From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

Opening files in Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

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Opening files in Photoshop

- [Instructor] When you first launch Photoshop it displays a Home screen to help guide you to the files that you want to work with. Now, don't be alarmed if you're new to Photoshop and your Home screen doesn't look exactly like the one you see here. The first time you launch Photoshop you might see messaging in this area, or you might see, like we do, kind of this link to a tutorial, or to check out what's new. If we want to we can always hide those suggestions by clicking on the caret in the upper right. You'll also notice that we can drag and drop images here in order to get started, and once we start opening up some files we'll see all of our recently opened images in this area as well. So let's start by opening a file, I'll click on the Open button. Navigate to the exercise files, to 01 Opening Files, and I'll open up the Arch.jpg. Now as soon as I open that file the Home screen will disappear. But, if I want to access the Home screen I can click on the Home icon in the upper left. Then if I want to return to Photoshop I can either click on the Ps icon or I can just tap the Escape key. As soon as I close this document we'll see the Home screen again, and now we can see the recently opened documents. All right, to open a new document let's click on Create new, and we have a number of different options across the top. We've got a Recent and Saved options, as well as a number of task-oriented document presets. So for example when I click on Photo I see a number of different presets for the default or commonly-used photo sizes. If we switch to Print, or Art & Illustration, or Web, we'll see presets based on the common file sizes for those tasks. I'll return to Photo, but let's say I don't see the preset that I'm looking for, well then, over on the right-hand side, we can enter in our own width and height, in this case I'll make a preset that's eight by eight inches. If it wasn't square I could quickly change the orientation here. I can also change the units of measurement if I want to, the resolution, color mode and bit depth, as well as what I want to fill the background contents with, and some additional advanced options. If I think I'm going to use this preset file size over and over again, then I'll click on the Save icon in the upper right and I'll give it a name. In this case it'll be eight by eight inches, and 300 pixels per inch. Then I'll save that preset. And Photoshop has automatically switched me to this Saved area here. I'll go ahead and close this text dialog, and then to open this I just need to double click on it. For now I'll go ahead and close it, but I want to show you when I return to Create new it's now listed, not only under my Recent area, but also under the Saved area. All right, let's close this dialog. And I just want to point out, if you're using Lightroom Classic to organize your images and you've synchronized some of those files to the cloud, you can click here on Lightroom photos in order to see those images that you've synchronized. If you're using Lightroom, the cloud-based version, then when you click here you can access all of those full-res images that're in the cloud. In addition, we can access any of our cloud documents. Now cloud documents are a specific type of Photoshop document, and you can save a cloud document which saves the original file into the cloud so that you can access it in other applications such as Photoshop on the iPad. Now, I like having quick access to all of my files in the Home screen, but if you ever wanted to turn this off, you could go to Photoshop, and then Preferences, and in General you could disable the Auto show the Home Screen. For now I'll leave it on. And as you can see, there's several quick and easy ways to open new documents, save presets, and open files from Photoshop's Home Screen.

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