From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Panels and workspaces - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Panels and workspaces

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to organize your panels over here in the right-hand side of the screen, so that you can easily access Photoshop's most important options. I'll also show you how to save off this particular organization as a workspace. And incidentally, I recommend that you go ahead and trust me on this one because if you and I set up our workspaces in the same way, then it will be easier for you to follow along with movies in this and future courses. Plus, you can always restore Photoshop's factory default settings, as I'll demonstrate before this movie is out. Now, just so that you and I are on the same page, go ahead and click on this icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen, and choose Essentials, which is the default workspace. Then notice that we have two columns of panels. The far right column is expanded so that you can see the contents of the panels. The next column over is collapsed so that you see just the icons. Now, you don't have to work that way. You can have as many columns of panels as you like, and they can all be expanded as well. So to expand these panels right here, you just click on this double-arrow icon, and then if you decide you prefer to have them collapsed, as I do, then you can go ahead and click the double-arrow icon once again. To expand a single panel, all you have to do is click on its icon. Also notice that many of the panels are scalable, and so for example, I can make the History panel taller or shorter by dragging this bottom edge. And then if I want to collapse the panel, I click on the double-arrow icon again. You can also make the column wider by dragging this left-hand edge right there, in which case you'll be able to see not only the icon for a panel, but its name as well. However, I'm interested in saving as much room as possible, so I'll go ahead and drag this left edge back over so that I'm seeing the icons by themselves. Now I want to make more room for the Layers panel, which is without dispute the most important panel in all of Photoshop. And so I'll start by grabbing this relatively new Libraries panel, and I'll drag it by its tab and then drop it down here on top of the Layers panel. And you'll know you're dropping in the right location when you see a blue rectangle surrounding that entire panel, after which point as soon as you drop, you will now see the Libraries panel next door to Paths, Channels, and Layers. If you want to change the order of the panel, just go ahead and drag its tab like so. I'm very comfortable with having Libraries at the end, so I'll move it back, and then I'll click on the Layers tab in order to return to that Layers panel. Now I want to move the Adjustments panel, so I'll go ahead and drag its tab and drop it above this little cube right there, see that? That represents the Properties panel. And so go ahead and drop it on top of the cube, above it, that is to say, so that Adjustments is followed by Properties. And the reason I do that is that the Properties panel, among other things, displays the settings associated with adjustment layers, and the Adjustment panel allows you to create adjustment layers. And we'll see what that looks like in a future chapter, but for now I'll go ahead and collapse that panel. All right, now I want to bring up some additional panels. And you can get to all the panels inside Photoshop from the Window menu. So I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Styles command in order to bring up the Styles panel, and then I'll grab its tab and drag and drop it on top of the Color panel, like so, and then I'll go ahead and return to the Color panel by clicking on its tab, at which point you can see that this so-called Hue field is taking up way too much room on the screen, and so to make it smaller, I'll just drag this bottom edge upward, which results in a smaller Color panel and a larger Layers panel. All right, now we need to add some more panels to this column of icons, and so I'll start by going to the Windows menu and choosing the Actions command, Which groups the Actions panel along with the History panel, which is exactly what I want. And then I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Histogram command, which brings up this little bar graph of the luminance levels inside the image. It happens by default to be grouped along with the Navigator panel, which doesn't really make that much sense, given that the two are completely unrelated. And so what I like to do is to grab the Navigator tab and drag it and drop it on top of this bottom icon, which represents the Device Preview panel. Now, I'll return to the Window menu and choose the Info command, which displays a bunch of information about the open document. To my way of thinking, it's more closely related to the Histogram panel so I'll grab this Info icon right there and drag it and drop it below the little Histogram icon. All right, now we need to bring up a whole slew of additional panels, so I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Brush command. And then I'll return to that menu, and choose Clone Source. And then I'll grab the Clone Source icon and drag it and drop it below this little brush icon right there. Next, I'll go up to the Window menu and choose Character command, which brings up both the Character and Paragraph panels, which allow you to format type. And then I'll return to the Window menu and choose the Glyphs command, which brings up the Glyphs panel, which allows you to find any character inside any font. Now, the thing about the Glyphs panel is it's exceedingly useful every so often, and it wants to be bigger than this. And so, what I suggest you do, is grab the Glyphs tab and then drag it and drop it any old place inside the image. And that's going to give you a free-floating panel as we're seeing right here. Then, go ahead and make that panel bigger, so that you can easily see a whole bunch of characters at a time. Now again, I don't like to have the Glyphs panel up all the time, and so I just go ahead and close it. Now the rationale here is that you can bring it back any time you like by returning to the Window menu and choosing the Glyphs command, at which point you will restore that large, free-floating panel. But as I say, I don't like to keep it up all the time, so I'll go ahead and close it. And then I'll return to the Window menu and choose the Layer Comps command, and then I'll go to the Window menu and choose the Tool Presets. And next, I'll grab this little Tool Presets icon and drag it and drop it below the Note icon right there. And then finally, I want to move both the Navigator panel and the Device Preview panel way down here to the bottom. And so any time you want to move an entire panel group at once, instead of dragging an icon or a tab, you want to go ahead and drag this little scrubby item above the icon, and then drag and drop an entire panel group to the bottom of the stack. All right, now having done all this work, you want to take a moment to save your panel configuration as a workspace. And you do that by clicking on this little icon up here in the top right corner of the screen, and choosing New Workspace. And then I'll just go ahead and name this guy after the course, One-on-One, and then I'll click the Save button. And we now have a new workspace that you can access just by clicking on that icon once again. Now let's say, for whatever reason, you want to switch to a different workspace. In that case, you can just go ahead and choose any one of these workspaces, such as Painting or Photography, but what I want to do is restore the factory default settings, which you do in two steps. First, you want to choose the Essentials command, and what that's going to do is show you the last configuration associated with Essentials. If you then want to reset Essentials to the factory defaults then go ahead and choose the Reset Essentials command, like so, and that's going to return you to the panels the way they were when you first launched Photoshop. And then finally, assuming that you want to be able to work along with me inside the following movies, then go ahead and click on that icon once again and choose One-on-One in order to restore your saved workspace. And that's how you position and scale your panels, as well as save them out as a workspace so that you can take maximum advantage of the many powerful features inside Photoshop.

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