Lessons

Lesson Info

Day 3: Lay of the Land

well welcome to day three of thirty days of photo shop and this is the first day of the rest of your life now this is the first day where it's just you and me know hosts nothing else just you and me doing some photo shop and today we're going to talk about some overall things we know about navigating around the layout of panels working with tools zooming in and out just the getting a started real quickly in terms ofthe how to get around within the program now before we do too much more there is one thing I want to mention to you as we talked about during the introduction to this thirty days you will have some homework that I'll give you some assignment I'll ask you to do and some of them will require a bit of work on your part others are just kind of more of a thought process or something to get you started so for example I would suggest that in this class today we're going to talk a little bit about customizing your menus in keyboard shortcuts and honestly more realistically you proba...

bly do that later on not today so what I was just you you do for in preparation for that day is get yourself some kind of notebook and this is going to be your thirty days of photoshopped notebook so you can take notes along the way of things you want to do so for example today we'll talk about how to customize your menus and shortcuts but as I said realistically it might be a little bit down the way down the road once you've used photoshopped then you'll know better ok this is how I need to use this is how I like to use the program so therefore I can start adjusting things like keyboard shortcuts and menus and so on so as you're going through start making notes of things of typical processes you do some of your favorite things that you do make note of functions for example that don't have keyboard shortcuts that maybe you wish they did as you start to use them more and more so that will make better sense for you down the road when you do decide to actually customize the way that photo shop operates now as I mentioned today the main focus is just kind of navigating around the last couple of days we talked about overall things like why did work non destructively and how to set yourself up to a lord and things like that that they were going to start exploring kind of the interface if now if you're a seasoned photo shop user some of this may be second nature to you but as we talked about in the first couple of days if you're self taught you may not have taught yourself some of these things because some of them frankly aren't obvious and I'm not going to try to give you many many different ways of doing things I'm going to try and give you one or two ways that you khun decide to work with and I'm going to start advocating to you that if you're not a big keyboard shortcut kind of person you want to start to become one because one the ways we can get most efficient but also creative at photo shop is by eliminating the hard work and cut to the chase and try things and a lot of the times keyboard shortcuts will do that and we'll talk about that more throughout all of thirty days of kind of starting to get used to using keyboard shortcuts but for now let's take a look at our typical set up here in photo shop this is fairly typical what you see I've got the tools on the left hand side panels on the right hand side however this is not the way that photo shop comes out of the box there is a function that will go into more detail later on called a work space and if I put it back to you the default work space this is the way that adobe thinks we should use photo shop in fact it probably doesn't look exactly like this it's probably more with panels open but one of these you'll discover is over time you start to develop a system of things that look the way you want and you put them the way you want them to be so overall what we're going to be working with here is this interface we've got the again the tools on the left menus across the top and also this options bar where we set the options for the tools and then our main panels over here just to talk about panels in general here's a couple of things that will help you when you're setting up kind of your visual setup of photo shop where you want things to be you notice for example here I have layers channels and pass in a minute get a little closer here as you can see there's three tabs that means that in this same slot there are three different options that I could work with layers channels and paths which of course will explore in more detail later as to what they are but this is one the way that we can save room is accumulate things together so we're not having to go having forty seven panels all over the place we're putting them in these little compartments that can make life a little simpler anytime you see something like this one where you see it says adjustments and all you see is the tab that means it's collapsed anytime you see a tab that looks like this we just have to click on it to open it up or double click to close it again so any time you want to get to something and this is a very effective way of working as well talk about in more detail layers and we touched on it briefly the other day layers are really the bread and butter of photo shop so what I suggest if we want to make our layers panel as big as we possibly can and put everything kind of in a second role that we can get to if we need to for example I need swatches I can see them but then once I'm happy I double click to collapse and down again let's talk a little bit about how we can combined things together for example there is a panel called properties and all the panels are shown here under the window menu there's a panel called properties that I like to use all the time now in a few versions ago a photo shop every panel back then they were actually called pal it's looked like this floating all by itself in space and all I did to get to this was I kind of toward off so I could show you this is what the panel looks like well I wanted to be more accessible so I'm gonna take this click on the name of it and drag it right in here and see how that whole area kind of got outlined in blue now I've just added that this little set of panels so there's still all collapse without any time I want to work with properties or styles or adjustments they're all there and again I can double clicked collapse and that's kind of the set up that we're going for is fine ways that you liketo work so and no way am I suggesting that you want to put properties right there although you could it's maur this is how you start combining things together you'll also notice when we look at our interface that there's some smaller little icons here beside the main panels and this is actually a really interesting idea because the's are panels that you might want to use fairly often but perhaps not quite as often as the ones where you see the name so for example let's say that I down the road I'm going to start exploring this thing called actions well actions appear let's pretend they didn't that's a zip it was floating out likelihood is it probably will pop right in the side here but if it wasn't same rule applies dragged this wherever you want look for the little line see how that's outlined there so now when I let go you'll see that actions are now on the little symbol this has collapsed down if I make this a little bigger I can see it see the name of the panel as well but my worry would be that's cutting into our valuable space here on the whole idea is we're trying to give our image as much room as possible and eventually you'll get used to these icons so any of these panels that appear on this side here are just a click away so you click on it hears everything to do with the panel I can make it as big as I need to like an access whatever the menu might be for that panel but once I'm happy I pressed this little double headed arrow toe put it away so eventually what you may find yourself doing is kind of setting up the way you want we've got main panels use all the time and then smaller panels in this little collapsed icon kind ofyou now I'll use one of my favorite words and photo shop and say theoretically if you leave photoshopped fuckwit photo shop the next time you launch it it should come back looking the way that you left it and I use the word theoretically because while it does happen often sometimes it doesn't so this is a way that you khun kind of there there is a way I should say that we'll look at later on that can make sure you have access to all of these panels the way you want them to be and again I'm not going to advocate to you do them this way this is just kind of the set up anytime you're working with these panels with very very few exceptions it always they always have the same concept so I want to work with swatches panel so I click on it to open up all these watches in the top right hand corner there's a flyout menu in this case it gives me all kinds of options as to what colors I might want I look at the layers panel and use its fly up menu you'll see there's a siri's of option some of which are great out and the reason they're great out is I they're not applicable yet so for example some of these things on ly work once you have certain situation so one of the terms you'll hear in photo shop all the time is things air context sensitive which means depending on your situation than the context you're in then the options will change so in here the reason a lot of things were great out is I only have one layer so far and many of these functions need more than one layer to operate it's also worth noting for example let's take a look at this example new layer so this is one of the functions that is available from that flyover menu in photo shop now you'll also find that in several other places so for example I went to that flight menu there's new layer it also has a keyboard shortcut command shift and our control shift in I could also click on this little icon down the bottom of the layers panel to create a new layer or I could go to the layer menu and you'll see there's the same function so the reason I'm showing you that is just to alleviate any fears that you're not going to the right place because it really doesn't matter in many cases and photo shop you can get to the same operation in multiple places so if you like using keyboard shortcuts great you can press the keyboard shortcut and the function has done done for you if you like doing things more visually you can click on a button that adds a new layer and you can also go to the layer menu and do the same thing frankly for many people that as confusion but it's adobe just trying to give you various options in this case there's no really right or wrong way to do it it's just which way appeals to you what I would suggest is that over time every time you go to a pop up menu somewhere or pull down menu and you see beside it the indication of a keyboard shortcut pull away from that command and try that keyboard shortcut and then the more you do that the more you'll start toe learn how these short cuts work so our panels were going toe one of the assignments you're going tohave is and this is an ongoing one is to come up with a layout that you like now one of things that we can do and again will go into this more detail in a bit is called creating a work space and that means instead of hope being that photo shop remember where you put everything you can create a work space and here is the list of work spaces that I have now honestly I don't use all of these these are just and repeated demonstrations I've shown how to make a work space and there keep getting at and I just haven't gone back and edit them yet but let's take a look at here this is the essentials workspace that adobe provided I've already altered it slightly but at a certain point I may decide to go back to one of the ones that I have created that has everything the way I want it so it's got everything in here and a whole bunch of extras on these kind of many panels as well so setting up your floating panels is something that you will develop overtime I don't expect you to jump right in and immediately know how you want to do it because it'll take some time some people are really into maybe painting and then you'll have different options so one of the advantages of workspaces is you can create multiple workspaces for different purposes so many people have ah workspace for doing things that are vory typography heavy and or have a different workspace for things that are photo retouching or whatever it might be and that's one of the benefits of work spaces you don't have to stick with anyone situation as an aside if you happen to work with more than one person on the same computer the other manage of a work space is you can have different work spaces per person so as someone else it's their turn to use the computer they just used their workspace and it sets everything the way they want all right let's look very briefly at the tools in a photo shop a cz we mentioned the other day has sixty four tools available and we're not going to use them all however it is important know that any time let's get a little closer in here so we can start to see this look beside a lot of the tools have a little tiny triangle in the corner that means there are more options so if I click and hold it says well in this case there are two tools sharing the same slot in this case there are three and in some cases there's even more so when you look at the tools it'll use or display whatever tool you last used so for example right now assume back out again this is my last way I use photo shop because is what's coming up but for example if I decide to use the patch tool and use it and then went to some other tool then from now on this patch too was going to be the one that's going to display and that's ok it just means that I'm not seeing the other ones but any time I just have to decide if I want to go back to the spot healing brush that I can do that you'll also notice if you look closely beside each one for example of these tools has the letter j and that means that if I'm working away and I want to select a tool instead of leaving what I'm doing and going in clicking on the tool I can also press the letter so let's take a look for example I've got my move tool selected I want to use the patch tool so I just press jay and because the past tool was the last one that I had previously used from that set it it activates that tool if I now want to go back to the move tool I happen to remember that it's v for move or is like to save e for move and it goes back to the move tool so this eliminates me having to go back and forth and when you're working on a big monitor and really concert in what you're doing pressing a single letter to activate the tool really khun b a nice shortcut if you can't remember you can just go to the tool and see all of these tools share the same one it's a letter I let's look at the last so tools and you'll see there's three lasso tools and all the letter l so how do we switch between the three lasso tools would say I was on another tool if I press a letter l it'll go to whatever lasso tool I just used if I press the shift key and press l ittle toggle through the chute tools that share that same slot so what that means is if I go to click I can just very quickly go l for last so long one shift l and find the one that I want now that is a preference and we will be talking in this class a little bit about preferences there is a preference for you to decide whether you want the shift key to change the letter or just have it just little letter alone so in other words instead of playing praying instead of pressing took a couple tries there instead of pressing l l l you press shift l and each time you do it switches the tool that's the default preference if I take that preference off it means every time I press l it will switch that's a personal preference I personally like the shift letter on ly because sometimes when I if I had that on lee set to this letter by itself sometimes when I went to switch back to the last o'toole what actually swift to the next lasso tool so I personally got you season the shift keep it is a personal preference and we talk about preferences we will say exactly that that preferences are your choice I'll give you some options for things to consider as we talked about in our first class that whole concept of setting ourselves up to learn and to experiment one of things we want to do is talk think about when I click on a tool the first thing I always do is go to the options bar and you'll hear me say that so many times over the next thirty days I apologize in advance for you getting sick of me saying it but it really makes a huge difference to get my habit of click on a tool go check the settings because with only a couple of exceptions you have to set the tool settings first in that option's bar because that's what determines how the tool operates so clicking on a tool and doing some work and then trying to change the setting for the most part with only a couple of exceptions doesn't do anything so you're going to end up undoing and as I always like to say you want to spend more time doing than undoing so having that habit is a really good one you'll notice that on some tools there's very few options you can change in other tools like the type tool there's a ton of options you can change and we're going to talk throughout the thirty days of ways you can make your life more efficient by doing things like presets which can save you time because you're not constantly having to remember what settings I use for that tool you can actually kind of record those and use those as a preset needless to say we also have a bunch of menus to use and you'll find as we talked about with that fly out menu sometimes menus air grate out that's because of the circumstances let's do a simple example under the select menu right now it's only giving me a couple of choices select all and color range and something called quick mass one everything else is great out less because all of those commands require you to have a selection so if I make a selection using one of my selection tools now you'll see there are more options available but some are still great out and that's because once again the circumstances I'm in you'll see these air all layer functions right now I only have one layer so they don't really don't have any they're not applicable to what I'm doing so don't be surprised if you're going through menus and you see something's great out it's because of the circumstances that you're currently in now there is I'm going to throw these thirty days or the twenty eight remaining days I'm going to try and throw out little gutches that catch people all the time here's an example of something that catches people they are in some function and I will talk about this of course later on called free transform and if I forgot for a moment I was doing that maybe I zoomed in to the point where I couldn't even see the fact that there are little handles on there and now I went to do almost anything it's just about all great out with very few exceptions well any time you see that in photo shop generally speaking that means you're doing something else that isn't finished yet for example typing with the type tool or using a transformation command like this and you have to tell a photo shop you're finished before you're able to continue and one of the little tips for you for you to see that look up in the options bar see that little cancel symbol on checkmark generally you on ly see that if you're in the middle of doing something so because I apparently even though I can't see right now I must be doing something then if I press the check mark all of a sudden everything is available so that meant whatever I was doing I must have completed it same thing goes with the type tool if I was working with type you'll see the same thing there's a check mark there until I press that and commit the type I can't continue working so that's one of those little gutches where people like how come I can't work that I do something wrong why won't photoshopped let me do that is because it's just waiting for you to complete the previous operation so that you can then turn around and go on to the next thing so any time again you're looking at menus don't be surprised if you see many things great out that's just a matter of the circumstances that you're currently in so they change on the fly which is a good thing now you'll also find that in many cases there are menus of course and then some menu some cases there are multiple levels of menus let's see if we can find one if I did smart objects well it's not we'll get through this is you can see that in some cases it's actually several levels deep of menus that doesn't happen that often but that's really just with that those little triangles mean is there is more in time and photo shop you see something with that that just means there's more information or more options you can get to I'm going undo what I did before so that's kind of getting a started with the idea of the tools and the menus and the panels that's getting a started now as I mentioned before start writing things down as you're playing around if you have questions to ask during our q and a sessions but also just for your own use that that's the tenth time that I've done this with that tool that gives you something to work on and also maybe might lead to changing the settings or customizing your workspace or something like that now the only thing we need to spend a bit of time doing is just navigating around our image itself I'm going to change my view back to fit on screen anytime you open a document in photo shop it's going to open it up in the space you have available between that tools and the panels as that open space in the middle so one of things that we could do in to give ourselves more room is we want to be ableto work on these panels but frankly we may need that make might not need them open all the time so you may decide I just want to seymour off my image so one of the options we khun do if you press shift tab you'll see that it keeps the tool box on the one side but removes all the floating panels so now we have more room to work if this was a panoramic image where it was wider you'd see even more of it but this shift tab is just a little tuggle switch that hides the floating panels now north side just shift tab and it's the same on mac and pc shift tab is a short cut for keep the tools high the other panels if I press shift tab again they come back so what this allows me to do is just free up more space now one of things that's kind of a nice added bonus here if I press shift tab as I'm working away and let's pretend that I did fill up all this room to be ableto work on something and then I decided I need one of those floating panels I just need to move my mouse over to the side and it pops up there's all my panels now I can choose whatever setting as I want when I move away from it it goes away so instead of constantly pressing shift tab to show on hide the panel the other option is to just hided temporarily but then instead of showing it hover over to the side and then you'll see that that the panel will pop up just long enough for you to make whatever changes you want and as soon as you move away it goes back goes back away I should say s o shift tab does that now just in case you ever press this and wonder what happened the tab key hides everything so I suppose if you ever want to show someone look at my photograph without the distraction of all the panels and everything you could do that but more often not people do that by mistake and go what just happened here so the tab kie is an overall hide all floating panels but again it is a toggle switch so if he ever press it by mistake just press it again and you'll be able to get back to it now one of things that hopefully goes without saying but I'll say it anyway is many of the keyboard shortcuts in photo shops such as pressing a single letter toe activate a tool or the tacky don't work if you're in the middle of using the type tool because it thinks you're typing text so if you have the textile active and you press a tacky you'll get a tab won't hide the panels so the type tool is one of the few exceptions where it changed the rules a little bit about working with shortcuts just because well it is type so tabs and thing that letters of course are part of war king type so let's get back to our story here about zooming in and zooming out and doing all those things so the view menu is our overall place fit on screen means scale down as we said between our floating panels and if you look up at the top here in my case it's saying fifty six point seven percent so that means it had to scale it almost half size so I could see the entire photograph there's something to be said for working at this view to a degree but I wouldn't do any detail work here so for example let's say in this photograph that my goal was to change the sky and only this guy well I might look at it first in this view to make shuriken do it effectively start to do the work and then a certain point zoom in closer to make more detailed decisions one of things that photo shop does is to speed up your work when you scale it down it's pretty accurate but you don't want to rely on its accuracy so you're going to do kind of global work maybe make judgments about what part of my photo after I wanna work on once you've done that or once you're starting to some work zoom in closer to make decisions so in order to do that I have several different options if I just choose one hundred percent or the keyboard shortcut his command or control one it says well now this is one hundred percent size meaning relative to how big it really is in my final size which we'll see in a second but it means now I can't see the entire document I could continue to zoom in but anytime I go higher than one hundred percent right now I'm a two hundred percent let's zoom in a little closer I'm a three hundred you can see the photograph is starting to get a little more pixel eyes if I keep zooming in at a certain point it's going to get to the point where it's really hard to make decisions because we're just seeing this kind of jagged edge pixel so some people like to zoom in really close to do detail work I find it a certain point if I don't have the quality of the image to support it then I'm going to have a problem anyway and in a later class we talked about image size and things like that this will make even more sense but for now let's just say for the most part I'm going to go at one hundred percent maybe two hundred but not too much more than that because when I do I start to lose quality by the same token I don't want to spend too much time working at fit in window or smaller view because it's not terribly accurate it's fine if you're tryingto roughly position something or gets started that's that's perfectly finally with all the time but in terms of making quality decisions I want to do that at one hundred percent as much as I can so for me I found very quickly the two shortcuts that I learned right away we're fit on screen and then one hundred percent so commander control zero for fit onscreen command control one for one hundred percent that way you could be working away press that keyboard shortcut commander control zero and then hope I want to get closer one hundred percent now one thing's it's also worth noting is that when you zoom in or zoom out always as to the center so if you want to zoom into a particular area you'll find that the zoom shortcut doesn't do that it goes to the middle of your document so the zoom tool is very appropriate for that kind of function for example is I want to zoom in right here well in the last couple of versions of photo shop there is a new option called scrubby zoom which no any longtime user photoshopped probably found it weird at first because let me turn it off and show you how the zoom tool usedto work and that was he would click and drag a rectangle say I want to zoom into this area and then it would zoom in there but you had to kind of make sure that you I chose the right area what scrubby zoom does says instead of surrounding area you say I want to zoom in on this tower so you put that in the centre and as you drag outwards it zooms in and as you dragged back in it zooms back in again and I went a little too far just to hear let me try that again you can see there we go now zooming in to see how instead of me having to click and drag that kind of area with zoom told hope that I got it right this to me makes a lot better sense so if you're brand new to photo shop don't even worry about what I just talked about ignore that whole part about click and drag to have to do it anymore that's called scrubby zoom if you find that you tried to scrub the zuma doesn't work you have to make sure that option is turn on which is why we always say click on the tool check the options bar right because we want to make sure that options like this are turned on you'll also notice in that option's bar it also has one hundred percent fit screen those were the same functions as the keyboard shortcuts and do basically the same thing now once you have started to zoom and so let's say that I have zoomed in a little bit but because I've zoomed in getting close to that two hundred percent threshold now I want to scroll around a little bit to see further down here well I do have a scroll bars on the side which let me scroll up and down and left and right but they work in japan lacey have do one and then the other so that's what the hand tool is for is if you click and hold this is like the view changer doesn't we're actually moving images we're moving our view so the hand tool is like a scroll tool by clicking and dragging that pain on your preferences you can also do what's called flick panning or if you have to go really far in this kind of do this flicking motion and it kind of scrolls very quickly throughout the whole thing now one of things you'll probably find along the way is you may well be in a situation like this where you've assumed in a bit and you've scrolled somewhere you're doing some work let's say with our paintbrush well I don't really want to I want to scroll something I don't really want to have to stop what I'm doing with the paintbrush just to move over a little bit so one of the other shortcuts that will see is for example and working with the paintbrush I passed press and hold the space bar and it gives me the hand tool so I can change my view as soon as I let go it goes whatever tool that I had and the beauty of this shortcut is it's very visual if you're not sure what key it is press and hold something and you'll see each one is giving me some different option there's the hand tool so honestly I can't remember the last time I actually really clicked on the hand will accept to show someone because now it's become a habit that as I'm working I just press the space bar and I can scroll in between our school whoever I want them when I let go it goes back to whatever tool that I had that I was previously using so that's a nice function to be able to do that and not have to interrupt your kind of flow as you go along so overall just again to summarize that kind of navigating part we wantto work mostly one hundred percent to make decisions and then zoom out to that fit window to kind of see the overall view while working on and later on when we talk about image size again this will become clear us to why we're getting this difference in some images looking really huge and some not so big that's all based on the pixel dimensions and the resolution which we well we'll talk about any future lessons once a previous lesson but we can't go back future lesson all right the other thing I want to touch on just briefly in this session is your preferences now as I alluded to before the whole concept of preferences is that that there your preference I wish it was called my preferences by default but it's not but that's how you have to think about it so preferences their role is to determine how photoshopped operates and some preferences you'll set once and never change other preferences you'll change all the time because of the situation you're in and all you need to really know to start off is that as you're looking through the majority of preferences are live in the sense that if you change a purpose and click okay that means they're in effect right away which is really nice because it means you can literally change a preference for the next twenty minutes and then set it back to something else once you're finished that if however you see a notification says you must restart for a shop well that does in fact mean you have to quit photo shop and restart for those preference to take effect that's relatively rare most of them don't but let's take a look at some of the preferences on the left hand side you'll see here is all the categories and then within here are some of the settings on some of these are default some I've changed I'm not gonna go through every single one but for example member before or talked about that use the shift key for switching between tools this is where it's on end it's turned on that's that's my choice to do that the other one if you're placing images in always talk later on about working with layers and importing images things like that I like having this on because it resize it so that I can see if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel you can choose to zoom with that I don't I personally have that I use my tablet so that's not as applicable enable flick panting that something I'm showing you with the hand tool or you can kind of flick to drag to kind of scroll through but as we go through here is what I mean by why the preferences are up to you starting with photo shop cs six we had changed the interface and go anywhere from ivory light interface two fairly dark to really dark I got mindset on here just cause I find it films better but again that's your choice and you could decide for some reason on the fly to change this and it doesn't really matter the uh the things that we need to really think about our most of these again are in this first set are up to you there are things okay here's an example the interface that the size of the faults were looking interface or currently set too small we have other options if you change that see this little warning is saying it will take effect the next time you start photo shops that's example where you have to to restart photo shopped for this to take effect sync settings is something that's tied into creative cloud won't talk about that right the moment but here this is one that I would say is something that you want to consider turning on I suggest that you always have an image preview turned on that means when you save the file it will try to generate a preview then when you're looking at any kind of file browser or bridge or something like that you see an icon on which may help you if your final naming system isn't the best you also notice that there's an officer says save in background and then automatically save recovery information these were introduced and csx and they're both fantastic in the past what we didn't have saving the backgrounds what happened is if you're working on a large file and it came time to save it you couldn't do anything else yet toe wait for it to finish saving in order to move on and do anything else save in the background means the document you're working on will still be saving but then you could switch to something else and still work now to be fair this actually works really well when I first saw it I thought well certainly if I save in the back on everything else is going to slow down right you would expect that but it actually works really well because it takes up so little background effort to do that that you could do some fairly complex functions in another document while this is still saving infact it happens so much in the background that I've developed a bad habit of hitting save that I go to close the window forgetting it's still saving because I don't even notice anymore of this in the background the other one which is really nice really nice that a lot of people asked foreign was brought out in c essex has automatically save recovery information every ex minutes you could decide what that is and that simply means if you're working on a project and you forget to hit the safe command it will attempt to save back up information so that if photo shop where to crash not that that ever happens yeah all those occasions were photoshopped might crash at least it will make what I would call its best attempt to bring back something doesn't work perfectly not so much but it's better than the alternative we usedto have which was nothing we didn't have any such things I was really up to you to remember to save all the time this way it at least makes a nice effort and a lot of times it work so again it's up to you to decide what option you want to put here in terms of how many minutes the other thing that becomes important and this really depends on the kind of work to do if you only use photo shop and nothing else you can use any other applications along with photo shop it's perhaps not quite as important but I recommend down here where it says maximize psd and psb files that you have that on all the time that some people put on ask when saving but that means every time you save a document you're going to get interrupted with would you like me to say this the purpose of this is it creates a better compatibility with other programs so for example if youse photoshopping light room you definitely want this turned on because for darfur light room to really be ableto see and work with psd files that needs to be on if you're gonna work within design or illustrator any of those other adobe application it's a really good idea some people might be wondering they've heard of psd photoshopped document what's psb well psb is a file format that adobe introduced for people that were creating such huge files they couldn't be saved is a psd file so psb really means follow shot big I mean I know that technically does it probably does but it really means we were increased the maximum file size that we can save just give us a little more room to work here's a minor thing but also useful to know when you're in vocal shop and you want to look to see what files have I recently worked on this is the list that determines how many of those things that remembers let's take a quick look at performance most of this I'm going to keep as is I like to let photo shop use a pretty big chunk of my available ram so I've been seventy percent this over here is an important one history states photo shop has a function called history which is really almost like multiple undoes hominy step backwards can you do within a document and by default and set to twenty some people put that up quite a bit higher thinking that I want even mohr steps backwards but I got a tell you while you certainly can that takes up memory so it takes a long memory to do that my personal purposes by building a document in the kind of nondestructive way we're going to spend a lot of our time talking about then in some ways that's almost like having multiple undoes or unlimited on news because of the way we structure our documents so initially you may be tempted to put this history states higher you can try it but I think you'll find that over time it it has it's a balancing act if you put the history states higher you're going tohave less ram available because being used up for that and there's probably yes they'll probably one or two times where you'll keep trying to step backwards and you'll run out a room because you've done twenty one or twenty six steps and you only got twenty history states but in my opinion that doesn't happen as often so that's something where it's a well again it's a personal choice that's why it's called a preference so you can decide which ones you want the other thing we want to talk about just a little bit is the cursors mostly because this throws people off if if this happens by mistake you'll notice there's an option called precise cursor and you can see the illustrations like a little cross hair most people like to see the standard cursor the benefit of using precise is now you know exactly where you're clicking but it kind of helps you forget what tool you're using here this happens that most people by mistake and they suddenly wonder why their cursor looks like this I'm gonna put it on standard this's the way that I like to use it actually looked sorry alec might put mine and full brush size as opposed to standardize full brushes is showing me the size of the bra it's a lot story what I mean by that if I'm working with my paintbrush now you see I'm getting this cursor which shows you that's how big the brush is based on the options that I previously chosen and again of course we'll talk about that in more detail what happens to many people though they're working on some tool and all of a sudden when they come back to their paintbrush they don't see the large size where they get that precise cursor well why did that happen well there's a reason but most people it kind of it's one of those little stumbling blocks is like I can't I could have sworn my brush will it says it's a hundred pickles why can't I see it this is one of these things that once you know it's an option is actually quite useful but for most people it happens by accident at first and that's the caps lock key if I have caps lock on it says I will turn whatever brush size you have until this precise cursor if I take off the cap sake then I see the overall size of my brush and again we'll talk about that more details as we're going on but let's go back here to the premises for one more second uh the only other thing let's just look att two more just real quickly when we start talking about layers you'll find that transparency is a big part of layers and we'll talk more detail we've already talked a little bit about that concept this is the default way of looking at transparency is with thee light grey and white checkerboard although that's a fine default my personal opinion is it's a little too light because if I ever put anything on a layer by itself for example maybe small white type is really hard to see what I'm doing because I've got a small white type on a white and gray checkerboard so personally I like medium because this way it reminds me that that's the checkerboard again totally personal preference but that's something to consider remember and I want to come back to this because I think it's important the fact that I let me actually do this if I click okay and now I had a new layer it means right now I have that checkerboard thing that I just showed you with that darker grey and it'll stay that way until I change it but I could work like this for fifteen minutes and then go back to the same preference and put it back again so there's no rule that says it's not like I think some people might my worry is that some people think of preferences as like moses and the tablets and it's like the's are my preferences well it's not it's just for now this makes sense and I like to think of preferences as well you know for the next twenty minutes this might help me for the next ten minutes this might help me anything I can do to make my life simpler and part of that may be change of preference for now and then put it back units and rulers this defaults to how you want to measure things and its again a personal choice I like to measure I have my inches and rulers and my type and points anything else these air just defaults that means for example when you create a new document it already does automatically does things but most of these again you really don't have to worry about and we're not going to go through the rest but as you look you see each one has different options about colors of guides and where your plug ins are and how you want type to work in my mint click on three d because that's a whole another world beyond the scope of our class today so here's a couple of other final comments about preferences and I just mentioned one of them but just a reminder that preferences don't mean you're stuck that way just means for now with the only couple of exceptions where it says you have to restart photo shop the other thing is there may come a time and I just want to set you up for this so you don't wonder what's going on with your version of photo shop every so often something happens in photo shop and no one seems to have an explanation for but the best way to describe it he was something weird starts happening for example you go to click on one of your tools and there's nothing there there's a tool missing or you go to the color picker and even though you're clicking on red it's purple or just things there don't make sense or maybe you get like that spinning wheel saying for things that shouldn't take that long often that means that your preferences have become what is referred to as being corrupted which I always thought to me personally was just a weird name for it I always have imagined like bad preferences from the other side of track saying hey kid come here have a cigarette I don't know it just seems weird to call them corrupted but that's really what happens is that the preferences are what give photoshopped instructions so if the preferences are bad than the instructions are equally bad so one of things that you may need to do is reset your preferences and the reason I mentioned this is I hear a lot of people say I had all kinds of problems whoops sorry about that I called adobe and they said reinstall photo shop well reinstalling photo shop is something you don't want to do unless you have to I would always start with resetting your preferences because that's a function which can be done very very quickly and solves many of the problems so here's what I would suggest if your run into were problems I wouldn't do this otherwise I'd say you have these odd problems don't make sense reset the preferences in the way I'll tell you in a moment and if they still continue then it's something greater and you may need to check other things like video cards and most drivers and everything else but honestly I can't remember too many times over the years where I've had to reinstall photo shop unless it's a new version or an update so the way you do it and I'm not going to demonstrate because I really don't want to re settle my preferences frankly is you quit out of photo shop and then you're going to relaunch it and you're gonna hold down three keys on the mac it's command option shift on windows its control also you keep those keys held down until you see a little of photoshopped will start to launch you see a little dialogue box and says are you sure you want to lead the settings file instead of just saying are you sure you want to reset the provinces that's what it says so you click okay it continues to launch photo shop but it re installs just the preference is not the whole program now the good news is that will often fix the little problems that we run into along the way the unfortunate news is by doing that it will reset every preference back to the out of the box photoshopped default preferences which may mean you'll have to go back in and set them the way that you want once you know that you've got it all real reinstalled or reset then you may have to put them back again but it's a minor inconvenience compared to the alternative of reinstalling photoshopped completely so once again I would say don't worry about doing that unless you run into a problem where you just can't avoid it alright so earlier we talked about workspaces we'll talk about that in more detail and another class but here's something I want to kind of leave you with I talked to a lot of people and when they're talking about let's just say some of the issues or problems they run into a photo shop my experience has been often their sentence starts with well when I restarted photoshopped something changed or something when a miss and this is going to seem probably silly to say this but honestly one of the tips I get people is don't quit photoshopped if it's working just keep it running today's computers they can just be put to sleep so I didn't do most my work on my laptop when I'm finished for the day I closed my laptop when I opened it the next day I've got all my applications running now if you work in an environment where you can't do that I certainly understand but if you have the choice I would say you're going to get much better performance out of photo shop if you don't quit all the time if you just leave it running unless you have a specific reason to quit earlier in this session we talked a little bit about the fact that we have all these menus and one of things about them is that could be challenging is there's so many menu choices and I want to touch on how we can edit those and then down the road you'll see how to take advantage of it so every menu here is lots of different options if I wantto change that I go to the very bottom off my edit menu just slightly outside my filming area but it says menus so here's the put it back to the defaults so here for example is every single menu in fact I'm gonna go back here so I can actually show you what I'm talking about let's take one quick look and I usually show this example because it's a good one there's one two three four five six different ways of sharpening but really the only ones who want to use are the ones that have choices on those air indicated by the name dot dot dot so these ones here sharpened sharpened edges sharp more really I don't use them I would recommend that you don't use them either so this would be an example once I know that I can go to that keyboard shortcut sorry meant to say menus but I went there instead but you can see it's in the same place and I just have to go find it so I go to filter I'm an application my news filter I scroll all the way down until I eventually see there's my sharpened commands and you notice that these ones have eyeballs beside them I simply turn off those eyeballs and click okay and now it means every time I'm going to that filter manu now I only have the choices that I use you notice that still says show all menu items so you can always get him back so that if you decide that you for some reason want to that you could just see them temporarily but the next time you come back to the menu by the same token so you can do this for the pull down menus that also these fly oh menus so if there's something on a flyover menu that you just don't use it all or you're finding your choosing it by mistake whatever the reason might be he would be the same thing you'd go to menus but in this case you choose panel menus and make the change we also have the opportunity as a mission before I'm a big advocate of using keyboard shortcuts and I know that initially you made night not even know what to use but this is sort of future stuff again here is as you start going through and think yourself why use that function all the time but yet it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut well that's because adobe decided we have to at some point that make a decision this will have a keyboard shortcut that won't and some of the decisions they made frankly aren't ideal but that's fine at least given us an opportunity to change it so for example under here there's a series of options called for example auto tone auto contrast auto qualified I've already taken the keyboard shortcuts so let me put this back hesitate to do this but I have to be able to show you this area so now you'll see that auto tone has the shortcut command shift or shift command eller shift control l I never use auto tony we talk about adjusting images later in another class you'll see why that's not such a great idea so to me that becomes a keyboard shortcut that I could use for something else something I do use all the time is addle air mask all the time when we talk about layers in great detail you'll see why so for now just trust me when I say it made better sense for me to say I would prefer to have a keyboard shortcut for that so I go down two layers eventually I find the layer masses down her harrison is ongoing press that same shortcut shift commander shift control l and is going to tell me this is already in use on the removed from auto tone if accepted well this is where you have to make a choice my reasoning is I don't really use auto tone nor do I expect what I understand you don't know that yet that this comes with time but I'm just setting yourself you up for down the road eso here I would just say you know what I'm gonna accept that so what that means is now it's gone from this command but now I'm working on a layer I just pressed that shortcut and it gives me a layer mask much more quickly than I would have had before so again I understand this is something that you won't be able to do yet because you don't know but this is part of what I was kind of setting up the beating this class to say once you no these things this and use them or you'll be apt you'll be more prepared to change that now I did mention about workspace and before here's where you can pull this all together so I've already put my panel's everywhere I want them to go and maybe I've gone and edit cem menus and I'm also added some keyboard shortcuts and I don't want that to ever go away talk just a moment ago about not ever quitting but just as an extra backup plan if you go to your window menu to work space and create a new workspace along with name it you'll see you also have the awesome including keyboard shortcuts and customized menus so this means if I were to say that workspace which I won't in this case but if I did that means just by choosing that workspace it would automatically say here's your shortcuts and menus so this is what I loot to before saying you could have two different work spaces for due to different situations or even two different people that happens by doing this by switching your workspace automatically I'm not going to actually save it in this case all right so part of the concept of this thirty days of photo shop is giving you some assignments or some homework in this case there's not a lot to do yet because we were just getting started but I would suggest on a very simple level open a document and just practice zooming in and zooming out using the hand tool to scroll try doing it through the menus but also using started use keyboard shortcuts try clicking on a tool that holding on the space bar too scroll things around it's a little early yet I think to start customizing keyboard shortcuts and menus but in that idea of that no pad I mentioned earlier this is where I would start making notes to yourself to say this is a function I keep using over and over again maybe that's a candidate for me too customised down the road there will be something to do today but you will be able to at least start to track what things use the most of things you don't use very much so that down the road you be able to spend more time customizing photoshopped so pretty easy day for you today in terms of assignment in homework but just go and try some of these things and we'll see you tomorrow