From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

A tour of the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: The Basics

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A tour of the Photoshop interface

- [Instructor] Let's take a few moments to familiarize ourselves with the Photoshop interface. So, I'm starting here in Bridge and I'm going to double-click on the BarrenTree to open it into Photoshop. Now, across the top are all of our menu items, and they're grouped together by topic, such as everything you would need to do with layers, or with typography. Then, all of our tools are going to be on the left hand side, and when we position our cursor on top of a tool, it's actually going to show us a rich tool tip for the tool. And this is great as you're learning Photoshop, but, as you get more advanced, you might not want to see these, so you should know that you can turn them off under Photoshop, and then Preferences, and Tools. Just disable the Show Rich Tooltips, that will hide the animations, and if you want to hide all of the tooltips, you can disable those as well. All right. When you select a Tool, the options for that tool appear in the options bar across the top. Now in the center is the preview area where we see the photo, and in the lower left is the status area. You can actually click on that and see more information about the image. If you click on the little caret, you can also change what is displayed there. As we can see, there are many panels that are being displayed on the right-hand side. But it's important to know that your screen might look different than mine because, maybe, you've rearranged the panels yourself, or Photoshop might have arranged the panels differently based on your screen resolution. For example, you may or may not be seeing additional panels like the Library or Learn. You might actually see two different columns of panels, again, it's just going to depend on the resolution of your monitor. So, I'm going to be talking about hiding and showing and rearranging panels in depth in other videos, but for now, I would suggest that you reset your panels by using the workspace picker, and just choosing essentials. Now if you have moved around your panels, you'll need to select that again, and choose to reset the essentials. In addition, there are a few small changes that we can make to the interface to help us to get the most out of the Photoshop environment. First of all, I like to maximize the Photoshop application so that I'm taking advantage of the entire screen and so that I'm not distracted by other applications that I have open up in the background. So, on the MAC, I've clicked on this green icon, here, in order to maximize it, while on Windows, you'll want to click the rectangular maximize icon in the upper right of the application. Now if I need to switch to another application, say, Bridge, for example, I can choose under the File menu, Browse in Bridge, or I can simply use the keyboard shortcut command, tab on MAC to toggle through the open applications that I have, or, on Windows, I can use alt, tab to cycle through those applications. Now second, I want to show you that you can choose a lighter or darker color theme for Photoshop. And we would just use the Preferences, here, under Interface. So we have four different color themes, a very dark color theme, and then sort of a medium, and light, and then the lightest one, here. Now, I would recommend that you use one of the darker interfaces, just because it's a little bit easier on the eyes. I also want to point out that you change the highlight color. We can see, right now, that the background layer is highlighted and it's gray. It might just be a little bit easier if you set that to blue so that you can tell which of your layers is highlighted. And, just for a little bit of fun, if you want to know of an Easter egg in Photoshop, you can hold down the command option and shift key, and you can just click on any of these color themed swatches and you'll get a little cup of coffee, and if you do it again, and toggle it once more, then you'll get some toast. So, just a little bit of fun there. All right, I'll click OK, and you should know that you can also change the color that surrounds your image, here, by just right-clicking in it, and then selecting either from the list or choosing a custom color. For now, I'll go ahead and leave it at the default but you might want to preview your image, for example, if you knew you were going to print it, against white or, at least, a lighter gray. Another small thing to know is that if you don't know the tool or the command that you're looking for, but you're not quite sure where to find it, you can always use a Photoshop search. So, under the Edit menu, you can select Search or just use the keyboard shortcut command, F on MAC, or control, F on Windows. And then you can start typing in what you're looking for. So let's say, for example, you were looking for the oil paint filter and you weren't sure where it was, you can just type in oil paint, and as you start typing, you get a lot of different options, here. So you would get options In Photoshop, Learn content, Stock content, and Lightroom Photos, so if you just wanted to look in Photoshop, just click on Photoshop. The great thing about this is if you click where it says Oil Paint, it will actually take you to that filter. Or if you were searching for a tool, it would show you where that tools is in the Toolbar. I'll go ahead and Cancel out of this, but, finally, the last, kind of small thing, if a tool isn't behaving the way you think it should, you can always right-click on the icon for the tool up here in the Toolbar, and you can reset that tool.

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