Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [30]
Full screen view mode
The Full screen mode with menu bar and Full Screen modes are usually the best view modes for concentrated retouching work. These allow full movement of the image, not limited by the edges of the document bounds. In other words, you can scroll the image to have a corner centered in the screen and edit things like path points outside the bounds of the document. Also note that the key can be used to cycle between screen modes and to cycle backwards.
Preset Manager
The Preset Manager lets you manage all your presets from within the one dialog. The Preset Manager can keep track of: Brushes, Swatches, Gradients, Styles, Patterns, Layer effect contours and Custom shapes. For example, Figure 1.79 shows how you can use the Preset Manager to edit a current set of Tool presets. You can append or replace an existing set of presets via the ‘Preset Manager’ options, and the Preset Manager can also be customized to display the preset information in different ways, such as in the Figure 1.80 example, where I used a Large List to display large thumbnails of all the currently loaded Gradients presets.
Figure 1.79 You can use the Photoshop Preset Manager to load custom settings or replace them with one of the pre-supplied defaults. Presets include: Brushes, Swatches, Gradients, Styles, Patterns, Contours, Custom Shapes and Tools.
Figure 1.80 Apart from being able to load and replace presets, you are able to choose how the presets are displayed. In the case of Gradients, it is useful to be able to see a thumbnail preview alongside the name of the gradient.
Saving presets as Sets
As you create and add your own custom preset settings, you can manage these via the Preset Manager. For example, this means that you can select a group of presets and click on the Save Set… button to save these as a new group of presets. The thing to be aware of here is that tool preset settings can easily get deleted when you update or reinstall Photoshop. So by saving out custom-edited sets of Brush or Tool presets settings, it is then easy to reload these later as you need them.
Loading presets
If you double-click any Photoshop setting that is outside the Photoshop folder, this automatically loads the Photoshop program and appends the preset to the relevant section in the Preset Manager.
History
The History feature was first introduced in Photoshop 5.0 and back then it was considered a real breakthrough feature. This was because, for the first time, Photoshop was able to offer multiple undos during a single Photoshop editing session. History can play a really important role in the way you use Photoshop, so I thought this would be the best place to describe this feature in more detail and explain how history can help you use Photoshop more efficiently.
As you work on an image, Photoshop is able to record a history of the various image states as steps, which can be viewed in the History panel (Figure 1.81). If you want to reverse a step, you can still use the conventional Edit Undo command ( ), but if you visit the History panel, you can go back as many stages in the edit process as you have saved history steps. History steps can also be saved as Snapshots, which temporarily prevents them from slipping off the end of the list and becoming deleted as more history steps are created. One can therefore look at history as a multiple undo feature in which you can reverse through up to 1000 image states. However, it is actually a far more sophisticated tool than just that. For example, there is a ‘non-linear history’ option for multiple history path recording (see the History Options dialog in Figure 1.82) and a history source column that allows you to select a history state to sample from when working with the history brush. Painting from history can save you from tedious workarounds like having to create more layers than are really necessary in order