From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Arranging the panels you use most often - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

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Arranging the panels you use most often

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- [Tutor] Because Photoshop is so many things to so many different people, it has a tremendous number of options. For example, look at the number of panels that are showing by default. And this isn't nearly all of them. Now, Photoshop does display panels a bit differently based on the screen resolution. So you might be seeing a slightly different configuration by default. If your panel layout is different, you can choose essentials from the Workspace Picker and then choose to reset essentials so that we're all starting in the same place. Now to see a list of all of the panels that are available in Photoshop, we can use the Window Menu and we can see for example, that the color panel has a check mark next to it. And it is at the top of it's group over on the right hand side here. If I were to choose Swatches instead, then the Swatches panel will pop to the top of that panel group. If we choose to show additional panels such as the Character panel, Photoshop will automatically add it to the second column. We can see that some of the panels like the Character panel are automatically nested with other panels, in this case the Paragraph panel. Now panels can have three different views, the expanded views like we're seeing over here on the right and if I close this, we have the Icon views. The third view you can get to by just dragging the Icon view a little bit to the left, and now you get the icon with the label, both the icon and the icon with label have these little grabber handles. So if I wanted to reposition or change the stacking order here, I could just drag the history panel down below the character and paragraph group. All right, let's drag back to Icon view and I'll expand the entire column by clicking on the two chevrons here. Now, if we want to rearrange a panel within a group, we can just drag the tab and when we see the group that we want to nest it with highlighted in cyan, we can release our cursor. We can also create our own groupings. So if I wanted to put the swatches in its own group, I would just drag the tab until I see the single horizontal cyan line and then release the cursor. We can also add additional columns if we want to, by just dragging to the left of the column until we see that solid line and releasing the cursor. We can also float panels by just dragging them out of any of the columns that they're in. And this can be very convenient because I can drag this to a secondary monitor if needed. In order to close a panel, I can just click on the X or I can right-click or Control-click on Mac and choose to close an individual panel, or I can right-click or Control-click on a group of panels and close the entire group at once. If I want hide the panels as well as the tools, I can tap the Tab key. Now, even though they're hidden, if I position my cursor to the side of the monitor, they'll go ahead and pop up so that I could access them and when I positioned my cursor away from the panels, Photoshop will automatically hide them. I can tap the Tab key again to bring them back. If I just want to hide the panels, but leave the tools and the options showing, then I'll add the Shift key to the tab and to bring them back again, it Shift + Tab. Now one panel that I want to point out is the Properties panel. It's a rather special panel because it's going to change its contents based on what I'm doing and what tool I'm working with. So for example, right now I'm on a background layer. So it shows me all of the properties of that layer. As soon as I change the background into a layer by clicking on the lock icon, now I get different options. And if I were to select say the Type Tool and create a type layer or the Shape Tool and create a shape layer, the Properties panel is going to update to reflect the different options for those tools. All right. So in order to reset the panels, I'll return to the Workspace Picker and choose reset essentials so that we'll all be working with the same setup. So as you can see, it's very easy to customize the panels that you use most often in Photoshop.

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