1. Photoshop Essentials

WHEN YOU FIRST MOVE INTO A NEW HOME, it’s easy to find the basics, such as the kitchen and the shower. But you never quite feel at home until you’ve got all your stuff arranged just the way you like it: the TV in the best corner of the living room for watching movies, the kitchen utensils stored right where you’d reach for them when you cook, and the alarm clock at just the right position on the nightstand for when your arm swings over to crush the snooze button every morning.

Anyone who spends a lot of time in any software program typically starts treating it like a home, positioning windows, customizing controls, and otherwise tweaking its behavior. Each person uses Photoshop in a slightly different way, and combined with the fact that Photoshop is a very deep program, there is value in bringing forward the parts of the program that you most want to use so that the areas where you spend the most time are most easily accessible to you. This chapter is about personalizing Photoshop until you feel quite comfortable moving around in it.