From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

A tour of the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

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A tour of the Photoshop interface

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- [Instructor] Let's take a moment to familiarize ourselves with the Photoshop interface. So I'm going to start with Bridge and I'm going to double click on the Mesquite Dunes photo here in order to open it into Photoshop. Now across the top of Photoshop there are a number of different menu items and they're all grouped together by topics, such as, you know, your layers, your type or selections or different filters. All the tools are going to be on the left hand side and when you hover over a tool you might see one of these rich tool tips for the tools and it's really great for beginners because it explains what the tools do. But as you get advanced you might not want to see these and so I want to show you that you can turn them off under Photoshop and then preferences and then tools. Now there's options for the Rich Tool Tips. Those are the ones that have the animations. I'll toggle that off. And then there's the tool tips. Those are just these little, small yellow tool tips that might pop out. So you can choose whether or not you want to leave them on. I'm going to toggle it off for now. All right. When you select a different tool we can see that the options for that tool are going to change up in the options bar. Right below that we can see the tab for the open document or multiple open documents if there were some. And then the center is the image preview area. Then at the bottom of the window is the status window and we can click on the little Chevron here if we wanted to see a different option, for example, maybe the document size. Then on the right hand side there are lots and lots of different panels that have additional options for working with Photoshop. It's important to note that your screen might look different from mine because you've either rearranged the panels yourself or Photoshop has arranged the 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 using this icon here and just choosing 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 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 have open in the background. So on the Mac, I click on this green icon right here. Or on Windows, you'd click the rectangular maximize icon in the upper right of the application. Second, to choose a lighter or darker color theme for Photoshop, we can use the Photoshop menu, select preferences, and then choose Interface. Now on Windows, that would be under the edit menu and then preferences and then Interface. So here we can choose from four different color themes. Personally, I think the darker color themes are much easier on the eyes. You can also change the highlight color. So I'm going to change this to blue and that just makes it a little bit easier to see, for example, which layer is targeted in the Layers panel. We can also enable this neutral color mode which would change any other interface in the application to a neutral gray. There's a few buttons that are blue so this just neutralizes that. All right, let's go ahead and close the preferences. If you were to right click, or control click on Mac, in this area that surrounds a photograph you can choose to change the color of the background. So for example, if I wanted to see this against a light gray, I could or maybe even choose a custom color. Here we can go and select white if we wanted to see what this might look like with a white mat around it. For now, I'll go ahead and set it back to the default. Also, if you don't know the tool or command that you're looking for and you don't know where to find it you can always try using the edit menu and choosing search. For example, if I was looking for color swatches but I didn't know where they were. I could just type in Swatch. And we can see that the Discover panel will return all of these results. So if I click on the swatches panel Photoshop will automatically bring it to the front and highlight it briefly. Excellent, so that wraps up this overview of Photoshop's interface. As you get more familiar with it it'll become much easier to find the tools and commands that you want to use.

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