Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [7]
OpenGL display performance
If the video card in your computer has OpenGL and you have ‘Enable OpenGL Drawing’ selected in the Photoshop Performance preferences, you can take advantage of the OpenGL features that Photoshop supports. For example, when OpenGL is enabled you will see smoother-looking images at all zoom display levels, plus you can temporarily zoom back out to fit to screen using the Bird's-Eye view (page 57), or use the rotate view tool to rotate the on-screen image display (see page 58).
Of course, not everyone has welcomed tabbed document opening. If you find this annoying you can always deselect the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option in the Interface preferences (circled in Figure 1.6). This allows you to revert to the old behavior where new documents are opened as floating windows. On the other hand you can have the best of both worlds by clicking on a tab and dragging it out from the docked zone. This action lets you convert a tabbed document to a floating window (as shown in Figure 1.7). Alternatively, you can right mouse-click on a tab to access the contextual menu where you can choose from various window command options such as ‘Move to a New Window’ or ‘Consolidate All to Here’. The latter gathers all floating windows and converts them into tabbed documents. You can also use the N-up display options (see Figure 1.10) to manage the windows.
Figure 1.6 The Photoshop Interface preferences.
Figure 1.7 This screen shot shows the two ways you can convert a tabbed document to a floating window, either by dragging a tab out from the tabbed windows zone, or by using the contextual menu.
New CS5 interface features
A number of things have been done to improve the overall user interface experience. The key changes are improved support for Windows 7 users. Those users who are working with a dual monitor setup will notice that new documents are opened on whichever display the current target document is on. Also, Mac OS X users will now see a ‘Reveal in Finder’ option in the document tab contextual menu for pre-existing (saved) images.
With Mac OS X, you can mix having tabbed document windows with a classic panel layout. If you disable the Application Frame mode (Figure 1.3) and use the Open Documents as Tabs preference or the Consolidate All to Here contextual menu command, you can have the open windows arranged as tabbed documents.
Switching between windows
The shortcut can be used to toggle between open window documents and you can use to reverse the order (note, the key is sometimes also referred to as the ∼ [tilde] key). In addition to this you can still use the shortcut to cycle through open documents and use to reverse cycle.
Managing document windows
Documents can also be tabbed into grouped document windows by dragging one window document across to another (see Figure 1.8). It is also possible to create a second window view of the image you are working on, where the open image is duplicated in a second window. For example, you can have one window with an image at a Fit to Screen view and the other zoomed in on a specific area. Any changes you make to the image can be viewed simultaneously in both windows (Figure 1.9). You can also vary the way multiple document windows are displayed on the screen. With floating windows you can Choose Window Arrange Cascade to have all the document windows cascade down from the upper left corner of the screen, or choose Window Arrange Tile to have them appear tiled edge to edge. For Tabbed document windows you can use the Document Layout menu to choose any of the ‘N-up’ options that are shown in Figure 1.10. This document layout method offers a much greater degree of control. It lets you choose from one of the many different layout options shown in Figure 1.10 and gives you access to the Match Zoom and Match