Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [6]
Figure 1.1 The Photoshop for Photographers Help Guide is on the DVD at the back of the book. You can click on one of the main tabs to select a topic, such as the Tools and Panels section shown here, where you can find out more about a particular tool or panel.
Photoshop installation
Installing Photoshop is as easy as installing any other application on your computer, but do make sure that your web browser and any other Adobe programs are closed prior to running the installation setup. After entering your serial number details, you will be asked to enter your Adobe ID or create a new Adobe ID account. This has to be done first in order to activate Photoshop. The reason for this is to limit unauthorized distribution of the program. Basically, the standard license entitles you to install Photoshop on up to two computers, such as a desktop and a laptop.
Adobe Photoshop activation limits
You can install Photoshop on any number of computers, but only a maximum of two installations can be active at any one time. To run Photoshop on more computers than this requires a deactivation and reactivation only rather than a complete uninstall and reinstall. There are added benefits to registering your product, as this entitles you to various reward goodies.
Figure 1.2.
The Photoshop installer procedure is identical on both Mac and PC systems. As you run through the installation process you will be asked to register the program by entering your Adobe ID or create a new Adobe ID account.
The Photoshop interface
The Photoshop CS5 interface shares the same design features as all the other CS5 creative suite programs. Because there is now a greater level of interface design consistency between all the programs that make up the Creative Suite, this makes it easier to migrate from working in one CS5 program to another. You can also work with the Photoshop program as a single application window on both the Mac and PC platforms (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). This arrangement is more in keeping with the interface conventions for Windows, plus you also have the ability to open and work with Photoshop image documents as tabbed windows.
Macintosh default workspace
The Macintosh default workspace setting uses a classic layout where the panels appear floating on the desktop. If you go to the Window menu and select ‘Application Frame’, you can switch to the Application window layout shown in Figure 1.3.
The Photoshop panels are held in placement zones with the Tools panel normally located on the left, the Options bar and Application bar running across the top and the other panels arranged on the right, where they can be docked in various ways to economize on the amount of screen space that's used yet still remain easily accessible. This default arrangement presents the panels in a docked mode, but over the following few pages we shall look at ways you can customize the Photoshop interface layout. For example, you can reduce the amount of space that's taken up by the panels by collapsing them into compact panel icons (see Figure 1.21).
Tabbed document windows
Let's start by looking at the way document windows can be managed in Photoshop. The default preference setting forces all new documents to open as tabbed windows, where new image document windows appear nested in the tabbed document zone, just below the Options bar. In Figure 1.5 I have emphasized the tabbed document zone, where you can see there are currently four image documents open. This approach to managing image documents can make it easier to locate a specific image when you have several image documents open at once. This is because you can now select an open image by clicking on the relevant tab. Previously you often had to click and drag on the document title bars to move the various image windows out the way until you had located the image document you were after.
Figure 1.5 The default Photoshop