Photoshop Preferences & Settings – part 2
Last week I made it through the information concerning the Preferences in PS. This week I will be addressing the Settings portion of the tutorial. I found this part of the tutorial much more interesting and useful.
Menus & Shortcuts
Did you realize that you can customize the menus in PS? I had no idea! Just go to Edit>Menus and PS lets you turn off the visibility of nearly any item in each of the menus.
So if there are filters you never use or other options on menus that you have no use for, you can get them out of your way. Sweet huh? These changes will create a new Set defined as Photoshop Defaults (Modified) and you’ll see this in the Set drop down menu. Don’t worry about messing things up in PS, because you can always revert to the original PS menus by selecting the “Photoshop Defaults” Set from the drop down menu and this will restore everything to how it was originally. You can also temporarily see all options on menus while working in PS by either going to File>Show All Menu Items or by Ctrl clicking the individual menu. The really great thing about this is you can save your “preset” menu options as a Set. This would allow you to toggle back and forth between your Modified Menu Set and the PS Default Menu Set. Even if you don’t save your Modified Menus as a Set, they will remain as the default whenever you open PS.
The same options are available for all Panel Menus. If you check out the other drop down box labeled “Menu For”, you’ll see you have the option to make changes to the Panel Menus.
If you notice the name of this dialog box is called “Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus”, so you guessed it, you can make changes to your shortcuts here as well. Check out the tabs at the top and you’ll see one labeled “Keyboard Shortcuts”.
Making changes to your keyboard shortcuts or creating new shortcuts is a little trickier. The main issue with shortcuts is that PS already has so many built in that it is tough to find an available set of key combinations to use for a new shortcut. You can select to make shortcuts for Application Menus, Panel Menus and Tools using the drop down box. If you have a menu that you use over and over in PS you may want to consider creating a new shortcut for it. Let’s say you use Gaussian Blur constantly in your work and would like to access it more quickly. Go to the Filter section of the shortcuts and click on the Gaussian Blur line to highlight it. An open box will appear for you to insert the key combination you would like to use. You do this by using the key combination, not by typing it in the open box. The recommendations from the tutorial are to use the F keys in combination with either Ctrl or Alt for new shortcuts. I chose to use Alt + F1 for my new shortcut to Gaussian Blur. The other option is to look at the menus in PS and find a shortcut currently being used by another menu item that you never use. When you attempt to use that key combination for your new shortcut, PS will warn you that this shortcut is already in use and ask you if would you like to override it. You’ll notice that as soon as you make a change to or add a new shortcut that the Set becomes Modified. Here again you can choose to save the new modified Set, or revert back to the Default Set.
Workspaces
If you get annoyed each time you open PS because it has panels open that you don’t need and the ones you do need you have to go to the Window menu each time and reopen them, then you are probably using PS’s Default Workspace. You can customize what panels are open each time you start PS by saving a new workspace. Simply get all the panels set up the way you want them, including how they are arranged from top to bottom in the panel docking area. Then go to Window>Workspace>Save Workspace and give your workspace a name. You can select to save Panel Locations, Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus by using the check boxes.
If you wanted to you could set up a separate workspace to fit the different ways you use Photoshop.
Tool Presets
This part of the tutorial was the most exciting as far as I was concerned. They demonstrated a way to cut down on constantly having to adjust the settings on tools like brushes or the text tool. If you use a particular font at a consistent size and color, you can make a tool preset for that. Basically what you are doing is setting up a “style” for text that you use on a regular basis.
Here’s an example:
Set a brush size, opacity and flow for the Clone stamp. Then click on the drop down arrow on the tool icon in the options bar and click on the “create new tool preset” icon. Name the new preset accordingly and save.
These presets can also be accessed via the Window menu>Tool Presets. This will open a palette with the presets for the specific tool, or for all tools if you uncheck the “Current Tool” check box at the bottom of the panel.
To use your presets remember to first select the tool, select the preset from the drop down, then start using the tool.
Brushes and Shapes
Creating new brushes – make a new document in grayscale, best to use black image on a white background.
Defining a new shape – it’s best to start from a vector image (in Illustrator), making sure to convert any text to outlines. Also, any open areas should be created as cut-outs in Illustrator. Create the image, then copy and paste it into PS, selecting “shape layer” from the paste options, then go to Edit>Define Custom Shape and give it a name and save. Then to use the new shape, select it from your custom shape tool, select the new shape from the menu, and decide if you are going to use it as a shape layer, a path or fill pixels.
Swatches and Styles
Adding specific colors to your swatches palette is pretty simple. Use the eyedropper to select the color from an image, click on the Swatches panel and click on the “create new swatch” icon. This will add the color to your Swatches panel. You can double click on this new color and give it a name.
Create your own style – if you use a specific drop shadow and bevel on a lot of things you can set up a style for that in the Styles panel. Apply the specific styles to a layer, then go to the Styles panel and click on the “create new style” icon at the bottom of the Styles panel, give it a name and save it.
That pretty much sums up the tutorial. Hopefully you found some tips and tricks to help you speed up your Photoshop work. Happy PSing!
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4 Responses to “Photoshop Preferences & Settings – part 2”
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