Customizing Menus and Keyboard Shortcuts

Photoshop CS3 is so flexible that it even allows you to hide and show menu commands. Being able to customize your workspace like this ensures that you’ll always be working in a comfortable, uncluttered environment. Photoshop also allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts, which can make remembering them a whole lot easier, but can also make life much harder for designers working in a collaborative environment and sharing computers—unless of course, everyone on the design team agrees on using the same new shortcuts.

Editing Menus
Photoshop is an application used by all types of creative professionals—from web designers, to video editors, to forensic experts—and that’s just to name a few. Therefore, as a print designer, it’s unlikely that you will use all of the menu commands available.  More often than not, you’ll wind up wading through a lot of unused clutter. If having to do this slows your workflow down, try customizing the interface to display only the menu commands that you really use. Choose Edit --> Menus, and click the Menus tab  at the top of the dialog box that appears. Unless you’ve changed it, the set currently displayed should be Photoshop Defaults (Note: You can choose from various other built-in task specific presets. See the “Workspace Presets” sidebar later in this section). Choose which menu type (application or palette) that you’d like to edit from the Menu For popup list. Toggle the triangle next to each menu name to view the various commands.

You can hide or show menu commands in any of the default sets by clicking in the Visibility column. You can also add or change the highlight colors for the menu commands by clicking in the Color column and choosing a color from the pop-up menu. When you’ve finished editing the menus, click OK to exit the dialog. Photoshop automatically adds the Show All Menu Items command to the bottom of any menu list containing hidden items. Choose this command to see everything that’s been hidden. You can also view hidden commands by F/Ctrl+clicking the menu name.

You can also create and save your own custom sets by clicking the Save button next to the Set drop-down list. When the Save dialog box appears, name the set and click the Save button. Your custom set is added to the Set drop-down list.

Workspace Presets
Photoshop CS3 ships with a number of built-in workspace presets. There are 11 presets already set up for you under the Window --> Workspace submenu or from the Workspace drop-down list located on the far left of the Options palette. Each preset applies menu highlights and keyboard shortcuts for a specific editing task in Photoshop (Note: These presets can change the palette arrangement onscreen). To highlight the new features in CS3, choose the What’s New In CS3 preset. Note that these are the same presets found in the Set drop-down list in the Keyboard Shortcuts And Menus dialog box.

Editing Keyboard Shortcuts
Photoshop allows you to change any of the keyboard shortcuts in the default set. To do so, choose Edit --> Keyboard Shortcuts. Then from the Shortcuts For drop-down list, choose Application Menus, Palette Menus, or Tools. Photoshop displays the chosen shortcuts in a list box underneath the drop-down list. For the Application Menus and Palette Menus lists, toggle the triangle next to each menu or palette name to view the various commands. Existing shortcuts are displayed in the Shortcut column.
If no shortcut is displayed, none is currently assigned to the command. To change or assign a shortcut, click in the Shortcut column and then type the shortcut. Any conflicting shortcuts will appear in a warning directly below the list box. Click the Accept button to remove the conflicting shortcut (if any) from its former command and apply it to the currently selected command. You can always reapply the original shortcut by clicking the Use Default or Undo buttons. Custom keyboard shortcut sets can be saved by using the same method as when saving custom menu sets.