From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

A tour of the Photoshop interface - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

A tour of the Photoshop interface

“

Let's take a few moments to familiarize ourselves with the Photoshop interface. I'm gonna start in Bridge and double click to open up the Mesquite Dunes image in Photoshop. Now across the top, we have all of our different menu items and they are grouped together by topics such as layers or type or select. So if you're looking for something like a filter, be sure to check out that menu first. All of the tools are on the left-hand side in the toolbar. When you hover your cursor over a tool, you may see a rich tooltip. This is great when you're just starting out, but as you get more advanced, you might not want to see these, nor the smaller tooltips that appear as a little yellow sticky. So I'm going to choose the Photoshop menu and then settings. Now, depending on your operating system, it might say preferences. And if you're on Windows, it's going to be under the edit menu. And then I'll select tools. I'm going to disable both the show rich tooltips as well as show tool tips. Now, when we select a tool, we'll see the options for that tool in the options bar. Below the options bar, we can see a tab for the open document, and in the center is the image preview area. At the bottom of the window is the status bar. We can click on the chevron in order to select from a number of different options to be displayed. To the right of that, we see the Contextual Taskbar. Now, as we change tools and add different types of layers, the options on the Contextual Taskbar will change as it tries to help anticipate whatever tools we'll need next. For example, if I use the Marquee tool and drag a selection, we can see that it's repositioned and now I have different options to choose from. I'll go ahead and click on Deselect and it moves back to the bottom. If we want to reposition it, we can grab on the grabber handle and then drag and drop it wherever we want. We can also use the three dots or the more icon in order to reset the bar position to pin the bar in a certain location or to hide the bar. If we choose to hide the bar, we can always access it again under the window menu down at the bottom by selecting contextual taskbar. I imagine that over time, the Photoshop team will be adding additional options, so be sure to check out the taskbar to access to quick features. Now, on the right-hand side of the screen are several panels that have additional options for working with Photoshop. It's important to note that your screen might look different than mine because either you've rearranged the panels yourself or Photoshop has arranged the panels differently based on your screen resolution. We'll talk about hiding and showing and rearranging panels in depth in other videos. But for now, I'd like to suggest that you use the chevron in the upper right in order to select the Essentials workspace. And then if it still doesn't look the same, select it again and choose Reset Essentials. This way, we'll all be starting with a similar setup. In addition, there are a few small changes that we can make to the interface to help us get the most out of Photoshop environment. First of all, I like to maximize the application. So on the Mac, that means I would click on the little green icon in the upper left. On Windows, you'd click on the rectangular maximize icon in the upper right of the application. If I maximize my application and I need to switch to another application, I can always use the shortcut Command-Tab on Mac or Control-Tab on Windows to cycle through my open applications. Second, you can choose a lighter or darker color theme for Photoshop. I'll return to the Photoshop menu and then Settings or Preferences. Again, on Windows, this would be under the Edit menu and choose Interface. If you're working in Photoshop for hours at a time, it might be easier on your eye if you choose one of the darker color modes. But if you prefer one of the lighter ones, you can go ahead and choose from any of the four options. I like to change the highlight color as well from the default to blue. That means that when I select a layer, it's going to highlight in blue and it'll make it easier for me to see it. I'll also choose neutral color mode. That's just going to take the color out of icons such as this share button. You can also use the search bar within the preferences to search for any preference that you're looking for. All right, if I ever want to change the color that surrounds the image in the image preview area, we can right click or you can control click on Mac and then select from any of these options. So for example, if I wanted to see what this image would look like against a white background, I could choose select custom color and use the color picker in order to select a white. I'll zoom out once using the view menu and then zoom out so we can see that area in white a little bit larger. All right, I'm gonna right click again, control click on Mac, and then set it back to the default. If you know the tool or the command that you're looking for, but you don't know where to find it, you can try using Photoshop's discover panel. We can access this by either clicking on the magnifying glass, or we can choose the edit menu and then select search or use command F or control F on Windows. Let's say, for example, I was looking for my swatches. As I start typing it in, we can see that Photoshop tells me not only where the swatches panel is, but it will also show me options that are associated with colors and swatches. All right, let's go ahead and close that. Excellent, now that you're more familiar with Photoshop's interface, it will become much easier to find the tools and commands that you want to use.

Contents