From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

Arranging the panels you use most often - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

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Arranging the panels you use most often

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- [Instructor] Because Photoshop is so many things to so many different people, it has a tremendous number of options. I'm going to open up this river rock image into Photoshop, and we're going to take a look at all of the different panels. Now, there's a number of panels showing by default, but that's not nearly all of them. Photoshop does display panels a bit differently based on the screen resolution, so you might be seeing a slightly different configuration by default. If your panel layout is different, we can go to the icon right here and choose to reset the essentials so that we're all starting in the same place. Now, to see a list of all of the panels, we can use the Window menu, and the ones with the check marks are the ones that are visible or on top of any stacked or nested panels. So for example, the Color panel has a check and it's on top, but if I selected the Swatches panel instead, then it would be moved to the top. Of course, we can also just click on the tab of any of the panels in order to bring them to the top. We can also reorder them by simply clicking and dragging to reorder them within their group. Now, if we choose to show another panel, for example, I will select the Character panel, we can see that some of the panels are automatically nested with other panels. And when you choose to show additional panels, Photoshop will show them in this second column. Now, these are expanded, but I can always collapse them by clicking on the two little chevrons here. So this would be considered iconic view. If I wanted to see the name of the panel, I can click and drag out so that I can see the icon and the name. But for now, let's go ahead and just make them iconic. If I want to expand the entire row of panels I can click on these two chevrons here. If I want to collapse them, I can click on them again. Now I can rearrange any of the panels within the group like we saw by just dragging the tab. But I can also rearrange the panels and nest them with other panels. So for example, if I wanted to nest the Color panel with the Properties and Adjustments and Libraries, I can drag the tab over on top of the other grouping, and when I see the solid cyan line around the group, I'll release my cursor and the colors will become nested. I could also create a new grouping of panels. In this case, I would drag the tab in between two other panel groups. And when I just see the single horizontal line, I would release the cursor and it would create its own grouping. Now we can see because I have so many groupings in this column, that some of the panels have automatically become collapsed. But if I want to expand them, then I just need to click on the panel tab, and another set or another grouping of panels will automatically have to be collapsed. If I want to separate these, I can always add more columns. So I could drag the adjustments and either nest it in the second column or create my own column by dragging and releasing the cursor a little bit to the left of the furthest column. I can also just drag a panel out and float it anywhere on the screen, including dragging it to a secondary monitor. If I want to close a panel, I can click on the X if it's a floating panel, or I can right click and choose to close a single panel, or I can right click and choose to close an entire tab group. All right, let's click on the Properties panel to expand it, because I want to point out that the Properties panel is rather unique, because the contents of the panel will change depending on what type of layer is selected in the Layers panel. So right now we can see things like the width, and the height, and the mode. But if I convert the background into a layer by clicking on the lock icon, now we see additional information including transformation options, and alignment and distribute options. All right. Well I've sort of made a mess of all of my panels, so I'm going to use the workspace picker here in order to reset them. And I'm going to reset the essentials so that we'll all be working with the same setup. But as you can see, it's very easy to customize the panels that you're going to be using the most often in Photoshop.

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