Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [55]
Photoshop allows you to create custom menu settings and use colors to highlight favorite items, but this particular feature can be disabled by unchecking the ‘Show Menu Colors’ option. When ‘Show Tool Tips’ is checked a tool tips box will appear for a few seconds after you roll over various items in the Photoshop interface. Tool tips are an excellent learning tool, but they can become irritating after a while, so you can use this checkbox to turn them on or off as desired. The ‘Enable Gestures’ option is relevant to some laptop users, where the trackpad can be set to respond to specific finger gestures. This can be both a good or a bad thing: some users have found it rather distracting when carrying out Photoshop work and prefer to switch this option off.
In the Panels & Documents section, the ‘Auto-Collapse Iconic Panels’ option allows you to open panels from icon mode and auto-collapse them back to icon mode again as soon as you start editing an image, while ‘Auto-Show Hidden Panels’ reveals hidden panels on rollover.
When the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option is checked, new documents will always open as tabbed documents, docked to a single document window in the Photoshop workspace. Uncheck this if you wish to restore the previous Photoshop document opening behavior. When the ‘Enable Floating Document Window Docking’ option is checked, this allows you to drag one window to another as a tabbed document (see page 12).
The UI in the ‘UI Text Options’ stands for ‘user interface’ and these settings allow you to choose an alternative UI language (if available) and UI text size. The default setting is ‘Small’, which most users will find plenty big enough (especially now the panel headers kind of scream at you with the all caps lettering). For those fortunate to have very large, high resolution displays it can be helpful to increase the UI text size (see sidebar).
File Handling preferences
In the File Handling preferences (Figure 2.15) you will normally want to include image previews when you save a file. It is certainly useful to have image thumbnail previews that are viewable in the system dialog boxes, although the Bridge program is capable of generating large thumbnails regardless of whether a preview is present or not. You can also choose to save a Windows and Macintosh thumbnail with your file to enable better cross-platform compatibility. Appending a file with a file extension is handy for knowing which format a document was saved in and is absolutely necessary when saving JPEG and GIF web graphics that need to be recognized in an HTML page. If you are exporting for the Web, you may want to check the ‘Use Lower Case’ option for appending files. However, instances of where servers trip up on upper case naming are fairly rare these days. The ‘Save As to Original Folder’ option is useful if you want this to be the default option. It makes sure that you are always able to save new versions of an image to the same folder that the original file came from. If this option is left unchecked, Photoshop shows you the last used folder location when you choose File Save As…
Economical Web saves
There are times though when you don't need previews. Web graphic files should be uploaded as small as possible without a thumbnail or platform-specific header information. If you use ‘Save for Web & Devices’, this removes the previews and keeps the output files compact in size.
Version Cue and enable Adobe Drive
Adobe Version Cue® is a workgroup file management option that is included with the Creative Suite. Version Cue caters for those working in a networked environment, where two or more operators have shared network access to files that they will be working on using different programs within the Creative Suite.