From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Handling multiple files - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Handling multiple files

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- [Instructor] So here it is, our new digital canvas. Ready to be turned into an artwork. And I will start right away by creating a little drawing here onto our digital canvas, because I now want to take a look at how Photoshop handles multiple image files. So, you can see that our image file here covers up the whole workspace and we have a little tab here on the top that gives us the name of the image file, it's currently Untitled. What if we add a second digital canvas to our workspace? And I will just use the same settings like in our first one. Okay, we now have a new, fresh canvas and we have an added tab here on the top so we can now switch between those two canvases and I will just put a little drawing here onto the second canvas so that we can distinguish them a little bit better. So we have two files now and we can switch between them by clicking the tabs here on the top. What we also can do is, we can drag the tab and rip the file here from our tab bar, so that it becomes a floating window. And by adjusting the size of the window, we can adjust how our file is displayed on the screen. Now we have both digital canvases visible. However, the floating window is always on top, even if we work on the lower one, the floating window will always cover the active digital canvas. We can also rip off the first canvas and have two floating windows here. Again, I'm resizing the size of the file window. That way we can make sure that nothing is covered up. They sit side-by-side. Now we can easily work on different artworks at a time. Now we can take one of those floating windows and dock it into another floating window like this. The blue frame here indicates that we can dock the window, and now we have a floating window with two tabs. And if we were to add another file to our workspace, this will now get opened in the floating window. So now we have three tabs here in the floating window. We can take out the third one, make an individual floating window and I think you see where I'm going here. You can setup a pretty complex working area with several floating windows, each containing a number of different tabs, and I have to admit, personally I'm a traditionalist, so the first thing that I normally do when I install a new version of Photoshop is the following. I go to the Preferences, the the Workspace, and here we find the options Open Documents as Tabs and Enable Floating Document Window Docking, and I uncheck these two boxes. Now if I rip the windows here, I have disabled the tab function. I now have only floating windows. They are not docking anywhere and this is the most important aspect for me, the active window always gets sent to the foreground. So I can make sure that I will always be able to work on a window even if it's half covered up by another artwork, when I make it active by clicking on the file window, I'm able to work on it. That's the way I like to do it, but I want to point out that it's very up to your own preference how you want to setup your workplace, either by using the tab functions or by using the floating windows like I'm doing it here.

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