From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

A tour of the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Start my 1-month free trial

A tour of the Photoshop interface

“

- [Instructor] Let's take a few moments to familiarize ourselves with the Photoshop interface. I'm going to start with bridge and then just double click on the BarrenTree.jpg in order to open it into Photoshop. So, across the top we have all of our different menu items and they're grouped together by the tasks that you may want to do so, for example, everything with layers is under the Layers menu, or anything you want to do with type, you can find under the Type menu. Then on the left hand side, we have all of our different tools, and when you hover your cursor over any of these tools, you're going to see a Rich Tool Tip for that tool. So I think this is great for beginners, but as you get more advanced, you might want to turn that off so you can choose Photoshop and then Preferences and then Tools; on Windows, this would be under the Edit menu. I'll go ahead and disable the show Rich Tool Tips. Now these small yellow tool tips will still pop up unless we uncheck the show tool tips above that. I'll leave those both off for now and then click okay. Now, when you select a different tool, the options for that tool will appear above in the options bar. Below the Options bar, we can see the tab for the open document, and in the center is the image preview area. At the bottom left, we have the status window, and you can use the chevron in order to choose from a number of different items that you can show in that area. On the right hand side, there are a number of different panels and don't worry, your screen might look different from mine either because you rearranged the panels yourself, maybe you've opened and closed some panels, or Photoshop may have arranged the panels differently based on your screen resolution. So I'll be talking about hiding and showing and rearranging panels in depth in other videos, but for now, I would suggest that you choose essentials from the workspace picker to reset the panels, and if they still don't look the same, select that same workspace picker and choose reset essentials so that we're all starting with a similar setup. In addition, there are a few small changes that we can make to the interface to help us get the most out of the Photoshop environment. First, I like to maximize the application so that I'm taking advantage of the entire screen and so that I'm not distracted by other applications that I may have opened in the background. On the map, I'll do this by clicking on the green icon in the upper left, but on Windows, you'll want to click the rectangular maximize icon in the upper right of the application. If I need to switch to another application, say bridge for example, I can always use command tab on Mac to cycle through my open applications or if I'm on Windows, I can use alt tab. I also like to keep the application frame enabled. If I disable it under window and then choose application frame, I can now see through the background of Photoshop, and it's very distracting to see those other open applications. So I'll return to window and just enable that again. Photoshop also has four different color themes that you can choose from. I'll select Photoshop, and then preferences, and then interface. To change the color theme, simply click on it, making it darker or lighter. I prefer one of the darker two interfaces just because it's a little bit easier on the eyes. We can also change the highlight color from the default gray to blue, and that just makes it a little bit easier to see what's selected on panels like the layers panel. Just for a bit of fun, there's also an Easter egg in these preferences. If I hold down command option and shift or control alt shift on Windows, and I click on any of the color themes, it switches to either cups of coffee or different colors of toast. All right, let's close the preferences, and I want to point out you can also change the color behind the image in the image preview area. Just right click or, on Mac, control click and then either choose from any of the options here or you can select a custom color such as white, just to preview, maybe, what this would look like if it was matted with a white matte background. All right, I'll go ahead and switch that back to default for now. And if you happen to know the tool or the command that you're looking for, but you don't know where to find it, you can use command F on Mac or control F on Windows, and that will bring up a window where you can start searching for things. So say, for example, I wasn't sure where the crop tool was. If I start typing in crop, we can see under the shortcut area, there's the crop tool, and when I select it, it actually highlights it in the interface. All right, I'll close that for now. And of course, you can choose whatever interface options you want, but I find that maximizing Photoshop to use the entire screen, selecting a color theme that's darker and more easy on the eyes, and changing the highlight color to blue helps increase my productivity when I'm working in Photoshop.

Contents