How we can customize the workspace how we can learn about the workspace in photoshop essentially understand the anatomy and some of the terminology around photoshop now everything i'm going to show you is the same for both the pc and the mac so no need to worry there if you're on a different operating system than me okay so currently i'm looking at the workspace called the essentials workspace now let's go ahead and take a look how we can identify what that is and how we can also change that so if you'll notice over here in the far far.
Upper left i have this little drop down menu this little drop down menu tells me that i'm in the essentials workspace so if you're not currently you can go ahead and change that and then go ahead and click on reset essentials and then i'm back to that so let's go ahead and just start cracking away and making some changes to this to make it look a little bit more user-friendly for us all right so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to click on this little guy way up here to make my tools panel two columns you're going to see that's.
Going to be a lot easier to read you're going to see that photoshop also sections things out in a little more intuitive way when you have it in two columns it's going to be the first change i'm going to make the next change i'm going to make has to do with which panels do i want right my colors panel i have my swatches right i got all these things here right i got channels i got paths all these things here some of these i don't want so very simply all we do is right click on the panel we do not want choose close.
Right click patterns close not working with channels right now not working with paths right click now you will notice that when you right click you get other options as well like you can minimize well that's kind of nice right so layers now gets minimized so i can right click and i can go ahead and expand it that's kind of nice also note that i can move these panels around just the same so if i want layers just kind of floating here i can absolutely do that just a very simple click and drag and there we go i can.
Also expand this out to make it taller to make it shorter i can even make it wider very kind of delicate there there you go just make sure you find that little double sided arrow and you're good to go now you're also going to see some times where there are panels that you want to use that are not shown here so all of our panels live in one particular place and that is the window menu and again this is the same thing for if you're on a pc or if you're on a mac so if i click.
On window you'll see in alphabetical order i have all of the panels available to me so for example if i want to bring out my character panel i click on that and then notice that the character panel appears along with the paragraph panel as a little bonus and then you'll notice that a new column now appears for all of your other additional panels if you'd like to bring them in so i'm just going to go ahead and collapse that you'll notice i can very easily access it expand it.
And collapse it very nice and of course i can drag that out just like i did with my layers panel another nice little pro tip is if you double click on the layer name excuse me on the panel name you can see very good if you double click on that comes right up expand collapse expand collapse you'll also notice that there's a little x there if you want as well now if i want to move this back to where it was you'll see i have a few different options here keep an eye on the blue halo as soon as i sort of touch ground.
Here you'll notice that when i move to here i get a little blue halo little blue halo little blue halo wherever that blue halo is is where this panel is going to live i'm going to drag mine way down to the bottom and you're going to see a tiny little blue halo way in the bottom and lo and behold that is where my panel lives right there at the bottom so i love exactly what i've done here okay i love this i'm going to keep this all set up and i want to save this as my own so what i'm going to do is click on the little drop down where i started from.
And i'm going to choose new workspace right click on that and you're gonna see here i can name it okay i'm gonna say dave's faves wonderful and then just click on these boxes to make sure it's basically freezing everything this is the workspace i want i'm overriding the essentials so i click on save and now when i click on the dropdown again you will see there's dave's faves wonderful and then anytime i mess anything up right i go a little bit crazy let's say i delete some things i can always come back to that that's.
What's so great about this i like to call this kind of like the mary poppins effect which just sort of like cleans up your mess right let me just go ahead and make this even more messy so you kind of get the effect okay wow what a disaster mad man at work i click on the drop down and then all i'm going to do now is say reset dave's faves and then i'm back okay and now that i am done customizing my workspace i recommend getting yours to look like mine creating your own workspace.
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And naming it accordingly in this next lesson we're going to learn
About some of the basics of understanding what some of our panels do but also we can get our hands dirty with resizing some of our photos moving them around rotating essentially kind of creating something like this and how this is more or less done so first thing we want to identify is on the left hand side we have our tools all right and we're going to be working.With this initial tool called the move tool so let's go ahead and activate that if it's not activated already and i want to make sure that you have both the show transform tools box and the auto select box selected for some of you may look a little different it might look like icons just make sure that they're selected why are we doing this if i click on that i want to actually see the show transform tools i want to be able to auto select the layer earlier we talked about the layers panel here is my layers panel you can see when.
I click on it my layers then act accordingly very important because it'll kind of keep you in the dark otherwise okay and by default these are not activated so let's make sure that those are in fact selected so i'm also going to drag out my layers panel like i showed you in the earlier lesson so that way i can have easier access to it if necessary now in my layers panel this will be our first introduction to the layers panel you will see that i have some names for my layers panel and.
Notice i also have the ordering of things it's going to become very important as we move throughout this class so let's work on our first lesson of resizing and also rotating some of our items that we have here on our canvas so when i click on this you'll notice how i get a little bounding box you'll also notice that i have my tools up on top here as well all my different individual controls that's not there if you click on window you'll see that i have this options.
Option that comes and goes right as i click on that so i'm going to bring that back fantastic okay so if yours is not there you can always go to window just like i said that's where all of your panels live fantastic so now i see that there and when i click and drag on this corner i'll be able to resize that accordingly but notice when i kind of do this or i kind of do that not so great so what i'm going to do is either click on this little circle slash to reset it also notice there's a little tool tip that pops up it says oh i can also hit escape.
In parentheses that's what i'm going to do and that sets us right back so what a good rule of thumb for you to do is is if you hold down the shift key as you click and drag it keeps it in proportion it constrains your proportions as you click and drag on the corners you can sometimes do the sides if you want to but that will stretch it out or make it a little bit too narrow so just keep that in mind okay also notice that as the name implies with the move tool i can move this wherever i want because it's its.
Own individual layer that's essentially how photoshop works so i can move this around independent of this and i could just basically shuffle these around accordingly no problem okay but now let's say i wanted to rotate these in a different way if you'll notice here on the outside i'm gonna move my mouse away from the double-sided arrow and i'm gonna come over here i'm gonna get this kind of little button hook see that just go ahead and click and drag and then it'll move accordingly.
And then when i'm done transforming very important here you have to tell photoshop that you're done transforming this is known as transformation so right now if i try to do something everything gets grayed out like a lot of things get grayed out as a result i have to tell photoshop that i'm done doing what i'm doing earlier we discussed how we can work with the little circle slash to tell it no thanks i don't commit connected to that is this little check mark to say yes i do commit so i have.
Two options here i can click on the check box or i can hit enter on my keyboard so i'm going to go ahead and click on the check box for now and then i've committed to that and that's done official so i click on this i'm going to go ahead now and rotate that one no problem this time i'm going to hit the enter key and that is committed it's that easy now that we've seen how we can manipulate something that already exists.
Let's learn how we can create this from scratch so how is that done
Like a lot of other programs we start with the file menu and we just choose new and you'll also notice we have control and if you're on a mac it's going to be command n so i'm going to go ahead and click on that and i'm gonna essentially teach you how we can create the same thing that we see here on this screen so this is what it looks like when you are creating a brand new document in photoshop so essentially they give you a number of.Different options on top right some preset templates if you want to if you're working on photos right they give you a whole bunch of different templates prints different templates arden illustration and you can see that not only they're giving you different dimensions but they're also giving you places to start with right kind of nice if you're doing like a web layout etc what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go ahead and create my own and i'm going to show you how you can even create your own saved layout as well.
Okay so i'm going to go ahead over here on the right hand side and decide what i'm going to put in which is going to be an 11 inches by 8 and a half inches document and it's going to be landscape so you'll notice here i can change the orientation and then my resolution this is going to be very important resolution is basically how vivid is this going to be how rich is this going to be are you going to be printing it or you can be putting it on the web typically if.
You're going to be printing it you want to be at least 300 ppi if you're going to be putting it on the web you can settle at 72 ppi okay typically you don't want it to be too high if you're going to be putting on the web essentially for load times you'll also notice down below i have my color mode option i have rgb and i have my cmyk those are going to be the two ones we're going to be focusing on this stands for red green and blue color and that's typically going to be for the web because that's how your.
Screen reads your images cmyk is typically going to be for print which stands for cyan magenta yellow and black so it really all depends because your printer like literally the printing machine itself can only read these colors so it's very important that we understand what are we generating the document for and over here we have our 8 bit and our 16-bit and if we go over here to rgb it'll say 18-bit 16-bit 32-bit just.
Really depends on how many colors you're expecting each of your documents to have like 16 000 colors 28 000 colors and if you're going to go up to 32-bit that's going to be an hdr document so let's just go ahead and make our 16-bit and what is going to be the background of your document as you create it you can actually make it black white you can set all these things up ahead of time if you'd like i'm just going to keep mine at transparent okay and we're just going to keep this for right now and then i'm going to also click on this little guy right here what is this one.
About this is going to allow me to save this as a preset so therefore i don't have to do this anymore okay i don't have to set all these things up so now when i click on that i'm going to be able to save this as a preset i'll just go ahead and say 11 by eight and a half landscape all right and then i'll just say 72 ppi fantastic click on save preset and now look under saved i will see there that is and anytime i want to use.
It i'll be able to come back to here and won't have to reset all these things okay so i'm going to go ahead and click create and now i have a blank document all ready to go great now let's start building out our document now that we have this all set up you will see i have an empty layers panel great but you'll also notice that all my panels have remained the same it's great it's exactly how i want it so our first lesson when we're bringing in things from the outside is going to be placing placing not pasting not.
Importing photoshop and a lot of other adobe programs refers to this as placing so placing essentially means we're bringing in some items from the outside in this case the item we're bringing in is going to be one of those images right of the ram and of the iceberg etc so i click on file you'll see here i have two options either to place embedded or to place linked when you're placing links essentially implies that there might be some changes happening to that file and.
You want to kind of have that linked up essentially so if i'm working with a co-worker and they're making some changes it automatically gets updated here on my file we're just going to do place embedded so it's just going to be static right here inside of this document so i click on that and i'm going to go to my files okay and i'm going to go over here to all my little friends here i'm going to bring in the big iceberg i simply just click on that.
And that's going to come in and again you'll notice i have my little bounding box which is great i also have my little circle slash and i also have my little check mark there okay and i'm just going to go ahead and resize that however i want to holding down my shift key and rotating accordingly and then i'm going to hit enter when i'm done so i'm going to very quickly do the other two place embedded bring in my ram.
Hold down my shift key constraining the proportions hit enter don't forget that hitting enter part very important you'll learn that fast enough anyway and then let's go to our medium iceberg and just bring that down holding down my shift key great and then this time i'll just hit the check mark in case that's your fancy great now now that i have these.
Let's see what we can do about some initial layer management okay you'll see that it takes in the name of the actual document that i started with okay that's great so maybe i don't necessarily want that exact same thing so i can just simply double click on that and then i will just say instead this is going to be iceberg one okay and this is going to be.
Iceberg two okay very easily just simply double click all right and there we go okay so i'm gonna go ahead and pause the video and i'm going to have you catch up and do all the things that we did in terms of placing resizing rotating etc okay we'll come back to you and good luck welcome back everyone so in this document you will notice that.
Around all of our images we have these little checkerboards here these checkerboards indicate what tells me that my image is transparent so if i were to bring in this image and save this transparency and i would bring it into let's say a powerpoint document it would just kind of float with whatever that powerpoint documents background is so would not come in with its own background it would just kind of float there kind of nice so we're going to learn a little bit of how we can either change the background to make it our own but then when we save our.
Document how we can retain this transparency now what we need to do first is discuss a little bit about the layers panel okay so right now i have my layers panel over here on the right hand side you'll see this whole thing is my layers panel and we have a number of different icons down below we also have this little guy over here right and earlier we discussed that little guy right there okay and of course here is the name of the panel okay now each of these things has a.
Purpose and you'll also notice that other panels also have kind of some similar things like a little flyout menu and things like that once we bring it out you'll see more options here and as we go throughout this course we will be discovering much much more detail than what we're going to discover right now earlier we looked at how we can rename each of our layers fantastic that's great okay we'll also see that in this panel we'll be able to see a bunch of other things that's going to allow us to have controls of our panels.
What we're going to look at right now is how we can adjust this background here you'll notice that currently again it is transparent so what can i do to add on a colored background you'll notice this little guy right here this little black and white cookie when you click on that you're going to see a lot of options and again this is going to be for some more advanced features when we get into our adjustment layers we're going to see all those what we're concerned with right now is just adding on a solid color okay when you move your.
Mouse over you will see it is called an adjustment layer so the adjustment we're making is going to be a solid color i click on that and then i can just go ahead and choose whatever color i like we're going to get a lot into colors later on just do this nice pretty aqua blue color i click ok and then oops everything gets covered why is it getting covered because this is the top layer so very simply i want to bring it down to the bottom so all i need to do is just click and drag that down and just notice follow the.
Blue lines there i let go and voila there you go now this is behind everything else great and i can go ahead and just double click on this to rename this i'll just say blue bg and i hit enter that's great wonderful okay so i love this i love this exactly as it is so i'm going to save this if you see my tab here this now has an untitled photoshop file here uh-oh i.
Don't want that so i want to be able to save this when i save it it's a good idea to save it not only as like your output what if it's going to be a jpeg or a png or a tiff or a pdf but you also want to always save it as your working file meaning my photoshop file so very important that's going to be the first thing i'm going to do so i'm going to go ahead and click on file i'm going to choose save as and you'll notice here my save as type is going to be psd okay that's great all right so i'm.
Just gonna say rams on parade okay great and that's gonna be my psd file i'm gonna go ahead and click save now why did i do that i want to have a working file because this is going to retain all this layers okay very important because i want to be able to make changes to this so as an example i can come back now i can say listen you know what i want this to be on top and because i'm working in my photoshop file i can now move this above my ram and now notice.
What it does so we're getting a nice little bonus layers lesson here on top of all that okay and you'll be able to practice all this in your practice time all right so that's a photoshop file let's now practice saving it as another file type so i click on file save as and you will see here in this drop down i have lots and lots of options to work with all right we're going to focus on two main ones one is going to be my jpeg.
And the other one is going to be my png now when do we use one versus the other let's start with the png option png typically is going to be for when you are working with transparencies like earlier we talked about before we had our blue background i want to retain that transparency but yet still have high resolution i would do png if i don't really care about that because i don't have a transparency that i'm working with i can just work with a jpeg right which is fine which is great and that's essentially what i'm going to.
Do now and then notice that save as jpeg i click on save and what jpeg gives you the benefit of is being able to compress your file because maybe you're concerned about file size okay whereas png gives you a little bit of sort of gradation jpeg gives you quite a bit to be able to really compress it on different levels here okay so if i want to bring this down a little bit more bring it up a little bit more absolutely i can do that.
And i click ok and now it's going to be a little smaller file size than it would be if it was 12. okay so go ahead and practice that we'll pause the video for a little bit and we'll come back and lastly within our layers panel i want to talk a little bit of how we can delete layers and then also some additional things that we're going to be discovering later on so deleting pretty simple so let me go ahead and just open up my group here and i click on this and.
Then notice here i can delete with the trash can okay you'll also notice that right clicking goes a long way lots and lots of options here here is delete layer i can duplicate layer lots of things here we're going to get into rasterizing layers later on and some of the things we've already done in terms of grouping and everything are already here okay so if i want to delete this i'm just going to go simply click on my little trash can and that goes away great fantastic but i'm going to undo that by simply clicking on edit and then notice here is undo and then here is.
Also ctrl z or command z on the mac so that comes right back also a very good tool to know about okay so deleting is pretty simple and also again right clicking for lots of additional options and then don't forget to undo when you make a mistake all right we'll see in the next lesson now keeping in line with this same image and document let's imagine a scenario where we'd like to manipulate the canvas a little bit.
Meaning maybe i want a little more space on the outside around it or maybe i want to crop it so what can i do here let me just first of all bring up the ruler okay we're currently working without a ruler the ruler is very important to have open just so we can have some context of where we are how big our document is where things are so we can have some sort of specificity and sort of exactitude so how do we do that let's go to the view menu and we're going to go to rulers and then bam pops right up you'll also notice the keyboard shortcut is just.