From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Opening a file by double-clicking it - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Opening a file by double-clicking it

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- [Instructor] All right, so as promised, I'm going to start things off by showing you how to open an image file inside Photoshop just by double clicking on it. First here under Windows, and then later in the same movie on the Mac. Now you Macintosh users can scrub forward if you want to, but I'm going to be offering some cross-platform advice in the meantime. And so here I am looking at the contents of the 01 Open folder, which is available to those of you who have downloaded the exercise files. In which case, by default, here on the PC it's going to look as if we have five files with the exact same file name, Welcome. On the Mac you should see the three character extensions but on the PC, even though this is where extensions were invented in the first place, they are hidden by default. And if that's true for you, then go ahead and switch to the View menu up here at the top of the folder then turn on this checkbox File Name Extensions and you will see different extensions for each one of the files, starting with the raw DNG file. We'll discuss that later in the chapter, followed by a JPEG file. JPEG is a compressed file format that is generally reserved for flat photographic images. Next we have ping. Ping is very popular with the web and mobile communities. After that, we have PSD, which is short for the native Photoshop document format. This format supports everything that Photoshop can do, including layers, which is why you're going to do 90% of your upfront work in that format. And then finally we have TIF which is very popular with the Prepress community. And so just to get your bearings, double-click on the PSD file and it should open automatically inside Photoshop as we're seeing here. And you'll know you're inside Photoshop because you'll see this tiny blue PS icon in a top left corner of the screen. In which case I'll just go ahead and click on this minimize icon here on the PC, on the Mac you would go to the Photoshop menu on the left side of the screen and choose hide Photoshop. All right, now I'll go ahead and double-click on the JPEG file now, very likely, at least by default it's going to open inside photos here in the PC which is not Photoshop. On a Mac it'll most likely open, at least by default, inside Preview. Now while Photos and Preview are fine utilities they don't hold a candle to Photoshop, not nearly as powerful. And so if this happens to you what you want to do is just close out of the program, or quit the program on the Mac, and then right click on that JPEG file, or any of the other files for that matter. If they open inside the wrong program. And then I'll go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of the shortcuts menu and choose properties on a Mac as we'll see, you want to choose the Get Info command. Next, I'll click on a change button right here in order to bring up a list of applications, and you should see Photoshop. If you don't, you can scroll down to the bottom of the list here and click on More Apps in order to locate the program. After which just go ahead and click OK in order to hide that window and then click OK again. And now if you double click on the JPEG file, it will open inside Photoshop, as will all JPEG files from this point on. And so we'll just go ahead and minimize the application and then double click on the PNG file. If it opens inside Photos, or Preview on the Mac, then just go ahead and close it and repeat those instructions. All right, now, for those of you working on the Mac, as I said you should be able to see those three character extensions right off the bat. In which case, assuming that your JPEG file is opening in preview, right click on that file and choose the Get Info command, which has a keyboard shortcut of command I, by the way, and that will bring up the Get Info panel right here. Notice this Open With area, if necessary go ahead and click on the triangle in order to expand it. By default, it's set to Preview, as I said. You want to change that to Photoshop 2020, whatever. And when I say whatever, I mean whatever is the most recent version of the software. Next you want to click on the Change All button right here, in which point you'll get an alert message asking if you want to do this for all JPEG files. You absolutely do, so go ahead and click on Continue. Now, if you end up getting this effect right here in which Photoshop is trapped inside a tiny window and incidentally, you'll know that you're inside Photoshop here in the Mac because you'll see a Photoshop menu over on the left-hand side of the screen. In any case, if Photoshop is trapped inside a small window, then just go ahead and click on a little plus icon. All right, now, here I am back on a PC. I'm working on a very small screen. So my layers panel, which is pretty much the most important panel inside the software, is smushed down here at the bottom. If that happens to you, all you need to do is click on the layers tab in order to expand it. And then you can make the color panel smaller by dragging this horizontal divider line. And then you probably want to drag the vertical divider in order to make these panels thinner which is going to give you more room to work on screen. Now, I'll just press Control plus. That would be command plus on a Mac in order to zoom in. And that is fairly lickety split. How you set things up so that you can open an image file inside Photoshop just by double clicking on it.

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