Customize Photoshop's menus

- [Voiceover] Previously in this chapter, we talked about the fundamentals of setting up a custom workspace in terms of how the image is displayed on-screen and what panels are up and what panel structure you have. Now I'd like to take it to the next step and talk about menus and adding menus to this customization process of your workspace. One of the great advantages of Photoshop, as we all know, is all the stuff that you can do inside of Photoshop and all these menus but it can also be a bit daunting as well. We can take a look at any number of menus but I'm just gonna continue on with my theme of color correction and tone adjustment which a lot of people need to do.

Let's take a look at the Image menu, for instance, and see what is in here that we need, what is it that we don't need. When I come underneath the Image in Adjustments, all the things here the Brightness levels, Curves all this stuff here which is currently grayed out, in fact all the way down to here, I never use through the menu. I always use it through the Adjustments panel. So I could get rid of all those things. I may keep Shadows/Highlights and HDR Toning and some of this stuff down here but I hate to having to come here and come all the way down here to access these. Also, some things like Apply Image and Calculations and some of these Variables I just don't use them when I'm doing tone and color correction.

Sometimes I use a Trap and very rarely do I ever do Analysis. So you can decide. You can look at these menus and you can say, "Hey, when I'm doing tone "and color correction, what do I need?" So there's the application menu but there's also the menus for the panels and, since we're using the Layers panel here and it's very common I use it all the time, I look here and say, "Are there some things "that I could get rid of like "Copy and cascading style sheets." I don't do that. I can't remember the last time I did a Quick Export to PNG, for instance and animations, I just don't need these kinds of things here.

So the good news is that you can take advantage of all the power that's inside of Photoshop but you can focus it for specific kinds of projects and workspaces. So how do we do this? How do we fine tune our menus and edit them? You can come down here underneath the Edit and come all the way down here to Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus that you see here or probably a little bit easier in terms of mousing around and accessing is come right back to the Workspace where we have been working previously. You can set up your basic panels as we talked about and then come down and choose the same access Keyboard Shortcuts & Menus and here we'll work on Menus.

So there's two things that we can set here, Application Menus and Panel Menus. So let's set one of each like we just talked about. Let's come underneath the Image menu and let's go turn off what we don't want and what we don't need. Remember underneath Adjustments we said if we want some of the adjustments but not all of them to be accessible underneath the menu so we could turn off all of them if we wanted to or, in this case, I'll just selectively turn off some of these, the ones that I don't want and remember we said all the way down we did the Channel Mixer and all that was available to me going through the Adjustments panel which is generally how I would do this.

If you can't quite remember what's there, just set it up so you can see the Adjustments panel and you then you can just move your mouse over these little icons and it will tell you what's there and then the highlights and shadows and toning we'll leave on. Down here at the bottom, we can keep going down. Yeah, I might use those things. Duplicate image but Calculations, Variables, Apply Data Sets. I mean I just don't use these things. I don't use the Analysis. None of these things where I use when I'm working on tone and color correction.

Then, let's go to the Panel's menu and let's go down here to the Layers. Obviously, you can do this for every single Application Menu and every Panel Menu as well. So, here, we can take out the Copy CSS. We can take out the Quick Export to PNG. All the rest of these things I may use. I don't ever use the artboards for this kind of work. So I can just turn those off and then when I have all my menus and panels set up the way I want to, and this will probably be something that will be a progressive change for you that over time you'll probably fine tune this.

The good news is, it's easy to edit and create new ones. So, we'll create a new set and we'll call this Tone and Color. If you're working in a multiple environment with other people, you can put your own name on there if you want to and then click Save. There you go and then when you click OK then, when you go underneath your Image, notice that you've only got a few adjustments there instead of having to go all the way down to the bottom of that menu. This is a lot simpler, a lot easier to manage and same thing for your Layers panel right here.

Then what you do is to finish it all up is you can create a new Workspace down here so you can say new Workspace and we'll call this Taz Tone and Color and then you can put the _2 to indicate that's the most recent one and say, "Hey, I want all the Keyboard Shortcuts." Well, in this case, we'll put Menus because we haven't done Keyboard Shortcuts and then click Save and then you've saved not only your panels and their orientation and relationships and placements on screen but you've also saved the custom set of menus to work on this.

So things get easier and easier the more attention you pay to the Photoshop interface and customizing it.