From the course: Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - Photoshop (2019)

Organizing and customizing the workspace - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - Photoshop (2019)

Start my 1-month free trial

Organizing and customizing the workspace

- [Instructor] Let's take a look at what you need to know about using Photoshop workspaces for the ACA exam. The Workspace menu is at the right side of the Options bar, right here. And here you can choose from the default workspaces that come with Photoshop or add your own. Right now, I'm using the Essentials workspace, but if I choose a different one, like Graphic and Web, or a Painting, or a Motion, I get all different arrangements of panels. I'll go back to Essentials and notice that all the panels are docked together in groups on the right side of the window. Some panels here are fully visible, while others are just collapsed down to icons. I can drag and drop panels to put them in different groups or drag them out to make them floating panels that aren't docked at all. And I can do the same thing even when a panel is minimized just to an icon, like with the History panel here. And I can close the panels I don't need. To expand or collapse panels, click the double arrows at the top of the panel group. And to collapse these panels down to icons, I'll drag on the left side of the grouping. Now let's add a couple panels to further customize what we have here. From the Window menu, I'll open Character. And notice that it brought along the Paragraph panel with it. And if I wanted to close the Paragraph panel while it's docked, I can go to the Panel menu and choose Close or I can close the whole tab group to close both Paragraph and Character at the same time. But actually, I want to add a panel here. I want to add the Glyphs panel, so I'll go back to the Window menu and choose Glyphs and then drag it into the group with my other type-related panels. I'll also open Info and Styles and collapse them down. And I'd like to customize the toolbar as well, so I'll choose Edit, Toolbar, way down at the bottom here. And notice that I can also edit keyboard shortcuts and menus from here if I wanted to. I'll choose Toolbar and I'll simplify my toolbar by removing some tools that I don't use very often, like the group containing Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge. I'll scroll down 'til I see that group. Here it is. And I'll make sure I see highlighting around the whole group before I drag it, so I'll move my cursor just to right here and click and drag into the Extra Tools area to remove that set from the toolbar. I'll do the same for the Hand tool group and the Zoom tool down at the bottom. Drag them over. And let's drag the Path and the Direct Selection tools to the group with the Pen tool. So I'll scroll up until I can see that Pen tool group and then drag this group right up at the top. I'll arrange them like so. And that's the way I want them. I'll click Done and now I have my simplified toolbar with customized tool groups. So I can see I have the same group with all my pen tools and my selection tools. Now, at this point, Photoshop thinks that I've just customized the Essentials workspace and if I were to choose Reset Essentials, I'd lose all my customization. So instead, let's save this arrangement as a new workspace. I'll just call it My Workspace and notice we have the options here to include customized keyboard shortcuts, menus, and the toolbar. Since we customized the toolbar, let's choose that and click Save. And now I can go and choose the Essentials workspace and reset it. Now I have that back to its original look and at any time I can get my customized workspace by choosing it. One last thing that you should be familiar with and that's how tab documents work. Know how to drag them into a different order, how to drag them off so they're floating windows, and how to to put them back into a tab grouping. And that's our look at working with workspaces for the Photoshop ACA exam.

Contents