- Making Workspaces Work for You
- Setting Up Your Own Workspaces
- Changing Things Around
- Docking Palettes
- Other Factors Related to Workspace
- Wrap Up
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Setting Up Your Own Workspaces
Now that you understand the concepts of workspaces, let's see how to create your own personalized workspace environment.
When you first launch Photoshop, the default workspace settings for the palettes and windows are as shown in Figure 1.
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Figure
1 Default Photoshop interface before any customized workspaces have been
created. You can always return to this layout.
The Tools window is positioned on the left side of the screen, whereas four different palette groupings are positioned on the right side of the screen. To begin customizing your display with the palettes you want to have open (and where you want them open), simply move any window by dragging its title bar. You can even separate the default palette groupings if you want. To move a palette into another grouping or create a new grouping, click on the palette tab and drag it into another group or place it in an open area to form a new palette group (see Figure 2).
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Figure
2 Customizing new palette windows allows you to group frequently used
palettes into one common window.
To close a palette group, click on the x in the title bar. To open a closed palette group, select the desired palette name from the Window menu (see Figure 3). The items with the check marks next to them indicate the open active palettes.
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Figure
3 The Window menu displays a list of all palettes. Check marks indicate
which palettes are currently open.
Once you have determined which palettes you want open (and which ones closed), you then want to save your workspace. To save a workspace, select Window, Workspace, Save Workspace with everything in the desired position. A dialog box appears and asks you to name this workspace. Give it a name that describes what this workspace will be used for, who will be using it, or how you intend to use it. Descriptive names work much better than using a naming structure such as "Workspace 1," or "Workspace 2." Instead, using my earlier example, implement a naming convention that helps you easily identify the workspace, such as "Masking" and "Color Correction." Continue to create and save workspaces as desired. To switch between workspaces at any point, simply select the name of any saved workspace you want to use.