General

We had already set a preference in Lesson 2 of this course, you remember?
But there are a number of other, what I want to explain to you.
To open the “Preferences” window, click “Edit” in the menu bar, choose “Preferences” from the drop-down menu, and click the “General”.

The hotkey for this is Ctrl + K.

The first tab is the “General” tab. I turn some of these options off.

The first is “Export Clipboard”. What you should know is that every running application has its own clipboard, such as Photoshop and Word when they are open. From both the applications, we can copy and paste data into another. When you copy text from a Word document into Photoshop you have no problem, but when you take a picture of several MB and copy to Word, then you have a proleem. Word can not handle it. So unless you want to copy small photos, it is best that you disable this feature. This will only waste your time, because Word will not accept this.

The second option that I want to disarm is the “Shift key for changing tools.” When you use the keyboard shortcuts for selecting tools then you normally press a letter key on your keyboard, for example the “W” for the “Magic Wand”. To select underlying tool, click on the “W” again. When this option is checked, when the shift key is pressed, you cannot select the underlying tool. With underlying tools I mean the tools that appear when you click the downward pointing triangle at the bottom of the tool.

The rest of the default settings for these preferences are fine.

Interface

The second tab is the “Interface” tab, this is new in Photoshop.

Among the things you can change is the background color and adding a drop shadow between the photos in the workspace. This can be interesting if, for example, to have a little contrast between the workspace and the pictures. If you choose “Custom”, when you click the downward pointing arrow next to the “Standard Screen Mode” box, then Photoshop uses a standard blue-colored background. To change this, right click somewhere in the background in the workspace and choose “Custom Color” screen. Choose a color in the window that you want to set the “Custom Color” to.

What we have here is interesting.

We have a number of settings for our panels that all relate to the display of the panels. What I find interesting is that the option “Open Documents as Tabs”. Disable this if you want, but I had already told you that in Lesson 2.

File Handling

In the “Maximize PSD and PSB file compatability”, Choose “Ask”.

When set to “Never”, Photoshop will always store the images with layers, that is a PSD file, not save a copy without layers. This consumes a lot of memory, so let it ask first whether it should do so.

The next box I want to adjust in this window is “Adobe Drive” box. Unless you know what “Adobe Drive” is, uncheck the box with the text “Enable Adobe Drive” in the “File Handling”. This will significantly reduce processing time of Photoshop.

Performance

In the “Performance”, you determine the memory for Photoshop.

The part of the RAM that Photoshop can use from your hard disk.

The higher you set it up and the faster the hard drive is, or better said, the faster Photoshop will work. When Photoshop runs out of memory, it will want memory of another hard drive. You can set which drive Photoshop should use first, in the “scratch disks”.

As you will notice in this example, it will first go and nibble on my “C”. If you want to set another, select it in the list and click the upward pointing arrow.

These settings are of course applicable only when you computer has multiple hard disks.

In the section “GPU Settings” you can see what display adapter is installed on your computer.

If the box in this section is not selected, then there is something wrong with your video driver.

You can still try to select, but it is likely that you need to install it new.

Cursors

In the “Cursors”, select the “Show Crosshair in Brush Tip” if you want to work correctly.

Units and Rulers

And the last thing I would change is the “Units” in the “Units and Rulers”. Our images are composed of pixels, so I find it most natural that the rulers are also set in pixels instead of inches or whatever.

These are my preferences, of course you can set what you find most practical.

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