From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Arranging the panels you use most often - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

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Arranging the panels you use most often

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- Because Photoshop is so many things to so many different people. It has a tremendous number of options. For example, look at the number of panels that are showing by default. And this isn't nearly all of them. Now Photoshop does display panels a bit differently based on the screen resolution. So you might be seeing a slightly different configuration by default. So if your panel layout is different, you can always use the workspace picker and choose essentials. And if it's still different, then you can choose reset essentials. So that we're all starting in the same place. Now to see a list of all of the different panels, we can choose the window menu. And you'll notice the ones with the check marks are the ones that are actually visible or they're on top of any stacked or nested panels over here on the right hand side. So the color panel has a check and it's on the top. If I wanted the swatches panel to be on the top, then I just need to select swatches from the group here. And it will pop forward. If I use the window menu and I select a panel that's not visible, then Photoshop is going to add it to this second row of panels right here. And some panels automatically nest with others. Like the character panel is nested with the paragraph panel. Now panels can be in a variety of different states. They can be expanded like we see here, or I can collapse them. This is called icon view. And if I click and drag, I can elongate that so that I get the icon. Plus the text. If I want to reorder any of these, I can click on the grabber handle and then drag to reorder them. But for now, I'm going to drag back to icon view. If I want to expand them, I can click on the 'double chevrons' here and again, click again to collapse them. Now, if I want to rearrange a panel within a group, I can just drag the tab in order to reorder them, but I can also move panels from one group to another, by clicking and dragging until I see that panel group that I want to drop it into surrounded by that cyan line. I can also create my own custom groups so I can drag right between two groups of panels, where I see the single cyan line and then release the cursor in order to add another grouping. If I want to minimize a panel, I just need to double click on the name of it and then just click once in order to expand it. I can also add more rows and columns. So if I want to drag my adjustments over to the left here, we see the vertical cyan line. And when I release my cursor, it will dock it there. Now, if I want to drag a panel to float it, I just need to drag away and release the cursor. This can be very convenient. If, for example, I want to drag it to a secondary monitor, to close a floating panel, just click on the X and to close a panel. That's within a nested group. We can right click and choose to close, or we can right click and choose to close, the entire group at once. If I wanted to hide all of my panels, I could tap the tab key. Now, when they're hidden, they still will pop open. If I position my cursor near the edge of my monitor, and when I move it away, they'll automatically be hidden to bring them back. I can tap the tab key again. And if I use the shift key with the tab key, that will only hide the panels and not the tools again, 'shift'+'tab' will bring them back. Now the properties panel that we see here is a little bit unique or different from the others because the contents of the panel will change based on the tool and the layer that selected. For example, right now I have a background here. So I'm seeing all of the options for a background. If I click on the 'lock' icon to convert it to a layer, the panel options change based on the fact that I converted it from the background to the layer. Likewise, if I would add a type layer, I would get type options or a shape layer, I would get shape options. All right, for now, in order to reset the panels, I'm going to reset the workspace by selecting the workspace picker and choosing 'reset essentials' so that we'll all be working with the same setup. So as you can see, it's very easy to customize the panels you use most often in Photoshop.

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