Lessons

Lesson Info

Make Adobe Photoshop Your Own

Davis providing some amazing notes and so we're going to take a minute to talk about those notes dave I know when I'm working in photo shop and I'm watching the videos it's really always nice to have something that I can print out beside me and kind of just see you had that as an extra extra bonus to figure out how you're doing your work flow could you tell us a little bit I'm actually going to have been in the back pop up slide of this of what it looks like it looks so cool I love that you you matched our branding with colors and logos that was very design ary of you but let's talk about the content well first of all I mean I this serves to persuade me one is that it lets me revisit my good old days of actually working and design and page maker before that but I'm I know with when I'm watching something or attend an event I try and take notes as best I can but if you're like the average person at least I find this you look back at your notes later on and it just says like press shift ...

like that probably made really good sense at that moment in time and my worry is that if you're spending so much time taking notes that you miss a step along the way so I try as much as I can to put together something that summarizes kind of the key steps. So this is I want to say it's thirty eight pages or something which covers I would say a lot of what we're going to talk about, but here's the reality of classes and things like that is, when I first put this together was based on what my intention was to cover over these three days, and then I changed my mind after the pdf was already done. So this will cover a good proportion of what we're talking about. The three days in this pdf, and then there's a few additional things. I decided the relatively last minute toe ad in, but I think the combination is the pdf gives you the step by step for things that are really important to have step by step. And a lot of things were just kind of concepts, where it's, not really a series of operations, it's, more like here's, why layer master important? Or here's? Why working on destructive it's a good thing, there's not a lot of notes on that, because it's more kind of the philosophical side of things. So this covers most of the sort of step by step portion of it, with the exception of what we're talking about next? Great thanks. So this was one of I added this at the relatively last minute, because I don't have a cz much opportunities I used to, but I still occasionally sit down with groups of people and and they don't know if these people still exist I guess they do, but I remember years ago hearing about efficiency experts where they come into a business or ah, you know, in operation and watch how you did work and then make recommendations on how you could do things more efficiently and to some degree, I kind of I think of myself as a photoshopped efficiency expert where I'll go into some, you know, like corporate location look at their twelve people using photo shop and most of them are self taught or learn something five years ago and it still doing it that way, so I'll kind of observe how they do things and then make recommendations based on what they're currently doing, and one things I realized kind of reminded myself is that again, regardless of what you're doing with photos out, there are some things that just make your life simpler no matter what you use photo shopped for whether you're a web designer, a photographer or something and it kind of came to my mind is working with a group of people, and I realized every single one of them would had habits they had created or got used to doing, and we're taking longer because they either didn't know where they forgot that they could customize photo shop a little bit so photoshopped comes out of the box looking a certain way that someone whose job it is at adobe to put together the interfaces seems like a good idea but it doesn't mean it has to stay that way so for example where things are located and how they look and what's under a menu and even keyboard shortcuts can all be customized to make your life simpler. So just because it comes a certain way doesn't mean that it's good or the way you should keep it which reminds me to also say um almost every tool in function comes with some default setting because it has to be like when you click on a tool and look at the options bar there's some setting up there but just because it it says say fifty percent doesn't mean that someone did research and said that's a good number it just means it's halfway so setting your own defaults is really important so don't necessarily think it's because a tool defaults to some setting that you should necessarily keep it that way. So in this session we talk about making photo shop your own by setting yourself up to say I like it when things are oriented this way and I only want to see certain things under menus and I want to be ableto make my life simpler by pre doing some of my work so as an example when we switch over to the photo shop so people can actually see there we go so this is what you're seeing right now is just my way of working and photoshopped I realize a long time ago I spend the more majority of my photoshopped life in the layers panel so I want my layers panel to be as long as I possibly could that's not the way it came out of the box it came with everything a bunch of what used to be called pal it's now called panels in a certain place that was just kind of a default operation so the first thing I would say is over time you develop this you realize I spend the majority my time using these functions so for example there's certain things that when you first install photo shopped there are panels that someone at adobe said let's make this the default orientation but if you never use that panel at all then why is it there? I mean it still needs to be part of photo shop but does need to be in your face because you don't use it so this what I'm suggesting here things that over time you have to sort of think and say again this is this is a panel I keep going back to and I don't really use this one or use it hardly at all so therefore all adjust accordingly so by nature panels can be collapse you see at the top here I have color swatches styles properties those air four panels for separate panels that are sharing the same slot but I've deliberately collapsed thm for now so all I see is the name of them because day today I'm constantly in my layers panel if I ever decide any the colors watched that I can go get it but it doesn't need to be open all the time that's to me taken up a lot of valuable real estate so the first thing is you start realizing that any time you need one of these you can just double click toe open or close that our collapse or enlarge it so right away that's going to save you space also I went through and there are a couple that I decided that this was obviously previously in a bigger size so I would orient and so now this properties panel is one I do use a lot but not all the time so it's still still in here for the same function as you'll see when I go to use the function that uses properties that automatically opens so now I have properties right on top of the layers power because they go hand in hand very nicely if that wasn't the case and every time I went to use properties have to go find and go where is proper so here it is and if I hadn't done it, it would fly out the middle of my screen somewhere and be a floating panel, which to me floating panels or definitely old school, I still see some people that, like, they have been using force up long enough that they have all their panels floating in space, which is all very nice except than they do what I've always referred to is the panel shuffle dance where he's been half their time, moving things out of the way so they can see what they're doing and voters shop, I much prefer this setup of having all my panels off to the side, and then as I'm working, I've got the complete photograph and time I need to do something. I'm seeing whatever panel I want, this is as we'll see, we'll come back to this in a little bit part of something called a work space, so once you have everything set up the way you want it's called a work space and it remembers or saves how you have your photo shop set up, and this could be as simple as the location of some panels, or maybe your left hand and you want the tools on the other side, you wanna stop having to switch that you set it up any way you want, it will remember those locations. One of the words that I tend to use a lot when I'm talking about computer technology is the word theoretically, because a lot of things, this whole theory and reality so theoretically photoshopped supposed to remember, so if I were to quit photoshopped now, when reopening, it should remember the location of everything, but since that doesn't always happen, ah, workspace guarantees that and again, we'll talk about work spaces more but just to show you it comes with force up ships with built in work spaces that someone adobe said, if you were doing work with typography, maybe you would prefer to have these panels showing so watch what happens if I pick one of the built in workspace? It doesn't do anything to my photograph. This is work space, meaning layout of everything else. As soon as I picked typography, it now switches and says, well, there's, more information for characters and paragraphs and a much smaller layers panel. Now that be fine if I was spending the next little while really doing some type intensive work with different thoughts, but to me day to day, I don't want that so that's why I'll see we'll show how to do this a little bit later, I made my own workspace, so when I want to switch to it, it puts everything back the way I want so this way I'm not spending any of wasting my time going let me get everything position accordingly before I started working it's just a built in function, this little part here, and I'm sure there's an official name for it. I came over what it's called but these air, all additional panels that I don't use quite a cz much so instead of them taking up room here, they're just little icons just to show you how this works. If I decided that I wanted to make use of the history graham at first, it might just be floating like this kind of in space, and I want a position that if I put it in here, it becomes one of these tabs like this see what slot right in there, but I don't really want that because I don't use it that often, so instead, if I drag it into this little bar, see that little colored bar now it becomes a little fly oat menu sometime I want to use the hist a gram, it just pops up is this little panel, then I can put it away, so those were kind of almost being a secondary panels use quite a cz much, but they're still kind of important, so the hard part for most people is at first you don't know yes, because you haven't really explored all the panels, but over time the good news is you can keep tweaking it, so this was not something I developed one day it was like, you know what I use this a lot I should add that as well and you can keep tweaking it so there's a couple of things in here that I don't currently use a lot so I can take them out it is closed so they're not gone, they're just really only accessible from this window menu. The window menu is the resting place for all of our panels, the work spaces where I decide to have them at the moment and whatever panel name you click on that's whatever is goingto be visible and will stay that way. In other words, if I right now I clicked on something called channels if I didn't go back every time I go to view anything, I wouldn't see layers anymore because I've told photoshopped make the channel's panel the active one but I use that rarely so it's going to mostly look like this, but at least it is there if I needed and this is a very personal thing, a lot of things we'll talk about in this section are your choice, so I would never suggest someone make sure you have a very long layers panel I think would be fairly typical people would but some people like to have three mid sized panels that of one large one that's a personal choice really this is just about how you set it up to look the way you want, so the first kind of function is just the physical layout um let me throw in one little bonus keyboard shortcut here because it's such a useful one, I really like having these panels easily accessible, but sometimes I might be working on something where I want to see mohr of my image, so if I press shift tab, it hides temporarily all the panels on the right hand side and gives me more real estate to work with the panels are still there, I've just temporarily said hide them for a second, so I'm on ly seeing my tools on the left hand side and then everything else is is blank. This is one of the areas I always joke that adobes expense sometimes, but this they did really well because this to me is absolutely brilliant. I worked this way quite often when I'm teaching class, I don't because I want you to see what's happening, but this is my typical way of working I in fact I hate to say this, but I normally don't show the tools either because I know the shortcuts for all of them, but I don't want to freak anyone out completely but anyway, so I press shift tab all the panels are hidden, but if I move over to the right hand side, you see, they pop up, so now I can click on a layer, move off of it and it goes away again. So now it's sort of showing the panel just for a so long as you want cause typically as part of a typical situation need to go over, click on something and then go back to your image so and you don't necessarily have to have the panel showing all the time. So shift have isa tuggle switch, so if you each time you press it, it hides and shows that set of panel. If on april fool's day, you wouldn't want to freak out, one of your co workers just press the tacky and that hides everything, and then they wonder, or and then go f f and then they're like, what happened to photo shop so but don't actually do that, because that would be mean, but you could. So this is like I said, it's, a toggle switch. So what it means you can kind of go through and use whatever set up makes sense to you, I suggest that this is something that is worth a little bit of investment of your time of start toe kind of think about how you use photo shop where you spend most your time and make it more accessible if you find yourself continually going to the window menu to get to something, stop it, do it once and then add it into your layout, because unless it's something you rarely use, then why not make it more available? Especially since you have these little kind of many panels right here for the ones you don't use as much? You just have to remember that by icon, I have tool tips turned on, which is a preference, so that if I can't remember what an icon stands for if I hover over it it's popping up the name of that particular panel. So this really is a nice way of getting yourself more organized because I guess part of my what I'm trying to suggest here is that every time you make an unnecessary trip to a menu, that's a waste of time, so if I'm going to the window menu to get to the clone source panel and I've done that four times today, then for the next hour, it might make better sense for me to add the clone source panel to my layout so it's right there. Instead of having to pull down to a menu, you will notice that some panels have a function key beside it. Like f five that's telling you that even if I didn't know where the brushes panel was, like a press at five on my keyboard, it would pop up. I don't tend to use those that much personally because I've gone through and said, these are the panels that I use the most, so I'm going to make sure they're right here when I need them. I'm not with the vertical one. How do you set that? One is well, the simplest way is if you use one of the built in workspaces that adobe gives you like essentials, it has as long as it has at least one or two, then any other one that you want, it will initially just pop up, and then you kind of sometimes it loose added automatically other if it didn't, it would be like floating like this out in space, so then you just have to kind of click on it and drag it wherever you want. In that list, you have to be a little careful because there's also you see how that vertical blue line is appearing that would create like another column. When you do that, it takes up. Way too much space in my opinion so I don't personally like to do that one because I had much rather just have it like this and then once we go through some of these functional show you the end how you then save that workspace so kind of step one is thinking about orientation of panels and there's nothing wrong in fact, I think this is a great idea when you're first getting used to it switching between the ones that adobe gives you just to kind of get a sense of what does this do for me? It's unlikely that what someone adobe thinks would be a good photography set up is exactly what you want I mean it might but at least you can see ok, so they've added, you know, this panel here I would suggest that fairly quickly will get to the point of saying I'm going to make my own that's the one I want I don't have to use mind that often because this is gonna sound odd to say this but I always tell people one of the first tips that I suggest about photo shop is if you can avoid it don't ever quit it sounds like I'm joking but I'm not I see the old time they when they're finished they quit photo shop and then relaunch it I'm like I just put my computer to sleep voters up is running all the time one time I restart photo shop is if I'm obliged to because it decides to just quit on its own shall we say then I would relaunch it, but I find that when people and the reason I say that this is this, I have no technical back up researched to quantify this is true, but every person I talked to when they say had this problem with photo shop was working fine, but the next time I started it and I heard that phrase so often that I'm like there seems to be something that during the recess starting up of photo shop if something's going to go wrong, that might be one of the times it would happen. So my philosophy is if photo shop is running like a dream don't quit just keep going, which is why when I think was in c s five r c s six, they'll be very proudly said, hey, we've made photo shop so now it restarts much faster and I was like, oh because for me and hardly ever restarted, so the fact that it happens faster is like whatever so that's the only time that I tend to switch to my work spaces if I do restart photo shopped for some reason things look a little odd then I would use my workspace normally mind stays on I use this ninety nine percent of the time and hardly ever switches because I found I have a work space that fits a variety of uses and photoshopped but I could easily see if you were doing something like restoring an old photograph there might be certain functions used just for that it would make sense to have a separate workspace with different panels more accessible or for web designers they spend more time worrying about graphic elements of things like that so they probably have a different workspace with different panels, so step number one is the orientation of where things are uh the next thing I would look at his say because photoshopped has so many different ways of doing things that as a result sometimes new look under menus it's confusing as heck because there's multiple choice is to do the same thing and usually the reality is there's one maybe two functions that are best and others are just still there because the dhobi doesn't want to remove things and make people unhappy so quite often they and a perfect example of that we'll see when we look at filters. So for example let's say all they want to do is sharp in this photograph and this isn't the way I would do it by the way, I just want to show you about the whole menu operation I'll hold on look away don't look don't look, I forgot to reset back too standards I can show you how to change is ok here. All right, so I go to the filter menu to sharpen still didn't wear hold on gosh, that was bad people shortcuts which of defaults? Oh, silly me ok, one more thing I forgot that I was working on menus all right, here we go. Okay, now it'll work. He said hopefully so now when I go to the filter menu in there you know there's this big long list of ways I can sharpen my photograph and how do you know when you're looking at that list what's the best choice to do? Well, you don't really except here's the tip I always tell people because I think it's important looking whenever you look down the list of filters any time you see a filter name that doesn't have a little dot dot dot lips beside it, that means the's air could be called auto something. So frankly, these three choices right here I would never use them because it just arbitrarily says I will sharpen this amount. I don't want that I want to have control so the on ly sharpening filters I would use are ones that give me choices. So for me these three sharpened filters are totally unnecessary and excess baggage is taking up valuable real estate in voter shop, so I'm much happier be much happier if they weren't there so as you start looking through there's a ton of filters in here, but most people, I think, find they have a core that they use a lot. So why you have to always scroll by the ones you never, ever, ever used to get the ones you do? Thankfully, you can change that and it's under the edit menu menus, and this means edit my menus toe look the way I want this is another example, but the sort of thing where it's going to take you a little bit of time to set this up, but once you do it, it becomes an ongoing timesaver and it's, not a one shot deal. In other words, if you for now at it one or two menus and then two months or nine and you know what I need to also change this? You can. It just means that you keep going back to the same place you can change either the main application menus, which are the file edit it center across the top or panel menus, meaning if you're in a panel like the layers panel that has a little pop up menu you can edit within there as well, and I would suggest considering doing both depending on what you're doing but for analysis, look at that example of thes sharpened filter, so I go to filter and this is the hardest part you have to scroll down all the way until you eventually find down here somewhere we go so here's all the sharpening filters and you can see it has those were the three I said I didn't want sharpened sharpened edges sharpened mohr the little eyeball means of his ability so I turn those off that's it they're now no longer in the menu so what you do is you kind of make note to self I never used these functions so let me eliminate them from the menu before anyone worries that am I gonna break photoshopped? They're just hidden they're not gone and saw before I was able to reset them back because I'd already turned them off previously but it's that's how you do is just go through and say these air functions I never use so let me eliminate clutter soon as you click ok it's instant if I go back to the filter menu you'll see now I only have the three sharpening things that I would actually use and there again for those people that panic or the thought of wrecking photo shop show all menu items will bring back the crappy ones if you really want them that I just a crappy sorry so it's not like anything's actually deleted is just I'm customized to say for now just show me the things that are important to me so he's select do you have to go back in and turn the eyeballs off again? No it's just a temporary temporary thanks so like right now it's gone again so when I do this, it means at this moment show all menu at is being on this menu I'm on right now not everything that this means right here just these sharpen one's but as soon as I go away from it, it goes back again so that's just a temporary fix if you suddenly realize for some reason I do actually want to use one of these ones I hidden, which I can't imagine actually happening because if you hit them there's probably a reason for it but just in case, but if you can imagine, multiply that by every menu where you're going through past all the clutter to get to the stuff you actually do use it's kind of like your streamlining photoshopped now and you're eliminating choices now some people I think are reluctant to do that because like, what if I read a tutorial that says use this filter will then temporarily show it's not deleted it's just you know what you'll find us they'll say go the filter menu too sharpened and then you'll say, I don't have that will you actually do it has gone for now are hidden for now so that's and then you may find that okay, that actually was a kind of cool idea maybe I want to go back to my menu settings and show that menu after all so the good part is nothing is ever permanent going to worry about well, now I've done it because just means for now I've done it and I can always put it back so shorten the mit the drop down menus to or is that just great you could get to like in this case the sharp and was like a sub menu so I was able to get to that so basically anything you can get to under this setting of menus where you can see for example we look under layer there's all the layer functions and eventually there's layer style there's another sub so it kind of goes as far as the menus are able to go you khun make those visible or not I never used layers just not true you can remove that think that the main topic and world which they would just it would stay there but you could take everything out from it to me the main ways for using this by use some but not all within a group if you're just us a main menu and you never use them, just ignore it, but if it's it's when you're tryingto dig down toe like sharpening filters or blurring filters and go but I don't ever use these three that's just to me it's that unnecessary zipped past them when they could just be gone and is it is it possible to reorder a menu? Unfortunately not andi I don't know that that'll ever happened it's possible but um at this point no always be careful when I answer questions because I know certain things that I'm not allowed to talk about fire to speculate thiss moment probably will not be able to reorder menus, so imagine if you again just invest a little bit of time and this is an ongoing process so you use photo shopped for a couple of weeks ago you know, I still that there's the more things that I don't use now I always on ly semi jokingly member I talked about this another layer here this bad thing called flatten image if it was up to me I would do this on everyone's machine while they were sleeping I just go into the layers panel and find where it says layers zip down here just take that up completely so now some say I'll just go in flattened oh can flatten anymore. So uh but again the this whole section we're talking about is all very personal so some people would look at and say yeah, you so many different things I don't think I did it my menus a lot of other people's good by using this core of functions so having to zip past all these other things to get to the ones that I want to me are much more important in the last segment, we talked a little bit about the importance in my mind of using keyboard shortcuts. Now let's take it up a notch. The things like pressing a single letter for a tool is good, but pressing a shortcut to instead of going to a menu, especially when you look under some menus and to get to certain things there's, like you have to go toe like sub menus and things like that that the possibility also exist for you to change the keyboard shortcuts, and that means either use an existing shortcut for some different function or try to apply a shortcut to a function doesn't have one, and I want it that way because almost every possible combination has already spoken for somewhere. So the chances of you finding one that's unused is fairly unlikely. But what you can do is, again, this is one of those things where someone's job in adobe was to say, I'm going to allocate keyboard shortcuts to things so right away, and I look under this menu as an example see these three right here I know personally, I will never in my lifetime use auto tone, auto contrast or auto color. Because I don't like functions and say auto anything, because if it doesn't work now, what do I do? So I much prefer focus where it controls so and I'm not suggesting everyone should be like that, but I looked at this and went, I know I'll never use those, so to me there are three keyboard shortcuts that I can use elsewhere, and if you start looking through, you can probably find things like vanishing point kind of a cool filter, but I can remember the last time I ever actually used it on a day to day basis. So there's, another keyboard shortcut that I could use some where it makes sense for me. So there are two options. You either attempt to apply a shortcut to something, and it will tell you that is being used by something, or look through first and make note to yourself. Here are some shortcuts that I know why will probably never use and use those, so it works both ways. I'll show you what the ideas so here's a perfect example as we'll talk about in a little bit today, I live and breathe layer mass to me there is such an important part of my work, it kills me to think that every time that a layer mascot to go click a button or go to pull down menu instead of pressing a short cut on the first things I did is why don't I have a keyboard shortcut for add a layer mask in the past I would have just spoken, you know complain to myself and nothing would have happened now I have the option of going well let's see if we can make that happen so I go to keyboard shortcuts similar principle too alec kidding menus but instead of just showing our hiding, this is allowing me to edit what the current keyboard shortcut isthe so I'm just I'm saying go to keyboard shortcuts for my main menus and you see you can hear you can allocate shortcuts for the again the main menus, the pop up and using panels or the tools themselves which we'll talk about in a second so I just have to go through it okay, I want to do later massa goto the layer menu and I dig down and find eventually down here layer mask so I want layer masking here and now have to think of a keyboard shortcut now I made a mental note to myself that command shift l or control shift l is one of the ones that I knew I could use but look as I try to use that it gives me this warning and says, wait this is already in use by auto tone and it will be deleted from auto tone if you accept this and I'm like you bet I'll accept that because I know I'm never going to use auto tone personally, so why not? We use that short gun now, this is the personal part because if you're a huge fan of auto tone, don't do this, but I'm having met too many people yet that are so this is just one example and you can I think I found probably I won't say ten or eleven short cuts that are currently being used for other things that I just think I'll never use that, so that gives me the ability to use them for myself. So what you do is you enter in you physically press the keyboard shortcut you would like to use for whatever function if you get, and I think it be unlikely you wouldn't get this message because, like I said, almost every shortcut combination you can imagine has already been used, so in this case is mourning the now if it came up and said, this shortcut is being used by levels, you know, because I do use that, but key is if it comes up and says it's something you never use any way that I just clicked except okay that's it now this I think, is really cool instantly, it shows you see, little shortcuts already appeared there. I just did it it's already in the menu. So now if I'm working away and I want a layer mascot expressed a shortcut done so much faster than going over and clicking on the little button at the bottom of layers, pal and that's just one example. If you start thinking I use this function there's no shortcut. I use this there's no shortcut for that. And I can not talking about every single thing you do, but there's probably a core functions that you think like I do that a lot. So why not make a shortcut that makes sense to me? Try to remember some combination that was chosen by somebody make it your own. Now you do have to use a bit of caution not I would say change, you know every single shortcut because some of them there's a reason why, you know it makes sense to have a certain shortcut for certain things. But like we saw with the menus, this is not permanent. That means until I tell it otherwise, this is my new shortcut. If we ever decide that maybe someone else has used my machine and they want to use auto tone than I can put it back to the default of auto tone again, so it's your choice, I thought you were you were adding that shortcut that there was some rice buttoned down there. Is that something that gives you a list of all the shortcut it does it's it does, although it's interesting, because what it does, it actually creates an html file of all your shortcuts, which you can still print, but it's almost for matters if you wanted to view it in a web browser for reasons known only to adobe. But so if you do especially if you do customize and you're trying to remind yourself it's a fairly long thing because it shows you not just the ones you created, but everything, but it will allow you to summarize, you can also save a set of keyboard shortcuts, so if you're going to work somewhere else and not bringing your machine, you could bring the thumb drive and say, I have with me my customization because I have my short cuts or my menus or whatever, so you can kind of load those in what's happening in this case for now, you see, it says photoshopped defaults, brackets modified, so I haven't saved anything if I wanted to. If I changed a whole bunch of shortcuts, I could press this little button, and then it would save an actual set. For now, I'm just doing a kind of ad hawk is for now, but I do have a list of other ones I've saved previously, so it's even possible if you really wanted to get fancy to say, I want to set a keyboard, shortcuts for photo restoration and different set of keyboard shortcuts for something else, that would be a bit of a mind bender, I think, but it is theoretically possible to have different sets of keyboard shortcuts, photos up has a lot of commonality and things, and one of them is things will stay the way you leave them. So if I go, I've gone in and change that keyboard shortcut for now. That's my keyboard shortcut for layer mask until, like, either set my keyboard shortcuts back to the default or photo shop where to perhaps crash when I went toe restarted, it defaulted to the originals that's one of the main reasons why I like to save custom forecasters in case something goes amiss not that that ever happens with the dhobi products, but if it were to, then we'd have a backup plan. So now here's, one of my other favorite examples because I've already harped a little bit about don't use these adjustments, but these were all the shortcuts are. So it's prompting its assuming hey, if you want to cut to the chase press commander control l for levels well I don't want to use levels it's destructive I don't want to use curves but all the shortcuts are set up to give you the destructive version which kind of makes me slightly unhappy let's just put it that way I'd much rather didn't do that but the good news is I could change that to the same exact procedure you can just go in and say all right, I want to go to image I'm sorry not so I want to go I want what I really like to do is say when I press commander control ellis that giving me levels the destructive one give me the levels adjustment layer so I go to what the one I want to the new one I want to allocate, I go to adjustment and new adjustment layer levels and in here I press commander control l it's gonna warn me it's already had used from levels so it's going to remove it if you accept it and this is where you have to make that cautious decision to realize I'm changing the game here a little bit but for me that's the decision I'm ok with because I don't want to use regular levels I want to use levels of justin player so imagine now and we'll just use the levels as an example but fill in the blank for any adjustment of the eu's curves or levels or whatever instead of every time you want to use it, you have to go and find somewhere in the layers panel where it exists you just press a shortcut and it pops up like this now the on ly kind of catch is when you press the shortcut it always wants you to say do you want a new levels adjustment? If so, what would you like to call it? Well, personally, I don't ever name my layers adjustments or my just layers, so this is what I do I'll tell you first I press command l okay? Because I know I don't want to name it, so I just go and then it so it takes one extra click, but to me that's still faster than taking my mouse and clicking on the adl airmass button. Excuse me of the added justin player okay, so not necessarily advocating that you should all do this. I kind of am, but I went through and said level of just levels no, I'd like a level dressmaker curves no, I like it curves just mayor so everywhere under this menu where it had a keyboard shortcut for these standard commands, I changed it to the adjustment layer equivalent because with very rare exceptions, there's very few times why want to use levels itself, not a levels adjustment layer and that does happen. So in those cases now I have to go to the menu to get that old fashioned levels adjustment because my shortcut has changed so that's where you have to kind of personalize a little bit, decide what makes sense for you, my feeling is I do it on a percentage basis, their not number of times that I use regular old levels is such small that I'd rather allocated short cut to the part that I use the most. Now I always talk about this part as well, and I don't want to say use the word controversial, but for a long time photo shop uses air like what? How could you do that? There's, a tool has been around a photo shopped for many, many years called the pen tool, which is if you're new to photo shop it's one of the hardest tools to learn how to use and in my mind with some of the law, the other tools that are available downforce up, I use it very rarely now, so this is another example of thinking of the way you personally use photo shop and looking at percentage usage in other words, do I use adjustment layers versus regular adjustments if I do that all change the keyboard shortcut down here the bottom is one of the ways we choose color is called color picker in order to get to it, I have to click on it to open up this color picker and in my effort to cut down on real estate of moving for years I remember thinking I wish I could give this a keyboard shortcut and a couple of versions ago photos up they let you do that but the same problem applies is what on earth can you press because every keyboard shortcut in the world has already spoken for. So if I go to the tools menu this where it shows me every existing current shortcut for every single tool now in theory you could change these, but I think that would be a little dangerous to go in and start playing around with you could I mean, it is a personal thing, so you think you know, I'm never going remember it's j for the healing brush than you could change it to a different letter and I would just warn you that letter is used by this one the on ly kind of disclaimer I would say with changing anything like this is if you're following some tutorial in a magazine or a book and it has a habit of saying just press, you know, see for the crop tool and and for this and you've changed it you'd have to be, you know, translating in your head the whole time but as an example I kept scrolling down on weighed out the bottom here it says foreground color picker I would like to allocate a single letter for that so I started pressing every letter to see and all of them were really important so then somewhere along the way I thought, what makes sense to me? I thought, how about p for picker when I did it said this is in use by the pen tool now some people instantly go I can't do that because they're heavy do some heavy duty uses of the pencil personally I use the penta will weigh less now than I used to. So on a percentage basis how many times a day do I use the color picker aa lot? How many times the data is the pendel? Hardly ever. Some days I go I go two weeks about using the mental so to me personally I would say I'd much rather have a shortcut for something that I use all the time in a pinch I could always change it back so that's kind of the mindset is thank you personally no one I would never sit up here and say all everyone out there should change the foreground color picker to pee because some people the pen tools a huge part of their work because of type of work they do in this case, I'm ok with that, I accepted click ok, and from now on until I change it, I could be working with my brush tool the signing of the color picker and just press p and it pops up so in their long, long I have to go and click on that little icon. And again, this is all relative to the size of your monitor, a big monitor that's a lot of moving over to click just to open the color picker. So for me, this made sense to say, let me think about the kind of work that I do. The other thing is, I think it's worth reminding ourselves none of these things are permanent, so it might even make sense for the next two hours to change a shortcut because you're working on some project where you keep meeting, do the same thing, and when you're finished, put it back again. This this is not like moses and the tablets where you cast in stone, you can change it if it makes sense for you right now to say you know what? For the next our two hours half a day, I'm working on something and follows up where I keep using that same function, then give it a shortcut for now. And then once you're finished, put it back again. Personally, I left p for color picker because I use it all the time, but I've had lots of other times where I thought, yeah, for now would make sense to allocate this shortcut to this it's the same when I can talk any great detail about the preferences, but the preferences and photo shop for the same thing. I talked a lot of people who seemed to view the preferences that do it once and then leave them that way forever. I changed my preference all the time that helps if I'm working on some project where it makes sense to go in and change some setting in here, I'm perfectly fine with doing that, knowing it will only stay that way until I put it back again. So that's, one of those recurring themes that for something is really important to remember none of these changes and customization you're making our permanent, they're just consistent until you change it again, just like the tool settings up the top of the options bar they will stay that way until you change them again. So if you know that most time use the clone stamp till you're at fifty percent capacity, leave it there, but you can always change it the same thing of all of these we're quite a bit especially the almost exclusively the effects can you automate or assign a short keyboard shortcut to think it's automate and then perfect effects are? Well, it depends a little hard to say because when it ever it's what they call a third party product, they're able to hook into certain things, but I'm thinking it's unlikely that you could allocate a shortcut because I don't think it would show up under photo shops menu like the list and that edit menu function is everything that it sees as part of photo shop, so even though it shows up under your menu, I don't think it would see it now there's probably some other way to do it, but that's it's, not a built in these are all the ones that were considered photo shops main functions that air once they're accessible. So those two things editing the menus and adding shortcuts are things that allow youto to start to customize kind of the look of feel of it now circling back again, and the reason I deliberately in this order is members step one was the layout of our panels then if you go in and edit the menus and the shortcuts now, if I go to save a work space, as you'll see it's going to give you the option of including in that work space not on lee the layout of the panels, but my keyboard shortcuts and menus so now I have I have a work space that I know is not on ly remembering where I have things is also remembering what I've done to my menus and my shortcuts, so that way, if you do decide to switch between a couple of settings or I've worked with some groups where they have a very powerful machine that two or three people share so this way they can each have their own workspace, so they don't wilt usedto happen as they sit down, the machine has been twenty minutes making it look the way they wanted it to now they just picked their work space and it was that doesn't actually make that noise, but it does effectively put everything and then change the menus. So assuming for a moment that I've gone through and I've said, ok, I already have my menus! I've added it, I've changed a few keyboard shortcuts, I oriented everything the way I wanted my panel's and so looking the way I want I want to make sure I don't do that again so I go to the window menu to work space and shoes new workspace when you do that it's going to prompt you to name it, but then this is why again I did in this order because now it allows me say yes, I would like to include keyboard shortcuts and menus if you didn't check those little boxes, although what happened is we just simply remember the position of your panels and nothing else, but in my case, because I wanted to, I would call it something that made sense to me as the name of the workspace, and then include both these I won't bother in this case, they already have enough under my list. In fact, I went through this morning and deleted about eight, from previous demonstrations, but if I did, then it would show up here under this list and to switch between them. Here are mine at the top here of the built in one's from adobe. Now, if I do go to switch a work space that's going to prompt me and say, well, you're changing the shortcuts and menus, is that okay? And then it is okay, because, you know you've saved us part of this workspace. Now, if you have a work space, and then you decide to edit further the shortcuts of menus that could potentially mess you up a little bit because they don't have to make a a new work space to make sure you've kept them all the current changes you have for most people, I would say this is something you generally would do once or once, and then a little bit later on once you update, I met other people that once they see what this does, they really go to town with it and they change shortcuts on the fly because they're like gosh for the next hour I need to do this I want to shortcut for that and then when they're finished they put it back to something else they better person than I because I don't think I could remember changing on the fly but I I can see why you might want to do that because any time you're repeating the same operation and having to go at it down three men use over and over again if you could do that through a keystroke that would make a lot more sense at the very, very end of this three days will touch on the concept of actions which is a similar kind of principle to say I'm only doing one operation a lot but several operations I could make that a pre recorded little action where I press one button it goes and does like four or five things this is just talking about making my life simpler by eliminating clutter and or making keyboard shortcuts make more sense to me one of the reasons I talk about this is what that one of the most common comments people make to me is I love to use more keyboard shortcuts but I can't remember them and part of that's because someone else picked them you know, if they're your keyboard shortcuts, I would say there's a much greater chance you would remember them because it's you doing your shortcut all the time not going what? What was that shortcut again and some of them when you look at them they're like pretty crazy combinations of like here's one option shift command l that's pretty easy remember um so but if that was a function that I was doing all the time and pressing it every day, I probably would remember it, but since it's something that is a rarity that I would use, I'd be less like to remember that and as I mentioned before, I always stress us going it's important the on the average person it will initially slow you down to start really taking advantage of keyboard shortcuts because you don't have to go to remind yourself what was that shortcut again and then you press it, but the more you do it, then it becomes happened and I really feel the reason I spent a bit of time on this is because this is again doesn't matter what you're doing with photo shop this is just overall everyday efficiency is I want to get cut to the chase and get to that function quicker more quickly so if aiken do that by saying I'm going to make a short cut which is makes better sense to me or for a function, it doesn't currently have a shortcut that I think is to me the most important one is not just a friendly your shortcut, but here's a function like atal air mask. I do that, I can't imagine how many times a day I do that, so why not have a shortcut to do that? And the good news is that said is once you've done that, then it becomes built in to that work space, so you don't have to worry about now as a further back up. I would suggest that if you have spent a fair bit of time modifying all the keyboard shortcuts than I would suggest, clicking this button and saving a copy of it, because that way, if all else fails, you know you can always loaded back in. Um in earlier versions of photoshopped, this is how you would move it from one version of photo shop to the next. You had to manually say, save my keyboard shortcuts and then load them in. The more recent versions have a built in ability where they will say, when you first launch like, say, the next version of photo shop, it will say, would you like me to import all of your settings? And it will make what could best be described as its best attempt to load everything in for you so that's that's not, I would say a necessary step, but it's not a bad idea for the extra step it takes notice. By the way, if you remember, let me just do this, I can show you I have there are two of my keyboard shortcuts set. The reason they're showing under this menu is when I clicked the save button, it automatically prompted me to save it in the keyboard shortcuts folder, so when you do that the next time you launch photoshopped, this would be one the rare reasons why restart photo shop next time it actually shows up under my list, so let me having to go look for it somewhere in some folder now what I personally do and we'll talk about this more in a second with presets is any time you decide to save a set of something like this, do it twice the first time, save it into the folder that it prompts you to like in this case keyboard shortcuts, then go back and save it a second time in this time, somewhere in a folder you've created somewhere out in your hard drive called my backup stuff or something and that way not that it's likely to happen really, but just in case I'd rather have a backup plan that didn't reside inside photo shop just in case something went horribly wrong, I'd rather have a separate folder that I know is my ultimate backup plan, okay, so I would do that with both keyboard shortcuts and menus because it's not part of the normal kind of a preset thing. Ok, any questions on shortcuts or menus or anything from here? Internet. Well, good so day we have a question from darren six here in six when saving a new personalized workspace can that be exported to use on other computers? It actually can. Um, when you look under the work space, you have the option of it's. Actually, we'd have to do it is under its consider, in that case, a preset manager. So you go under here, too, export import presets, and then that would let you pick the ones. We'll see that in a second, so I want these are the ones I'd like to move on to, like a thumb drive to take to a different machine than they can be loaded in. And is that if you, when you update photoshopped to a new version, it makes its best attempt to automatically pull all those settings and for you.