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The Photoshop CS2 Default Workspace
Let's start by getting to know the Photoshop CS2 workspace. When you first start
Photoshop with the default preferences, you should see something like the screen shot
here. If the workspace looks vastly different to you, you'll want to reset your
Photoshop preferences back to default settings. To do that in Photoshop CS2, hold
down Ctrl-Alt-Shift (Win) or Command-Option-Shift (Mac) immediately after
launching Photoshop, then answer Yes when asked if you want to delete the settings
file.
My screen shot shows the Windows version of Photoshop CS2. If you are using a
Macintosh, the basic layout will be the same, although the style may appear slightly
different.
These are the main counterparts of the Photoshop workspace:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Menu Bar
Tool options bar
Adobe Bridge shortcut button
Palette Well
Toolbox
Floating palettes
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You can explore each one of them in more detail on the following pages.
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The Photoshop CS2 menu bar, showing the Image menu and the Rotate Canvas
submenu.
The menu bar consists of nine menus: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View,
Window, and Help. Take a few moments now to look at each of the menus, starting
with the File Menu.
You may notice that some menu commands are followed by ellipses (...). This
indicates a command that is followed by a 'dialog box' where you can enter additional
settings. Anytime input is needed from the user, it is presented in a dialog box. For
instance, if you click File in the Menu Bar and then the New command, you will see
the new document dialog box. Go ahead and do this now. Click OK in the new
document dialog to accept the default settings. You'll need an open document to
explore the menu commands.
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Throughout this course, I will use the following syntax for instructions which involve
navigating menus in Photoshop: File > New
Some menu commands are followed by a right pointing arrow. This indicates a
submenu of related commands. As you explore each menu, be sure to take a look at
the submenus as well. You'll also notice that many commands are followed by
keyboard shortcuts. Gradually, you'll want to get to know these keyboard shortcuts as
they can be incredible time savers. As you make your way through this course, you'll
be learning the most useful keyboard shortcuts as you go.
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To access the other tools, click and hold down on a button and the other tools will pop
out. Try this now by clicking on the rectangle marquee tool and changing to the
elliptical marquee tool.
Now hold your cursor over one of the buttons and you should see a tooltip appear that
tells you the name of the tool and its keyboard shortcut. The rectangle and elliptical
marquee tools have a shortcut of M. An easier way to switch between the different
hidden tools is to use the keyboard shortcut along with the Shift key modifier. For the
marquee tools, the Shift-M combination toggles between the rectangular and elliptical
marquee tools. The single row marquee tools are used less often and must be selected
from the toolbox flyout. Another shortcut for cycling through the hidden tools is to
Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) click on the toolbox button.
Take a few moments now to familiarize yourself with the tool names using the
tooltips. Use the shortcuts you've just learned to explore all the hidden tools. Don't
worry about using each tool for now; we'll get to that soon enough. For now, you
should just get to know the tool locations and their icons.
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Photoshop's color well is where the foreground and background colors are chosen and
displayed.
In the lower part of the toolbox we have the Color Well, Edit Mode Buttons, and Screen
Mode Buttons.
The Color Well
Moving down in the toolbox, we come to the color well. This is where the foreground
and background colors are displayed.
The foreground color is used when you paint, fill, and stroke selections.
The background color is used when you make gradient fills, to fill in the erased areas
of an image, and when you expand the canvas.
Foreground and background colors are also used by some special effects filters.
The small double arrow at the top right of the color well allows you to swap foreground and
background colors. The tiny black and white swatch symbol to the lower left allows you to
reset the colors to the default colors of black foreground and white background. Hold your
cursor over those two areas to learn the keyboard shortcuts. To change a color, simply click
on either the foreground or background color swatch and select a new color in the color
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picker. Experiment by changing the foreground and background colors and then resetting
them back to defaults.
Below that you have a set of three buttons that allow you to change the appearance of
the workspace. Hold your cursor over each button to see what it does. Notice the
keyboard shortcut for all three is F. Hitting F repeatedly toggles between all three
modes. Try it now.
This is a convenient place to mention a few more shortcuts for modifying the
workspace appearance. Feel free to try them out as you read. When in either of the
full screen modes, you can toggle the menu bar on and off with the Shift-F key
combination. In any screen mode you can toggle the toolbox, status bar, and palettes
on and off with the Tab key. To hide only palettes and leave the toolbox visible, use
Shift-Tab.
Tip: If you want to see the image you're working on with no distractions, just do: F,
F, Shift-F, Tab and you'll have your image on a plain black background with no other
interface elements in the way. To get back to normal, press F, then Tab.
The last button on the toolbox is for moving your document to ImageReady. We will
not be exploring ImageReady in this course.
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Next to the Bridge button is the palette well. This is a space where you can keep
palettes that you don't use as frequently or don't want occupying your workspace. It
keeps them easily accessible, but hidden from view until you need them.
In the default workspace, you should have title tabs for the Brushes, Tool Presets, and
Layer Comps palettes in the palette well. You can drag other palettes to this area and
they will remain hidden there until you click on the palette tab to reveal it. When you
need access to one of these palettes, just click on the title tab, and the full palette will
expand below its tab.
Tip: If you cannot see the palette well on the options bar, you will need to adjust your
screen resolution to at least 1024x768 pixels.
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Palette groups can be moved around in the workspace by clicking on the title bar and
dragging. Each palette group has a collapse and a close button in the title bar area. Try
the collapse button for each of the palette groups now. You'll notice the button works
as a toggle, clicking the button a second time after the palette is collapsed will expand
the palette again. You may also notice that some palettes do not completely collapse
when you click this button. Try collapsing the color palette and you'll see that the
color ramp is still visible.
For palettes that partially collapse, you can completely collapse them by holding
down the Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) key as you press the collapse button. You can
also collapse a group by double clicking on any of the palette tabs. To display a
collapsed palette, just click once on the palette tab if it's in the back of the group, or
double click if it's in the front of the group.
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To bring a grouped palette to the front of the group, click on the palette's tab. You can
also ungroup and rearrange the palettes by clicking on a tab and dragging it outside of
the group or to another group. Try it now by dragging the navigator palette out of its
default group. Then put it back by dragging it back onto the palette group.
Palettes can be resized either by holding your cursor over an edge and dragging when
the cursor changes to a double pointing arrow, or by clicking and dragging on the
lower right corner. The Color palette is not resizable.
When you click the close button on a palette group it closes all the palettes in the
group. To display a palette that is not shown, you can either choose the command
from the Window Menu, or display the palette using its keyboard shortcut. Refer to
the Window menu for the keyboard shortcuts for your operating system.
We went over these on the previous page, but a couple of palette shortcuts worth
reviewing are:
Tab = Show/Hide Toolbox, options bar, and all palettes
Shift-Tab = Show/Hide all floating palettes
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Several palettes can be joined into one large super-palette. To do this, drag a palette to
the bottom edge of another palette group. An outline will appear long the bottom edge
and then you can release the mouse button. The two palettes will become attached, but
not overlapping. You can adjust the height of each palette group by dragging the
divider between them.
You can attach several palettes this way to create one massive palette collection. This
can be useful if you use multiple monitors and you want to move all your palettes to a
second monitor. By docking all the floating palettes together, you only need to drag
one thing to move all your palettes to the second monitor.
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The Styles palette, after customizing and moving it into the palette well.
Now let me show you some ways you can customize the workspace. I find that I
rarely use the Color or Swatches palette, so I like to drag those into the palette well
and keep them there. Go ahead and do this now.
That leaves the Styles palette all by itself. I like this palette large, with large
thumbnails, but I don't want it taking up all that screen space. Here's how to customize
it:
1. Click the title tab for the Styles palette and move it away from the other
floating palettes.
2. Next open the styles palette menu and choose "Large Thumbnail" from the
menu.
3. Now drag the lower right corner of the palette down and right so that you can
see 5 columns and four rows of thumbnails.
4. Finally, drag the Styles palette up into the palette well, or choose "Dock to
Palette Well" from the palette menu so it doesn't use screen space.
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Now when you click on the styles palette from the palette well, you'll see that it opens
quite large, but quickly tucks away when you click away from it.
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palettes on the bottom. You can drag the title bar and whole group moves; click the
collapse button and the whole group collapses.
Now repeat the steps above to join the Layers, Channels, and Paths palettes below the
History and Actions palettes so you have something like the screen shot above.
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Experiment on your own by customizing the palettes into an arrangement you think
you'll like. If you work with many large images you may prefer to keep your palettes
collapsed along the bottom edge of the Photoshop workspace to give you the
maximum space for documents. If you use multiple monitors, you may want all the
palettes joined into one and moved onto a second monitor.
When you are happy with your custom arrangement, go to Window > Workspace >
Save Workspace. Type a name to identify the palette arrangement, make sure the
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"Palette Locations" checkbox is enabled, and click Save. Now when you go to the
Window > Workspace menu, you will see your new saved workspace at the bottom of
the menu. You can choose this from the menu anytime you want to go back to this
palette arrangement.
If you'd like, check out some of the other custom workspaces under the Window >
Workspace menu. Also practice rearranging the palettes and re-loading the
customized workspace you saved. When you're finished exploring, you can reset
everything back to the defaults by going to Window > Workspace > Default
Workspace.
We'll take a closer look at each of the individual palettes in future lessons.
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When you have a document window open in Photoshop, there are a few more workspace
elements you'll need to be able to identify. Go to File > Open and navigate to any image file
on your computer and open it now. Ctrl-O (Win) or Cmd-O (Mac) is the keyboard shortcut to
open a file. This is the same shortcut used by most applications, so it should be an easy one
to remember. Windows users can take advantage of a handy shortcut for opening a file
just double-click on the Photoshop application window background.
If your image is small, drag the lower right corner of the document window to make it
large enough that you can see all parts of the document window shown in the diagram
above.
The Title Bar
The title bar shows the filename, the zoom level, and the color mode of the image. On the
right are the minimize, maximize/restore, and close buttons that are standard in all
computer applications.
Scroll Bars
You're probably familiar with scroll bars for moving around the document when it is larger
than the workspace. A good shortcut to know for avoiding the scroll bars, is the Spacebar on
your keyboard. No matter where you are in Photoshop, you can temporarily switch to the
hand tool by pressing the Spacebar. We'll practice this shortly.
Context-Sensitive Menus
In addition to the menu bar, Photoshop often has context-sensitive menus for accessing
some of the most likely commands depending on which tool is selected and where you click.
You access the context sensitive menu by right clicking, or by pressing the Control key while
clicking on a single-button Macintosh mouse.
One of the most convenient contextual menus can be accessed by right clicking on the
title bar of a document for quick access to the duplicate command, image and canvas
size dialogs, file information, and page setup. Go ahead and try this now on your open
document.
Next select the zoom tool from the toolbox, and right click anywhere on your
document. This context-sensitive menu offers quick access to commands for Fit on
Screen, Actual Pixels, Print Size, Zoom In, and Zoom Out.
Note: Each document appears in its own floating window, unless you maximize the
document window, in which case only the top-most document will be visible in the
workspace. When you maximize a document window in Photoshop, the document title
bar merges with the Photoshop application title bar, and the zoom indicator and
status bar go to the bottom edge of the Photoshop application window.
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The Zoom Level Indicator
Located at the lower left corner of the document window, the zoom indicator shows the
magnification level of the document. You can swipe your cursor in here and type a new
number to change the zoom level. Go ahead and try it now.
To return your document to 100% magnification, locate the zoom tool in the toolbox
and double click the button. The keyboard equivalent to this shortcut is Ctrl-Alt-0
(Win) or Cmd-Option-0 (Mac).
Status Bar
To the right of the magnification display on the status bar, you will see a display of
document sizes. The number on the left displays the uncompressed size of the image if it
were to have all layers flattened. The number on the right displays the uncompressed size of
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the document including all layers and channels. If the document was empty, you would see 0
bytes for the second number here.
Note that both of these numbers will usually be larger than the final file size of the
saved document. That's because Photoshop documents are usually compressed when
saved. For more on the Document Sizes display, look up Document Sizes option in
the Photoshop Help file.
Status Bar Display Options
Next to the Document sizes display there is a small black arrow that pops up a menu. Some
menu items may be faded out, for instance, if you don't have Version Cue installed.
The "Reveal in Bridge" menu option opens Adobe bridge to the folder where the
image resides on your computer.
The "Show" sub-menu allows you to change what is displayed in this area of the
status bar. In addition to Document Sizes, you can optionally choose to display other
information about Version Cue, the current document, Scratch Sizes, Efficiency,
Timing, the name of the current tool, or 32-bit exposure information. You can look up
each of these items in Photoshop's online Help for more information.
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Since these options are also available in the Zoom tool, and now that you know the
Spacebar trick, there is very little reason you'll ever need to use the hand tool from the
toolbox!
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without switching to the zoom tool, use Ctrl-+ (plus sign) on Windows or
Command-+ (plus sign) on Macintosh.
To switch to zoom out mode, you can click the zoom out button on the options bar.
However, it is much easier to use the keyboard shortcuts. When you hold down the
Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) key, the zoom cursor will change to a minus sign in the
magnifying glass, and you can click to zoom out. To zoom out without switching to
the zoom tool, use Ctrl-- (minus sign) on Windows or Cmd-- (minus sign) on
Macintosh.
Let's review each of the zoom tool options:
No modifier key = click to zoom in; click and drag to zoom into a specific
area
Double click zoom tool button = zoom to 100% magnification
Ctrl-Alt-0 (Win) / Cmd-Option-0 (Mac) = zoom to 100% magnification
Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) = click to zoom out
Here are a few more zoom shortcuts we have not yet covered:
Ctrl-0 (Win) / Cmd-0 (Mac) = zoom to fit the screen
Ctrl (Win) / Cmd (Mac) = temporarily toggles to the move tool
Working in Photoshop generally involves a lot of zooming and panning, so now you
are well on your way. By memorizing the most common keyboard shortcuts related to
zooming and panning, these functions will become second nature to you and you'll be
able to work much faster.
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