One of the often overlooked features of Photoshop is the easily customizable GUI. If you’ve just been using the standard workspace, this simple how to will give you all you need to make your Photoshop workspace truly your own. Excel 2013 for a mac. Our task today is to create our own custom “workspace,” or a saved file with locations of panels, menus, and shortcuts.

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This allows pros to create multiple workflows depending on what kind of files they’re working on. Are they doing color corrections? Are they editing images for the web? Are they doing digital paintings? You might use entirely different panels depending on what you’re doing, so having multiple workspaces can save you a lot of time. Today, we’ll touch on how to customize a workspace for a more basic need—to make it easier for you to use Photoshop, and keep the panels close by that you use the most. Creating A Custom Workspace Out of the box, Photoshop for Windows should look something like this.

Creating a customized workspace is easy. Go to the top of the screen where you see “Essentials” (in CS5) and find the button. This drop down menu will allow you to create a new workspace, as shown. Name your custom workspace whatever suits you. If you want to name it “Photography,” or your first name, or Richard M. Nixon—it doesn’t much matter.

Make sure that “Keyboard Shortcuts” and “Menus” are clicked on if you want to save those to this workspace. ( Author’s Note: For beginners, this is recommended, as nearly all Photoshop howto articles are written using default keyboard shortcuts.

If you marry your workspace to any custom edits to these, you’ll always be able to switch back to “Essentials” and revert to the default shortcuts while keeping your custom ones stored safely away.) Your new workspace starts off with default panels. It’s pretty ho-hum. Take note that by default, these panels are snapped to the sides of the screen. Clicking and dragging on any of the elements will break them free of the snap, and allow you to move them wherever you want.

Don’t worry about saving your workspace as you edit, because Photoshop will track every panel as you move it. Simply click and drag any panel either from the top bar or by the name tab ( see above where it says color, swatches, styles, adjustments, masks, etc.) on the top of the panel. Depending on how you like to use the program, you can work with “free floating” panels or utilize the snap. Drag panels to the left and right sides of the screen. When you see this blue line, you can snap them back to the side, or install new ones. The snapped panels seems to be the way that Adobe is pushing users into.

Depending on your preferences, set up your panels to effectively use your screen’s real estate and compliment what you do in Photoshop. For instance, when you see a layout like this one, fix it—that huge column of layers is eating up way too much space. Drag a panel above a panel already snapped. If you see a blue box, you’ll add new tabs to an existing panel. If you see the blue line, you’ll add the whole panel in a new segment above the other panels in that column. If you work extensively with layers, channels and masks, these right side panels could be a good setup for you. Notice how the “Paths” panel has a tab behind “Layers.” Any panel can be added as a tab behind any other panel, if you wish.