Lesson Info
2. Customizing Menus
Lessons
Lesson Info
Customizing Menus
Let's, just talk really briefly about the overall look and feel when you first launch voters up the very first time somebody decided the tools air here and your panel's air here on the good old days used to call them pellets before they became panels, and you could move them around and theoretically, wherever you leave those panels that's where they will show up from then on, and I deliberately used my favorite term in photoshopped, theoretically, because it should keep showing up in the same place, but if it doesn't, there is a way we will talk about where you can set up. I like toe have my set up this way, what you're seeing right now, a big giant layers panel because I spend most of my life in layers, everything else is still there, but collapsed into just names. If I need to get to something like this watches panel, I can still open it up with them. When I'm finished, I claps it again, and then it shows me my big panel. So this is my workspace, that's the terminal, you so kind of p...
rogressively get to this point, the other thing that we can do, and I'm going to change it now because I think it looks better on screen, I like the dark interface when I'm working, but I think from a presenting standpoint, it's easier to see so I just went into the interface preferences and you can see there are four different color themes you can choose from and that's a personal preference that's why they're called preferences you could decide so I'm going to stick with this one, but I just think it shows better on the screen, but frankly when I'm finished teaching, I put it back to the other way because I like just I'm used to it but that's another kind of a personal preference thing so let's talk first of all about the simplest thing to do, I think, which is to think about the way use photo shop and what menus you use and more importantly what menus you don't use so for example, let's use this example where I was going to sharpen this photograph, I go to the filter menu to sharpen theirs all these choices one, two, three, four, five six so there's six choices for sharpening so here's a little side tip for you that's not completely on customizing but it's very important to understand the difference whenever you look under the filter menu. If you see a name of a filter that has dot dot dot at the end, that means it will open a dialogue box giving you choices any filter that doesn't it means it's like auto and it's not great is going to some other way of saying, you don't really want to filter that just says, I will arbitrarily decide for you how much to sharpen to me that's, just not a good idea. So frankly, I can't think of any reason ever why would use any of these three sharpening commands so therefore, why were they there? Why are they taking up valuable room and distracting me if I'm never going to use them? So that's just one example that's easy to understand, because most people will say, yeah, you do use smart sharpener on shark mask or whatever it is, so this is part where it becomes more personal to you is you have to decide what the answer to that question of which do you and what don't you use buying the show? You the mechanics of how you customize the menus? And then this is where your investment of a short amount of time is to go in and then and say, okay, I really don't use this so I can remove those from the menu and as I'll show you in a moment when I say removed from, it really means temporarily hide so anyone who worries that, but what if I ever do need to use them? They're still there, they're just hidden from view. So the way you do that so the first step would be kind of going through and making mental note under this menu, I don't use this under this menu and for me the place I started with filters because even though there's, however many filters are in photo shop, I use a very small amount of them every day it doesn't really not that many that I use in the end, if I ever do decide to try some other one, I know I will get them back so the way you do it is you go to the edit menu and you'll see there's a commander says menus this dialog box shows you the current menus for the application menu, which is the main one across the top as well as the panel menu. So you know the little pop up fly out menus so you can edit either or both of those were going to start with the application menu. And right now it's saying set photoshopped defaults that's because I put it back to the default set so I could show you the things I was going to hide because of my day to day work of photo shop I've already done this and I have slimmed down menus that people go, how you do that and that's exactly why we do a class like this that to say, well, this is how so I just have to kind of look through, ok? Ok, I was going since I showed you filter I'm gonna go to filter and this is the only hard part of just have to be ready to scroll a bit and find eventually. There they are so there's all my sharpening filters and all I do is say, I don't want these three right here, so you just turn off the eyeball. That means they're no longer visible and it's instant suze, I click ok, I go right back there see the difference now, there's only three options of the three that I use, but if you ever are in panic mode for some reasons say, I really need to use sharp and more don't ever but if you did, you'll see that there's a thing it says show all menu items and then it brings back the hidden things, so I can't think of any reason the whole point of hiding them is because you don't use them, but if you're following some tutorial that says, use this filter and yours is hidden, show mohr would do that now. So we're gonna pretend for a woman that I've gone through and done that because frankly, once you've done one there's you already know how to do it so I'm not going to go through and say now let's hide things under this menu but I normally would go through and hide all of those and eventually you'll have all these menus which have less things in them if you do nothing else theoretically it should stay like that every single time you work in voter show however just because of past history towards the end of this whole operation and show you a way that you can make it more permanent because I could set in theory you should just from now on everything you've hidden should stay hidden having the reason I say it that way is because I know people have said I don't what happened I just restarted photo shop and all of a sudden things were back the way they were before so here's a side tip for you and it's going to sound like I'm being sarcastic or joking but I'm not don't ever quit photoshopped unless you really need to like you're actually shutting your machine down I put my laptop to sleep and I keep photoshopped running because historically I found if there's ever one time that you're going to encounter a problem with photo shop it's when it restarts and something doesn't load properly so for me if it's working fine I keep it running as much is like humanly possible and I don't quit because the times where I have quit for some reason, or it quit by itself, which never ever happens on those occasions, then I, uh, realize that, ok, I don't want that to happen again, so I'm I want to make sure that I don't lose anything. So towards the end of this whole operation, I'll show you how you get to that point. The first thing you can do is go back to this menus and you'll see now it's kind of hard to see, but it says now, it's saying photoshopped defaults modified in brackets because I made a couple of changes so it will automatically recognize you have your own set of menus. Now, however, calling it photoshopped defaults modified probably isn't the greatest idea in the world, so instead you can go and tell it, I want to save this as my own set and call it my shortcuts or whatever you want to call it that way, you know, in a pinch, if it the wrong ones low, you go to your pull down menu in this dialog boxes say, oh, that was the set of menus that I say so that's the first thing you can do to kind of make sure you don't have to go through this again, it doesn't take a whole lot of time, but any time you can avoid having to redo the same operation make sense, so that would be the first thing I'm not going to bother in this case, but that would normally be so I would then have a list of those options. So that's, the first thing is just saying, okay, now I've got the menus kind of slim down and everyone's going to be different cause some people say actually do use that that filter or that command that's. Why, I said, that part is personal on the whole point of this entire session this morning is customizing, too, the way you want it to look and feel not meat saying you should make this shortcut that's, not the point. If someone tells you, make sure you have a short cut for this, you still might not use it. But if you find yourself saying, gosh, every time I go to do this operation, I'm pressing, going over and digging down, and then you are clicking on a button. If I could do that with a shortcut, then I would
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jcashin
Thank you so much Dave for this awesome course. I can tell already that my work in Photoshop is going to be so much more effective. I actually did stop the videos and make some tool presets and a curve preset. Thanks Creative Live for featuring such an easy to follow and understand instructor like Dave.
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