my default, and fully customised.  You'll notice that I have very few nested toolgroups  like below.  I expect you know that when several tools have the same shortcut, holding down Shift and pressing the shortcut toggles you through all of the tools that share it.  Which is why you remove the shortcut from all options other than the standard brush so you know that B is _always_ going to give you the plain vanila brush tool.  

I have never understood why you would want to hit two keys when one will do, so I have the Shift key to toggle option turned off.

What makes this more powerful is that we can save custom Toolbars, Shortcuts and Menus in Custom Workspaces. So you can use the same shortcuts for different functions by context according to what workspace you are using.  

I switch between workspaces by ising tiny Actions triggered by Function keys.  These actions select and reset the workspace, so if I have panels dragged all over my screens (often for making screenshots for forum answers, I only need to press one key to tidy things up.