From the course: Photoshop: Channels and Masks

Thumbnails and transparency - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Channels and Masks

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Thumbnails and transparency

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- [Instructor] Now I'm calling this movie thumbnails and transparency because I'm gonna show you how to increase the size of the thumbnails inside the layers, channels, and paths panel so you can better make out their contents and I'll also show you how to modify the appearance of this checkerboard pattern right here which indicates transparent pixels inside Photoshop so the opaque and translucent pixels stand out a little better. Along the way we'll review a few important preference settings as well. It should go quick so stick with me here. Anyway I'm gonna turn these layers back on. Notice how very very tiny these thumbnails are by default which makes it a little bit difficult to see what's going on. Now if you typically work with just tons and tons of layers then small thumbnails may work better for you because you can see more layers on screen at the same time. However, for our purposes large thumbnails are gonna work better and you get to those larger thumbnails by clicking on the flyout menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and choosing this guy down here at the bottom panel options. Now notice these little thumbnails right here. I'm gonna select the biggest one, which is gonna make these thumbnails as large as possible and then I'm gonna turn off a couple of check boxes. Notice this guy right here, use default fill masks on fill layers. We don't want that and that's because you can always add your own layer mask and it actually works better then having a default mask which is empty. Also when copying layers or groups by pressing Control + J or Command + J on the Mac Photoshop adds the word copy by default. I don't typically like that so I turn this checkbox off and then click okay. Notice now we have much bigger thumbnails and we can see the contents of these thumbnails including that checkerboard transparency pattern. All right now I'm gonna switch over to the channels panel which is right next door here. Notice these thumbnails are very tiny and to make them larger all you have to do is right click in this empty area down here and choose large. You can do the same thing in the paths panel. Now this particular images doesn't contain any paths, but if it did they would look bigger after right clicking inside this empty area right here and choosing large. All right now I'm gonna switch back to the layers panel and at this point you want to bring up the adjustments panel which if you followed along with the previous movie you can get by clicking on this black white icon right here and then click on it's flyout menu icon in the top right corner and turn off this command add mask by default. Again, you don't want to add masks by default because they just come up empty. Your better off converting selection outlines to masks and that way you have a mask that meaningful. All right so I'll go ahead and hide that panel and now we want to adjust a few preferences and you get to the preferences dialogue box by clicking on the edit menu here on the PC. That's gonna be the Photoshop CC menu on the Mac. Then drop down to the preferences command which is not nearly so low on the menu on the Mac and choose workspace. That's gonna bring up this panel right here. Notice this checkbox right there, large tabs. It creates these large tabs right here at the top of each one of the expanded panels. That works pretty well for tablet users such as folks that are using Microsoft Surface Pro, however, for those of us who are working on laptops and other computers those tabs are taking up a lot of space and so you can make em smaller by turning off this large tabs checkbox and notice how much better things look. Next you want to drop down to this guy, cursors, in the left hand list and click on it. We're gonna be doing a lot of brush work in this course and so I like to stick with a normal brush tip, but I also like to turn on this checkbox right here. So notice by default you're just gonna see a circle for your brush, but if you turn on show cross here in brush tip you're gonna see a little cross here as well so you know exactly where your brush is centered. All right now click on units and rulers and bring up this rulers popup menu. Now by default it might be set to inches and centimeters the thing about all of these units from inches down to picas is that they're exclusively for print. They have no meaning on screen. Whereas whether an image is bound for print or devices or screen pixels have meaning which is why I'll be working with pixels throughout this course. Then finally we have this guy right here, transparency and gamut which is responsible for these bright checkerboard patterns and so for example with this dreamstime layer I've got some white type right here and you can't even tell it's there at all, where the thumbnail is concerned. So to make things stand out a little better go ahead and change the grid colors to medium and then let's eliminate a little bit of this high contrast checkerboard by clicking on the darker swatch and what I typically do is raise the brightness value to 54% and click okay and that way we've got a more subtle pattern. Then once you click okay and you turn off those opaque layers which include the background and the grab layers right there then you will see this lower contrast checkerboard. Now if you notice that your thumbnails aren't updating here in the layers panel that's a little bit of a bug. What you have to do is turn the layer off and then back on. Notice that updated the checkerboard and so I'll go ahead and turn these layers back on right there. I'm gonna turn this guy off and then I'll turn on the dreamstime layer and you can see that updates it's checkerboard as well so that we can see this tiny white type inside the thumbnail. Then finally to save your preference settings, and this is gonna sound weird, what you do is you go up to the file menu. That's gonna be the Photoshop CC menu on the Mac and you choose the exit command. That's gonna be the quit command on the Mac and so when you quit the software that's when Photoshop actually goes ahead and saves all your preference settings and that my friends is how you adjust the thumbnails and the transparency as well as a few key preference settings here inside Photoshop.

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