From the course: Introducing Photoshop

Introducing the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Introducing Photoshop

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Introducing the Photoshop interface

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'm going to take you on a brief tour of the Photoshop interface. Starting with this vertical toolbox over here on the left hand side of the screen, which contains the various tools that you can use to edit your image. Up here at the top of the screen, directly below the menu bar, you'll see the context sensitive options bar. And by context sensitive, I mean that its options change to suit the active tool. And so notice, as by default, that the Rectangular Marquee tool is selected, up here at the top of the toolbox. If I were to switch to the Crop tool, then you would see that the options change up here inside that horizontal options bar. And then they will change back if I were to once again switch back to the Rectangular Marquee. Now notice by default, you're going to see what's known as a Rich Tooltip. And those animated tooltips are pretty, but I find them to be a little bit distracting. If you agree, then what you want to do is bring up the preferences dialogue box, which works a little differently on the Mac than it does on a PC. Here on the PC, you go up to the Edit menu and you drop down to the Preferences command, on the Mac, you go to the Photoshop menu and choose preferences, which is not nearly so low in the menu. Then you go over to the sub-menu and you choose General, which is going to bring up this big dialogue box right here. Now you want to switch to tools over here on the left hand list and turn off this checkbox, Show Rich Tooltips, then click OK. At which point, if you hover over a tool, you're going to see its name along with a letter inside parentheses, that letter represents its keyboard shortcut. And so if you want to switch to the Rectangular Marquee tool, all you would do is tap the M key, you don't have to press Control or Command or anything else. All right, now notice these big panels over here in the right hand side of the screen, you may or may not see the Learn panel right here, if you do, what I recommend you do is go over here to this flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the panel, click on it and choose Close. And that will get rid of that Learn panel. You can always bring it back anytime you like, by going up to the Window menu and choosing the Learn command. The reason I'm suggesting you hide that panel for now is because that way, you can switch over to the Adjustments panel, just by clicking on its tab, and then you can drag this vertical bar over here on the left side of the panel, over to the right, in order to save a lot of room on screen. Then I recommend you drag this horizontal bar upward so that you have more room for the Layers panel, and then just so that you can easily see the thumbnails for each and every layer, go ahead and right click in this empty region right here and choose Medium Thumbnails. And that will give you the best view of what's going on while allowing you to see a lot of different layers at the same time. And that is my very brief introduction to the User Interface or UI, if you prefer, here inside Photoshop.

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