From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Opening files in Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

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Opening files in Photoshop

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- [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. For example, if you've already opened up Photoshop documents, you'll see thumbnails of your recently used images in this area right here. All right, let's begin by creating a new document. I'll click the Create New button and we get a window that displays a number of different categories including the recently opened documents. Again, your screen might look a little different here any saved presets and then we have a number of different categories for specific tasks. So photo or print or art and illustration. And in each one of these categories, we have all sorts of different presets as well as templates that we can start working with. If we want to see all of the presets, we can click to view more and we can also resize this window which might be helpful. Over on the right hand side we can customize our new documents. We can change for example, the width or the height of our new document and we can change the orientation very quickly. We can also change the resolution as well as the units of measurement, both for the resolution as well as the size here. We can change things like Color Mode and Bit Depth and the Background Contents and several other options that we'll cover later in the course. For now, if I want to save this as a new preset, I'll click on the downward pointing arrow and give the preset a name. In this case, I'll give it 12 × 10 @ 300 ppI and choose to save the preset. As soon as I save a preset, it appears in the saved area. If I ever wanted to delete the preset I could click on the Trash icon. And if I want to open the preset, I can select it and then choose Create or just double click on it in order to open it. As soon as we open a document in Photoshop, that home screen is automatically hidden. And when I choose File and then Close, the home screen will automatically reappear. All right, let's open one of the exercise files instead of creating a new document, I'll choose Open and then I'll navigate to the Exercise Files folder. I'll choose Open in Files and then double click to open the Arch.jpg. Now, while I have a document open, if I want to see the home screen I can click on the little Home icon in the upper left. If I want to return to Photoshop, I just click on the Photoshop icon. And again, when I choose File and then Close, the home screen automatically appears. We can see the recent file that we just opened. And we can view this screen either by thumbnails or by a list view. From the home screen, we can also quickly access the Learn content or our work if we're using Lightroom or Cloud documents. So Cloud documents are a special type of file that are stored in a cloud and they're optimized for transferring Photoshop images between Photoshop on the desktop and Photoshop on the iPad. Now I like having an access to the home screen but if you ever wanted to turn it off, you can use your preferences. So I'll select Photoshop and then Preferences and General. On windows, you'd use the Edit menu to access your preferences. And I would disable the Auto Show the Home Screen. One thing to note, you do have to quit Photoshop and then reopen to have that change take effect. For now though, I'm going to leave it on. I like having it, so I'll click OK and as you can see there are several quick and easy ways to create new documents, save new document presets and open files in Photoshop.

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