Photoshop Preferences & Settings
For my first week I figured I should start with the basics in my learning of Photoshop. I’ve never really spent much time understanding the preferences and settings of the program. So today I spent most of the afternoon watching a series of tutorials on Kelbytraining.com titled “Customizing Photoshop” by Dave Cross and taking notes. For those of you who are not familiar with Kelby Training, it is a website that is dedicated to providing education for creatives. It is available only by subscription at $199/yr. unless you are an NAPP member, then the cost is $179/yr.
Ok, on to what I learned in my 3-4 hours of watching the tutorials and taking notes. I’m not going to repeat each item they covered in the tutorial, only items that I found helpful and had never used before. I should also mention that I work in PS CS4 and some of the items I mention may not be available in previous versions of PS.
First you need to know how to access your preferences in PS. Go to the Edit menu>Preferences>General.
Under the General section, the only item of interest to me was the ability to set up the scroll wheel to zoom in and out of an image. This might be a little annoying when you are trying to scroll up and down.
The next section was Interface and the one thing I found interesting here was the option to turn off “Tool Tips”, which at times can be annoying when you already know what each tool is called.
In File Handling you can turn off “Enable Version Cue” if you don’t have that program.
Performance is something I have used before to adjust the number of History states PS will hold for you while you are working, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Caution should be used when adjusting this preference. Too many History states will cause your computer to run slowly since it uses RAM to store the History as you work. The default of 20 history states is usually sufficient.
Cursors are pretty standard, although I thought it might be nice to have a cross hair in my brush tip when painting.
Transparency gives you the option to change the appearance of the grey and white grid. A good point they made in the tutorial was to change this to grey and another color, such at pink or red, if you are working with white text. It can be difficult to see the text on a transparent layer otherwise.
Units & Rulers allow you to set the default measurements of your rulers and text. I prefer to have my rulers and text set to pixels.
Guides & Grids lets you change colors of your guides and grids depending on what is appealing to your eye. But the most important thing I got from this section is the ability to turn off those pesky slices numbers. If you inadvertently select the slice tool you will get a slice number in the upper left hand corner of your document, and no matter what you do it won’t go away. Turn this option off and you won’t have to worry about that anymore. Of course if you slice images for use on the internet, you will want this option turned on.
Type options included a nice feature that those of us with vision problems will appreciate. You can change the size of the display of the fonts in the drop down list.
So that summarizes what I found interesting in the Preferences section of the tutorial. Next week I’ll cover other helpful settings within PS.
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