From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

Arranging the panels you use most often - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

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Arranging the panels you use most often

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Because Photoshop is so many things to so many different people, it has a tremendous number of options. For example, look at the number of panels that are showing by default, and this is not nearly all of them. Now, Photoshop does display panels a bit differently based on screen resolution, so you might be seeing a slightly different configuration by default. If your panel layout is different, or if you've rearranged all of your panels, then you might want to choose Essentials from the list, and then choose Reset Essentials so that we're all starting at the same place. Now, to see a whole list view of all of the panels, we can go under the Window menu, and the ones with the check marks are the ones that are on top of any stacked or nested panels. For example, the Color panel has a check, and it is on top of this nesting of panels. Swatches is below it, but if I were to choose swatches from this list, then it would have the check mark and it would be moved to the top. If you were to select a panel such as the character panel, well, it will appear within this second column of panels and some panels are automatically nested with others like the character and the paragraph panel. We can use these two chevrons in order to collapse this and if we want to expand the entire column, we can use the chevron at the top. All right, let's click that again in order to hide it. If we want to see the icon plus the name of the panel, we can drag out on the edge of the panel. Or if we're happy with just seeing the icon, we can go ahead and drag that back. Now, in order to rearrange a panel within a group, we just need to click on the tab for the panel and then we can drag it left or right in order to reorder it. If I want to move a panel from one group to another, then we can select that panel and drag and drop it. When we see the other nesting of panels with a blue highlight all the way around it, well, then I know that when I release my cursor, it will drop that into that grouping. If I want to create a new grouping, then I can select a panel and drag it in between two groups. And when I see the single horizontal line, I can drop it and it will create its own group. I can double click on the name of any panel in order to minimize that panel, and I can click it again in order to expand it. If we need to, we can add more columns. I can drag this over to the left of that second column. When I see the blue vertical line, I can release my cursor, and now we have a third column of panels. We can also undock our panels by just dragging them away from the others. Now they're floating, and this can be very handy if you want to drag them, for example, to a secondary monitor. You can even dock panels to the toolbar on the left-hand side of the screen. Now to close a panel, we can right-click or control-click on Mac and close a panel. We can also right-click or control-click on an entire group of panels and choose to close the entire tab group. And if we want to temporarily hide our panels, we can just tap the Tab key. Now that will hide the tools and the panels. Tapping Tab again will bring them back. If we want the tools to remain visible and only hide the panels, then we'll add the Shift key. So Shift-Tab will hide, Shift-Tab again will bring them back. All right, I'm going to move to Bridge and open up this document. because I want to point out that one of the panels is a bit different, and that's the Properties panel. Now it's going to change its contents based on the tool and the layer that's selected, very similar to the contextual taskbar. For example, when we look at the Layers panel, we have a certain number of options in the Properties panel. When I convert this background into a layer, then we'll see different options. Similarly, if we add type or a shape layer, we'll get different options in the properties panel based on that tool or that layer being selected. Now, as you become more experienced in Photoshop, you'll find that you'll use different groups of panels for performing different tasks. And it might be helpful to customize the way that your panels are laid out and save them. If you want to look at some other ways that panels are laid out, we can use the menu here. For example, if you were doing graphic and web work, well, then it might be handy to show all of your type and library panels. Likewise, if you're doing photography, it might be helpful to have access to the histogram and to your adjustment layers. For now, I'm going to choose core tools, and then I'm going to hide or close my adjustments, as well as my history, so that all I have are my properties and my layers. If I wanted to save this as a workspace, we could click on the icon and choose new workspace. I'll call this JK simple and I only want to save the panels for now. So I'll leave these unchecked, choose save. And now if I select a different layout, for example, painting, and then I want to quickly return to my set of panels, I can just select that from the list. All right. For now, so that we're all working with the same setup, I will return to Essentials, and then I'll choose to reset the essentials. However, throughout this course, I'm going to be hiding many of the panels so that we can focus on the ones that are more relevant to the features that we're discussing. All right, I'll use Command or Control W to close this file, and I don't need to save it. Excellent, that's how easy it is to customize the panels that you use most often in Photoshop. you

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