Playing with Palettes Photoshop

Many image-oriented programs use palettes of a sort, and Photoshop itself has had palettes since version 1.0, released in January of 1990. However, since Photoshop 3.0, the program has used a novel way of working with palettes. Instead of stand-alone windows, Photoshop uses grouped, tabbed palettes, which overlap each other in groups of two or three (or more, if you rearrange them yourself). To access a palette that falls behind the one displayed on top, click the palette’s tab. By default, some palettes, such as Brushes, Info, Layer Comps, and Tool Presets, appear alone.

Palettes operate a little like dialog boxes and may contain sliders, buttons, drop-down lists, pop-up menus, and other controls. You’ll also find icons at the bottom of many palettes. For example, at the base of the Layers palette are icons that let you create a new layer, add a layer style, or trash a layer that you no longer want.

Some palettes can change like chameleons. The Actions palette can be displayed in Button mode, in which you see only the name of each set of procedures you might want to invoke. Or you can flip the Actions palette to Normal mode, which lists each of the procedures in the action separately for you to view or edit.

Many palettes, such as the Brushes, Styles, Actions, and Colors palettes, include options for defining sets of parameters (called presets) that you can store for reuse at any time.

Here’s how to open, close, and otherwise manipulate a palette group from the Window menu:

-->To bring a palette to the front of its group: When the palette group is open, the palette that’s visible is the palette that has a check mark next to it on the Window menu. In this mode, you can select only one palette in any group because only one tab in a group can be on top at one time.

When you select a palette from the Window menu, you have no way of knowing which palettes are grouped together because Adobe now lists palettes alphabetically instead of by groups.

-->To move a palette out of its group: Grab the palette’s tab and drag to its new location, such as another group, the Palette Well, or the Photoshop desktop. If you move the palettes out of their groups or drag them onto the desktop so that they stand alone, any of them can be check marked.
-->To hide a palette: Select a check-marked palette on the Window menu or click the Close button at the top of the palette.
-->To access a palette from the desktop: Find its group and click the palette’s tab to bring it to the front.

Here are some palette-manipulation tips:
-->Save space by keeping palettes in groups. You can drag all the palettes in a group by dragging the group’s title bar. Access an individual palette by clicking its tab to bring it to the front. As a result, several palettes occupy only the screen space required by one.
-->Use the Window menu if you can’t find a palette. If you can’t find a palette or suspect that it’s hidden, access the Window menu and select the palette’s name to make it visible or to bring it to the top of its group.
-->Rearrange groups by dragging. If you’d like to move a palette to another group or to display it as a stand-alone palette, grab its tab and drag. Release the mouse button where you’d like the palette to reside in the workspace, or in the destination palette group.
-->Customize, customize, customize. After you’ve used Photoshop for a while, creating your own custom palette groups based on the palettes you most often use can be a real time saver. For example, if you don’t use the Paths palette very often but can’t live without the Actions palette, you can drag the Paths palette to another group or the Palette Well and put the Actions palette in the same group as the mission-critical Layers and Channels palettes.
-->Minimize palettes to save even more space. You can double-click a palette’s title bar (or tab if you’re using the Mac OS) to shrink the palette or palette group down to its title bar and tabs alone. You can also click the Minimize button at the top of palette.
-->Restore default palette locations whenever you need a change. If you decide you don’t like the way you’ve arranged your palettes, you can choose Window➪Workspace➪Reset Palette Locations to return them to the default configuration (the one they had when Photoshop was installed).

Some individual palettes, such as the Swatches and Character palettes, allow you to reset the settings back to their defaults. Select Reset from the palette’s pop-up menu located in the top-right corner.