From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

A tour of the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 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 then double-click to open the barren tree image into Photoshop. Now across the top, you will notice there are a number of different menus and they're grouped together by topics such as layers or type or selections. Now all of the tools are on the left side and as you hover your cursor on top of the tools, you may see a rich tool tip for the tool, which I think is great for beginners. But as you get more advanced, you might get distracted by these. You might not want to see them. So in order to turn them off, you can always go under the preferences to tools. Now on Windows, this would be under the edit menu and then tools, and then disable show rich tool tips. And in fact, I'm also going to turn off the regular tool tips. All right, when you select a tool, the options for that tool are going to appear in the options bar and below the options bar, we can see the tab for the open document and in the center is our image preview area. Now at the bottom of the Window, we have a status area and we can click on the Chevron in order to access additional options. Then on the right, we have a number of different panels that have additional options for Photoshop. Now it's important to note that your screen might look different than mine because you either rearrange these panels yourself or Photoshop has arranged panels differently based on your screen resolution. 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 choosing the essentials workspace. And if they still look different, choose to reset the essentials. That way we'll all be starting with a similar setup. 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. So 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've opened in the background. So on the Mac, I would just click on this green icon right here, if it wasn't maximized, I had just already done that. On Windows, you'll want to click the rectangular maximize icon in the upper right of the application. Now, if I do need to switch to another application, say bridge, for example, I can always choose file and then browse in bridge, or I can use the keyboard shortcut command tab on Mac to cycle through all of my open applications. All right. Some of you may also choose a lighter or darker color theme for Photoshop, and we can do that by again, going to the preferences, but this time I'll select interface. Again on Windows, this would be under the edit menu. And you can choose from any of these four different color themes. I know a lot of people like the lighter color themes, but I just think the darker ones are a little bit easier on the eyes. You can also change the highlight color. If I change it from the default to the blue, we can see that on the layers panel, the background now has a blue highlight, which I just think sometimes it's easier to see. All right, I'll close that and if you ever want to change the color of the interface that surrounds the preview area, you can right click and then select from any of the options or go ahead and choose a custom color. This might be convenient for example, if you wanted to preview this against white. For now, I'll just set that back to the default. And if you know the tool or command that you're looking for, but you're not sure where to find it, you can try using Photoshop's discovery panel by either choosing the edit menu and then selecting search using the keyboard shortcut command F or Ctrl + F on Windows or clicking on the search icon in the upper, right. Let's say we were looking for swatches. I could go ahead and start typing in swatches, it will show me a number of different results. And if I select, for example, the swatches panel, we'll go ahead and highlight that for me. All right. I'll click on the search icon again and then just close that, and I'll also close the open document. Excellent. So as you get more familiar with Photoshop's interface, it's going to become much easier to find the tools and the commands that you want to use.

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