From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

A tour of the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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A tour of the Photoshop interface

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- [Instructor] Let's take a few moments to familiarize ourselves with the Photoshop interface. I'm going to start in Bridge and navigate to 02 Document Navigation and then double-click to open the Mesquite dunes image into Photoshop. So across the top, we have all of our menu items, and they're grouped together by topics, such as layers and filters, and then all of our tools are on the left hand side, and when you hover your cursor over any of the tools, you may see a rich tooltip for the tool, which you could then play to see what that tool does. Now, as you get more advanced, you may not want to see these, so you can choose the Photoshop menu on Mac, and depending on what operating system you're on, you'll choose preferences from the list or you might need to choose settings and then tools. On Windows, you'll choose the edit menu and then preferences and tools. Then we'll disable the show rich tooltips. There are additional tooltips that will pop out. These are just yellow text tooltips. You can either choose to leave them on or off. I'm going to toggle them off because I find them to be a little bit distracting. All right, when we select a tool, we will get the options for that tool up in the options bar, and below the options bar, we can see the tab for the open document. In the center is our image preview area, and at the bottom of the window is our zoom percentage. Next to that, we have a status bar which we can click. Here, we're looking at the width, height, channels, and resolution, but we can use the carat to select different information to show about our image. Now, to the right is our contextual taskbar. We can reposition this by grabbing on the dragger handle. We can also use the three dots in order to hide the bar, reset the bar position, or pin the bar position. So while I could move this anywhere and then choose to pin the bar here so that it doesn't move, one of the advantages of not pinning it is it will actually move around the image window as you select different tools and options, and it will display additional features here that you can use based on what you've targeted. So by moving around, it could save a lot of just mouse movement over the course of the day. So for now, I'm going to reset the bar position, and then on the right, we have all of our panels. So it's important to note that your screen might look different than mine because you've either rearranged the panels yourself or maybe Photoshop has arranged the panel differently based on your screen resolution. Well, we're going to talk about hiding and showing and rearranging panels in depth in other videos, but for now, I would suggest that you reset your panels by choosing the essentials workspace, and if they still don't look the same as this, return to that and choose to reset your essentials. Now they should look as similar to mine as they're going to. 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. So first, I like to maximize the application, which I've already done by clicking on this green dot here. That's going to hide all of my other application and put this into full screen so that I'm not distracted. On Windows, you'd 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 go to file and then browse in Bridge. But if I want to switch to, say, Lightroom, Photoshop doesn't have an option to do that. So on Mac, I can use command tab to cycle through all of my open applications, and on Windows, that would be an alt tab to cycle through any other open applications. We can also choose a lighter or darker color theme for Photoshop by selecting the Photoshop menu on the Mac, and depending on what version of the operating system you're using, you'll either choose preferences or you may need to choose settings and then interface. On Windows, you'll select the edit menu, and then the preferences and interface. We can select from these four options, either lighter or darker. I typically prefer the darker options, just I think they're a little bit easier on the eye. We can also change the highlight color for things like the layers panel from gray to blue, which I think makes that a little bit easier to see, but then there are other things in the interface, like this share button, that are blue. If we want to hide that, we can go into neutral color mode. It'll be hidden as soon as I click out of the preferences. But before I click okay, I just want to point out, you do have the ability to search your preferences, so if you are looking for a specific preference, you could just type it right in here and Photoshop would take you to that preference. All right, if you want to change the color that surrounds the image, you can right click or control click on Mac and then select from one of these colors, or you can select the custom color. Say, for example, you might want to choose white. Maybe you want to see what this would look like with a white matte around it. All right, for now, I'll set that back to default, and if you know the tool or command that you're looking for, but you don't know where to find it, you can use the edit menu and choose search. In the discover panel, you can then type in what you're looking for. Say, for example, you're looking for swatches. As soon as I type that in, I get a list of search results, and say, for example, I'm looking for the swatches panel, As soon as I select this, we'll see it highlight over in the panel area. All right, I'm not sure why the discover panel is hidden. Usually, it stays here and I would go ahead and close it. So for now, I'll go ahead and just close this image. I no longer need that open. And there you go, a quick overview of the Photoshop interface. With time, it'll be easy to find the tools and commands that you want to use.

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