Lightroom Preferences - Saving Documents
Lesson 6 from: Introduction To Adobe PhotoshopBen Willmore
Lightroom Preferences - Saving Documents
Lesson 6 from: Introduction To Adobe PhotoshopBen Willmore
Lesson Info
6. Lightroom Preferences - Saving Documents
Lessons
Lesson Info
Lightroom Preferences - Saving Documents
Now let's talk about navigating your document itself. We're going to end up needing to zoom in on our image and move around. There are many different tools for doing that, one of which would be the zoom tool. Looks like a little magnifying glass, with it I can click on my image and each time I click I zoom up. I never use that tool because you need a zoom up on your image so frequently that I really don't want to have to move my mouse to the left side of my screen. So instead under the window menu, actually the view menu, there's the choice of zoom in and zoom out and I get used to these keyboard shortcuts, Command plus and Command minus. So I'm going to do that right now. Command minus to zoom out, Command plus to zoom in. There's another special keyboard shortcut and it's right next to those plus and minus keys and that is zero. Command zero, was going to fit in window, so I can see the entire image filling the screen. Those are the ones I get used to. Now in windows that would be ho...
lding on the Control key control plus and minus to zoom in and out and control zero to fit on screen. Once you've zoomed up, you could use the hand tool on the left side of your screen to move around, but you need to do that so often. I'd rather have you get used to keyboard shortcuts and in this case the keyboard shortcut is just pressing and holding the space bar with a space bar held down. We can scroll around and easily navigate our document. All right, then the only other things really need to know right now is anytime you use a painting tool, you're always going to be painting with your foreground color. So on the left side of my screen here are two colors overlapping each other in that top color is my foreground color. If you click on it, you're going to get a color picker, which looks like this and it choose a color, click anywhere in this vertical bar. So if you want blue click on blue, if you want yellow, click down here and then drag around in the big square area to choose a shade of that color, either a really vivid one or a dark one, whatever you'd like. When you're done click okay. You can see your foregone color in the left side of your screen and that's going to be used by all your painting tools and will be used by many other features like if you want to fill, or use a certain filters in Photoshop, certain filters will end up accessing that as well. All right, then let's quickly go to our preferences 'cause there's just a few preferences I'd like to tweak. There are a lot of preferences in Photoshop. We're going to ignore the vast majority of them and let's just look at the ones I considered to be the most important. In order to do that by starting out in the section called interface. As you can see there's a whole bunch of categories on the left side of my screen for preferences and then here are the settings in under interface. First off, there is a color theme. If you like the interface in Photoshop to very dark so it matches other night kind of themed programs, you can do that, or if you prefer it to be very bright, you can change it here. You also, if you find that your eyes aren't that great, you need reading glasses all the time. Then in here there's a choice called UI Font size. That means user interface, font size. You can make the text that shows up in panels larger, but this is only going to affect it after you restart Photoshop. You can also have it scale some of the other interface up along with the font by turning on this checkbox. Then if we go under workspace, there are a couple settings to be aware of. There's one here called large Tabs, which defaults is being turned on. That makes it so the Tabs that make up the interface in Photoshop are easy to tap on with your finger. If you have a tablet. I don't have a tablet so I turn that off and therefore my screen will be more efficient. If you don't like Tabs in general where if you open more than one document, it shows up as separate Tabs. You can turn off this check box and also the one below it, but I like Tabs, so I leave that turned on. Then if we come down here to the section called tools, we have a few choices. I like to have one turned on called over scroll which will allow me to scroll my document so it doesn't have to stay too centered within my view. And then there's another one about rich tool tips that I turn off. If you end up seeing me mouse over things like the paintbrush tool, and you saw a large colorful tip appear, that's going to cause those to no longer show up. So that's under tools. Let's go down then, to file handling. in under file handling. There's a choice here to ask before saving layered TIF files. I save all my layered files into file format and so I don't want it to ask me every time, so I'm going to turn that off. And then one other setting here, maximize compatibility. I should have asked me or always do it. I want to choose always. What does that do? Well, if you happen to use Adobe Lightroom, or any other program that doesn't understand what layers are, that will save a version of your picture that doesn't contain any layers, so those other programs like Lightroom, can still display your picture. It does it in one file though, but if you don't have that turned on, then other programs that can't understand what layers are won't be able to show that picture. Click OK. Those are the general preferences that I think are most important. Then finally, when you're done working on a picture, you go to the file menu. If you've already saved the image once, just choose save and that means save it in the same file format, in the same location and just update the file with any changes you've made. If you've never saved the image before or you want to create a secondary version of the file, like in a different file format, you can choose save as, and when you first do this, in the newer versions of Photoshop, this will come up because you can now save your documents in two different locations. One is on your computer's hard drive and the other is on Adobe servers as part of your creative cloud account. So here I could choose save to cloud documents if I use that. Then when I save my images there, they're stored on the internet and if I have more than one computer, that uses the same Adobe ID, I'd be able to access those images from all the computers that use the same Adobe ID or I can save to my local computer, which is what I'm going to do here. I'm going to turn on the don't show again, checkbox and then say save to my computer. When this comes up, you're going to find a button right over here. It says save to cloud documents in. That's where it would send me to a different screen to save. To the internet, to Adobe servers instead of saving on my local hard drive and if I did that there'd be another button to send me right back to here, where I can save on my local computer. Then here is where I choose the file format I'm gonna use and I have a separate bonus video. If you purchase the class that describes the file formats to give you a better idea of which ones to use for now, I'm just going to tell you in general what I use. If my image contains layers and I know we haven't talked about layers yet, but we will have a separate session on that. Then I'm going to use either Photoshop file format or TIF. They have both the exact same quality so you could flip a coin to choose between the two. I personally use TIF because it has a larger maximum file size, so if you ever work with huge images, sometimes you'll run into the limit of what Photoshop can handle, so I use TIF. If on the other hand you're going to deliver a picture to someone else, then I would use JPEG. If it's a photograph, and I would use, if I can find it in here, P N G if it is a graphic, like a logo or some text, and then we can save our images. But that should give you a general overview of how to think about the interface of Photoshop.
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Ratings and Reviews
Pierre-Marie OUDOT
I really enjoy to get this update of the PS course. If we still have the "easy to teach" Ben's touch, the new approach per main topic is more easy to access". Nevertheless, I would strongly suggets to provide a general Table of contents (Topic/lessons) to be able to get back in the appropriate lesson when needed.Thank you and congrats
Alan Humbard
I found this class okay with the exception of some of the individual chapters incorrrectly titled. Example would be the last says Lightroom instead of Photoshop. He also speaks at nuke speed. I'm guessing Creative speeded up to make the class shorter but I don't think it's recommended for all ages.
Corinna Huerta
Ben's style is easy to follow and he goes into depth without going in so deep that you lose him. I have been watching Ben's classes for several years and never fail to learn something significant from each class that I watch. Highly recommend!
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Adobe Photoshop