From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Customizing the Toolbar - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Customizing the Toolbar

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- [Instructor] In addition to using different panels, you'll also spend a lot of time in Photoshop selecting and switching tools. Now, almost every tool has a keyboard shortcut. For example, the Move tool has the keyboard shortcut of the V key, and the Marquee tool has the keyboard shortcut of the M key. So if I tap M, Photoshop will automatically switch to the Marquee tool. And if I tap V, Photoshop automatically selects the Move tool. Almost all the tools, the ones with the triangles in the lower right corner, have nested tools. We can click and hold to see all of the nested tools and their keyboard shortcuts. You can select the nested tools from the flyout, or you can use the keyboard shortcut to select them. So if I tap L, that would select the Lasso tool. But if I want to cycle through the nested tools, then I'll add the Shift key and tap L, and that'll cycle us through the different tools. If you hover over a tool, Photoshop will show a Tooltip. However, in previous videos, I turned off the Tooltips. But if you go under the Photoshop menu on the Mac, well, depending on what operating system you're on, you'll choose either Preferences or you may need to choose Settings, and then Tools. Or on Windows, you'll select the Edit menu, and then Preferences and then Tools, and then you can enable these Tooltips. You can also Show Rich Tooltips, but for now, I'm going to leave both of these turned off. If you don't like the default order of the tools, or if you want to hide some of the tools that you don't use very often, you can customize the toolbar. You can either select the three-dot icon on the toolbar and choose Edit Toolbar, or you can go under the Edit menu and choose Toolbar. Here we can split out tools. So for example, if I want the Rectangular Marquee tool and the Elliptical Marquee tool to no longer be nested, I can just drag up, and now we see it has its own place on the toolbar. I can also remix or rearrange the tools. If I wanted, for example, the Lasso tool to be with the Move tool, I could drag it up and nest it with that tool. If there are tools that I don't use, I can drag them from the toolbar area to the extra tools. Now, they'll still be available if I click on the three-dot icon, but they're hidden from the toolbar. I can also change these shortcuts for any of the tools that I want. So for example, if I wanted to change the Rectangular Marquee tool from M to Y, I can just highlight it and then tap Y. Once you've set up all your tools and the keyboard shortcuts that you want, you can then save that as a preset. I'll click Save, give it my name, JK, and it will save it automatically as a .TBR into the Custom Toolbars folder. I'll go ahead and click Save, but knowing that not everyone is going to watch this video in the course, I'll go ahead and restore the defaults for now. Then I'll click Done. But before we wrap up, I have a few additional tool options. So by default, the tools are in a single column, but you can click on the two chevrons in order to expand it so that you can see two columns. This can be handy if you've gone in and edited your tools to show more tools than are viewed by default. You can also float your tool panel, so I can use the dragger handle here to just drag it out into the image area or drag it to a secondary monitor, or even nest it with all of my panels. Again, for now, I'll go ahead and place it back on the left-hand side. Finally, if a tool isn't behaving like you think it should, you can right-click or Control-click on Mac on the tool icon in the options bar and choose to reset the tool or reset all tools. So as you can see, the tool layout in Photoshop is very flexible. And don't worry about learning all of the shortcuts to all of the tools right away. You'll learn the ones that you need to know, and soon enough, it'll be second nature to just use the keyboard shortcuts to select your tools much more quickly and efficiently in Photoshop.

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