Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [16]
The Options bar contents will vary according to which tool you have currently selected and you'll see several examples of the individual Options bar layouts in the rest of this chapter (a complete list of the Options bar views can be seen in the Photoshop CS5 for Photographers Help Guide on the DVD). Quite often you will see ‘tick’ and ‘cancel’ icons on the right-hand side of the Options bar and these are there so that you can OK or cancel a tool that is in a modal state. For example, if you were using the crop tool to define a crop boundary, you could use these buttons to accept or cancel the crop, although you may find it easier to use the key to OK and the key to cancel such tool operations. To reset a tool or all tools, right mouse down on the tool icon in the Options bar and choose ‘Reset Tool’ or ‘Reset All Tools’. As I mentioned earlier on page 20, you can use the shortcut to toggle hiding the panels only and keeping just the Tools panel and Options bar visible.
Tool Presets panel
Many of the Photoshop tools offer a wide range of tool options. In order to manage these settings more effectively, the Tool Presets panel can be used to store multiple saved tool settings, which can then also be accessed via the Options bar (Figure 1.38), or the Tool Presets panel (Figure 1.39).
Figure 1.38 Here is a view of the Options bar, where I had moused down on the arrow next to the Brush tool icon (circled) to reveal the Tool Presets menu.
With Tool Presets you can access any number of tool options very quickly and this can save you the bother of having to reconfigure the Options bar settings each time you choose a new tool. For example, you might find it useful to save crop tool presets for all the different image dimensions and pixel resolutions you typically use. Likewise, you might like to store pre-configured brush preset settings, rather than have to keep adjusting the brush shape and attributes. To save a new tool preset, click on the New Preset button at the bottom of the Tool Presets panel and to remove a preset, click on the Delete button that's next to it.
If you mouse down on the Tool Presets options button (circled in Figure 1.39), you can use the menu shown in Figure 1.40 to manage the various tools presets. In Figure 1.39 the ‘Current Tool Only’ option was deselected, which meant that all the tool presets could be accessed at once. This can be useful, because clicking on a preset simultaneously selects the tool and the preset at the same time. Most people though will find the Tool Presets panel is easier to manage when the ‘Current Tool Only’ option is checked.
Figure 1.39 The Tool Presets panel.
Figure 1.40 The Tool Presets options.
You can use the Tool Presets panel to save or load pre-saved tool preset settings. For example, if you create a set of custom presets, you can share these with other Photoshop users by choosing Save Tool Presets… This creates a saved set of settings for a particular tool. Another thing that may not be immediately apparent is the fact that you can also use tool presets to save type tool settings. This again can be useful, because you can save the font type, font size, type attributes and font color settings all within a single tool preset. This feature can be really handy if you are working on a Web or book design project.
One important thing to bear in mind here is that since there has been a major update to the Photoshop painting engine, any painting tool presets that are created in Photoshop CS5 will not be backward compatible with earlier versions of the program. Similarly, you won't be able to import and use any painting tool presets that were created in earlier versions of Photoshop either.
Selection tools
In Photoshop the usual editing conventions apply: pixels can be cut, copied or pasted and mistakes undone by using the Edit Undo command ( ), or by selecting a previous history state via the History panel. The keyboard shortcut can be used to hide an active selection, but note that on a Macintosh, the first time you use the keyboard shortcut, this