Customizing Workspace and Preferences in Photoshop

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To a certain extent, Photoshop lets you have it your way without having to make a trip down to the local burger shack. You can easily customize the look of your workspace, specifying everything from the location of palettes to the arrangement of dialog boxes when you begin a session.

You can even store these physical layouts and recall them anytime you like. Photoshop also makes it easy to choose how certain tools and features operate. You can choose how the cursors for tools such as brushes look, tell Photoshop your preferred way of storing files, and specify just how much memory you’d like to set aside for image editing. You can set all these preferences once and then forget them, or you can change them from time to time as your needs change.

Creating Workspace Presets
Photoshop is a complicated program; the more you learn the more complicated (and routine) your activities become. For one project, you may find yourself using the Styles palette repeatedly to add special effects to layers. For your next project, you may never use the Styles palette but require frequent access to the Paths palette to create curves that you use to make selections. And so it goes. Use custom presets to save time and effort, or to instantly clean up a messy desktop.

Custom workspaces come in handy if you share a computer with students, family members, or coworkers. Those who prepare images for both Web and print have different needs that may call for special workspaces, too.

You can create customized workspace presets that handle all these needs and a great deal more. Here are some of the ways you can tailor your workspace:

-->Combine palettes to group the ones you use most often together.
Drag a palette’s tab into another palette group to add it to that group. If the Layers, Channels, and History palettes are the ones you use most often, you might want to group them together. You can also hide palettes that you rarely use for a particular project, tuck them away in the Palette Well, or minimize them to their title bars.

Move a palette out of the way quickly by Shift+clicking its title bar. The bar snaps to the nearest screen edge.

Before saving your workspace preset, show or hide the palettes as you prefer them and move them to the locations you want on your screen.

-->Position dialog boxes.
Photoshop’s menu bar dialog boxes pop up in the same location they appeared the last time you used them. You may want to drag them to a specific place on your screen and store that location when you save your workspace preset. When I’m working with a large image, I sometimes position dialog boxes on the screen of my second monitor to maximize the area for the image on my main display.

-->Customize the Options bar.
You can grab the gripper bar at the left edge of the Options bar and drag it to another location. For example, you can dock the bar at the lower edge of your screen or have it float in a specific place on your Photoshop desktop. You can also double-click the title bar of the floating Options bar to collapse it so that only the active tool’s icon is showing. Photoshop stores these settings with your workspace preset.

Saving and Deleting Presets
After you’ve set up your workspace, you can save it by choosing Window➪Workspace➪Save Workspace. In the Save Workspace dialog box that appears, type a name for your saved workspace and click the Save button. Your saved workspace now appears as a listing on the Workspace submenu.

To delete a saved workspace, choose Window➪Workspace➪Delete Workspace. In the Delete Workspace dialog box that appears, choose the name of the workspace you want to remove from the drop-down list. Click the Delete button, and your preset is gone, gone, gone.