Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Workspace and Additional Tips

a couple of other kind of random tips along the way we talked a lot about things like keyboard shortcuts one thing that I didn't talk about that I just want to touch on very briefly it's it's not really I wouldn't consider advance but I think it's important that some people overlook is I think it's really important that you make photo shop your own in terms of the way it looks and feels over time I kept changing things around now I have a layout they called a work space that works well for me and it has a very large layers panel a lot of other panels collapsed up a lot smaller and then tools and functions panels that I use a lot sort of collapsed in here and I did this initially by using a workspace that adobe fights called essentials which was for no other reason to get me started because that was where they thought things should go so if you look here can you found it right in this little pop up here or under the window menu under workspace if I said it too essentials that's the defa...

ult one and this is what adobe thinks is a good default setting and the only thing I think that's perfectly good about this is that already includes this sort of secondary icon based panel thing that some people can't figure out how to get to me that's the easiest way to get it is just to change to this view and then if there's some other panel that you want to add in that's not currently there like maybe layer camps it automatically tends to pop right into that little panels thought if it doesn't if which would be unusual but let's say for some reason it appeared too slow ding in mid air some people like floating panels I now hate them because I used to use them but I figured I spent half my life moving panels out of the way now I would say I want to put this right here and you can you see that little blue line that appears that's letting me so I want that there this one I don't use anymore so I'm gonna pull that out of there so and close it up so this is how you can start to customize and then once you have everything looking the way you want in terms of location of panels on what's collapsed then you can create your own workspace uh when you do that if you remember earlier we talked about customizing menus making us she's been customizing keyboard shortcuts should also mention and this is a I'm glad I did this was reminds me to say this you can also customize photo shops menus and to me one of the the ways we can work more efficiently is to remove clutter so instead of always be looking through things so for example and I was his example because the simplest one I could think of when I look under things like the filter menu there's all these sharpening filters but I only really use three out of the seven that are here are six or whatever it is so why every time I ignoring these instead of just removing them completely so we saw yesterday howto edit keyboard shortcuts you can also edit your menus just have to find them so in this case I would go to filter scroll down eventually to the point where I see my sharpened filter's not to say these three I do not use so as soon as you remove the eyeball on click okay as soon as you go back to that menu now you have a smaller subset they're still there so they're not gone but if you think about taking a few minutes to go through and say I never used those functions I've tried them and I don't use them I would be less I like to do it if it was something I'd just never tried don't know what it is because I might decide later on to use it but if you go through and know for example you never use these particular filters or these particular functions you can remove them from the menu they will stay removed till you put them back but then on top of that if you when you make a new work spaces were just talking about you also have the option including yes include my custom keyboard shortcuts and my custom menus so this way you could actually create a couple of different work spaces for defense I think she doing photo shop so for example if you're working on something that's very heavy typography you might have a workspace has all the type things like characters and paragraph styles and all that kind of information visible and then you have a second one that's very layer centric and you can switch back and forth on the fly or what some people use it for they have more than one person that uses the same machine instead of always reconfiguring everything you just set up a workspace to call it mine yours theirs and then you switch it and it switches things around the way you want it to be so as much as it's not something that you would do on ongoing basis I really think it's worth the investment of a little bit of time too set up everything the way you want to edit the keyboard shortcuts so then you're using shortcuts that make sense to you I'm not spending time going where is that and I still watch people who are fairly experienced users spending what I find is an awful lot of time trying to look under menus and find things when they could speed up their work by taking advantage of things like the presets we talked about tool presets adjustment layer presets customizing menus making it making photoshopped really operate look and feel the way that makes sense to you and then part of the other reads for making a work space by the way is used one of my favorite words with working with photoshopped theoretically if I were to quit photo shop and relaunch it it should look just like this however I leave it however that doesn't always happen sometimes it re launches and suddenly it decides I'm going to revert back to the essentials view so by saving a workspace at any time I know I can go back to the way the layout that I want with my panels in the right place with my keyboard shortcuts et cetera um one other thought that accursed me because it's important to know presets talked about the importance of all the different presets and I show you briefly this preset manager the preset manager does a couple of very import functions the first one is it helps you organize the all the different panels like what's in the brushes panel what's in the swatches panel this determines the contents so for example if I look at the have already probably done this before so it won't really help but let's say the styles there's a few styles there I'm like I'm never going to use this soul just deleted so you can go through and delete some of the ones that you just think you won't use or for this to be and or you are looking at the brushes and this is the order of the brushes but you have created a brush like somewhere in here here's a signature brush I use this so often I'd like it to be up here better closer to where I'm working so I'm not always going in having to go way down to the bottom of my brushes panel so let's drag this let me go all the way top in one shot apparently but eventually I can put it right there for their so now from now on I'm using brushes I don't have to go looking way down the bottom somewhere go where is that custom brush I made so they you can reorganize the order of the presets inside each of these panels and you can delete one so you don't want and the other very important function is if I've spent a lot of time like I have a whole bunch of customized brushes that I made out of different things that I I don't want to do again so some of these I've already done let's pretend that from here overall ones that I made today so I want to make sure I don't have to redo that so I select all of those and she was saved set whenever you do that it's going to assume slash prompt that you to save into the brush is preset folder inside a photo shop which is fine because what that means is we'll see the second is when I leave relaunch photoshopped now my brushes are in effect built in but the other thing I would do with this is as a backup plan I want to make sure that all this work idea doesn't disappear so I'm gonna to this a second time saved my brushes into an external folder somewhere called my backup preset so that way if anything ever goes amiss I know I can reload these back in again but if you do just load them right into the brushes panel excuse me the brushes folder what that means is now as I'm using my brushes I go to the brush picker and I don't see the ones I want I go you this menu and if I school right down the bottom here's all the different sets of brush is that I had previously saved so now I can load in my custom brushes or whatever it might be that I've created so that way you don't have to go looking is a lot of people I know I'm one of them has lots of brushes they've acquired somewhere and they're just all over the place so any time you want to load your brush is like a mystery to find them this way if you put them in this folder they appear under this list this is one of the rare times we have to restart photo shopped for it to take effect most of time like with menus and short cut out of things you can make a change that happens right away this one you have to quit photoshopped restart for it to kind of click in that you've done something different that also reminds me to say and people always think it's odd that I say this but um I really feel strongly that I want to keep photo shop running as much as possible and not quit unless I have to for some reason like I have to shut down my computer but if you're an environment where you can just put your computer to sleep and that's okay with whoever runs your it department something I would do that and the reason is very simple if there's ever a time where I've had things go wrong with photo shop that's when I quit and restart because when I'm restarting something doesn't quite click in the way that I want so my philosophy is for a shop is running well I don't want to quit I want to just keep it running because that's the time something's gonna go wrong now there's no evidence to support this claim of mind except that I know what's happened to me where I've got recorded some actions I've done some things and I'm like looks great and then photoshopped just decides on its own to quit and when I restarted like things aren't there anymore so it's during that process that things can go wrong which adobe could probably you refute that say oh no that's not the case but it's happened to enough people that plus I use photos off so often I don't wanna wait for it to start up I just want to use it so there are times where you might have to if you ever are working away in photo shop and things just aren't going the way you would expect for example a function used all the time is suddenly really really slow or doesn't work at all or he will click on a tool and it's not nothing's happening or you go to choose blue is your four around color but when you look at it it's not blue anymore it's pink or just oddities that don't make sense every so often in photoshopped the preferences which determined how things work and the term that they actually used to describe it is the preferences get corrupted which always struck me as I have this mental picture my head of preferences on the wrong side the tracks going hey kids have a cigarette somehow your preferences just get mixed bad mix up so they're sending bad save most of photo shop so in that case you have to quit photo jockeys in to reset your preferences so if that ever happens to you where you're working in photo shop and things are just really odd please please please don't believe it when people say oh no you have to reinstall photoshopped it's very rare anymore you have to reinstall resetting your preferences is faster and as easier and it usually solves most of the problems that reinstalling photo shop would so how you do it is very simple you quit out of photo shop and then you go to launch it again but you hold down three keys on the mac it's command option shift on one's control all shift you keep those keys held down until little dialog box pops up and says are you sure you want to lead the settings file and that sounds back to delete the settings file I don't know why it doesn't just say are you sure you want to reset your preference will go ok but delete the settings file is the word used you click okay photoshopped takes a moment or two to re continue restarting when it does it puts in a fresh set of preferences the only downside to that and it doesn't affect your presets that's on that separate what it means is if you've gone into your photoshopped preferences and changed ah whole bunch of settings like you know different things turned on and off we've gone to the interface you've changed the color and you've done this and that those will be reset back to the out of the box factory settings so this is not a function we do just for the sake of doing it this is something you would do if you run into specific issues where photo shop is just not operating properly then you would reset your preferences and if you needed teo you have to go back into individual settings you might have changed and put them back the way they were so what some people do it it's not a bad theory is right before they do this reset the preferences they take a quick glance at their current preference is to make sure they haven't forgotten anything of particular settings they have and then when they reset the premises lot easier to put everything back the way it wass there's another theory out there which I fully support but I don't know anyone that thinks about doing this because there's like a lot of things you don't think about your preference until there's a problem but in an ideal world if you are working away in photo shop when they thought you know what everything is working really really well I should probably back up my preferences but no one ever thinks about doing that because it only happens when there's a problem but in theory you could say cause everything's working really well find your preference is filing in the search for adobe preps dot something or other and then duplicate that file save it away somewhere that would be another way of resetting your preferences but the reality is like I said this is like people who aren't religious about backing up their files only think about when they have a bad problem there like oh I better back up everything so preferences if you can think about it's on about it to back up your preference but most people end up having to go with plan b which is reset your preferences as opposed to think about saving them