20 Things About Photoshop You Have to Know - The Window Menu, Scripts, and the Actions Manager

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The Window Menu

The Window menu is all about customizing your workspace and managing your panels. It’s about making your life easier. You use it to switch on available tool panels such as the layers panel or the character panel when they are needed. In addition to switching on or off tool panels as and when they necessary, it is also where you access the Workspace submenu. If you find yourself constantly closing certain panels and opening others as soon as Photoshop has loaded, you can save yourself the bother by saving the current workspace.  Your saved workspace then on appears in the Workspace menu.  You can also customise existing panels using the tabs at the top of each panel; if you wanted the history tools to be in the same panel as the layers, you simply click and drag the tab with History on it into the desired panel.

Scripts

Another time-saving tool here: the scripts function of Photoshop can be used to perform automated repetitive tasks, such as exporting all of your layers to PDF in order to produce a slideshow. Photoshop also contains its very own script debugger and will let you write your own Visual Basic or JavaScript scripts. Photoshop comes with many pre-written scripts that can be accessed via File -> Scripts -> Browse.  The scripting tools are supported by a number of PDF reference manuals in the Photoshop CS application folder so before taking on anything big, I suggest having a quick read through these.

Actions Manager

Similar in some ways, but nowhere near as powerful to the scripts function, the actions manager can be used to record and playback a series of menu or tool selections and actions, very much like the macro feature of Microsoft products. It comes with a vast library of pre-recorded actions which can be applied with a simple double-click. The actions panel should load into your workspace by default, and to record your own actions simply click the new action button and do whatever it is you need to do. You can set a name for your action and it will from then on appear as an action in the actions panel.

Next: File Browser, the Layers Panel, and Effects >>
 

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Comments On: 20 Things About Photoshop You Have to Know

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