Customizing Workspaces

Rather than spend any time reorganizing your floating palettes, save a workspace to remember their location. A workspace is, in effect, a snapshot of the current look of your Photoshop layout: which palettes are visible and where they are located, and if you wish, which keyboard shortcuts and menus are in use.

If you change the layout of your screen while you’re working and want to return to the original layout, just select your customized workspace from Window>Workspace. It’s very simple to save your own workspace: just position the palettes where you like, and then from the Window menu, choose Workspace>Save Workspace. Give the workspace a nice logical name, click OK, and you’re done. To switch to that layout, just choose it from the Workspace submenu.

It’s important to note that in Photoshop CS2 you can include custom menus and keyboard shortcuts in a workspace. This means that with one trip to the Workspace submenu, you can change the location of your palettes, the contents of your menus, and your keyboard shortcuts. Best of all, you can just as easily return to the default workspace.

If you’ve created custom menus and shortcutsto include them in a workspace just make sure your custom settings are active and then save a workspace (just remember that the workspace will also include the visibility and position of the palettes, so check that too before you save it). Note: In the Save Workspace dialog, ensure that Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus are both selected before you click Save.

Here’s a thought: If you have a couple of workspaces that you use regularly, why not assign them a keyboard shortcut? Here I have saved a workspace with only an expanded Layers palette so I can do extensive photo editing. Now I can use the Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts dialog to assign a keyboard shortcut to my custom workspace.

Check out the Workspace submenu and you’ll see that Adobe has provided some built-in workspaces, many of which include customized menus. Some of these customized menus are strictly color-coded menus, which makes it easier for you find items in the menu bar.

As you can see, there are plenty of options for customizing, and with a little bit of effort, you can “make yourself at home” with Photoshop CS2.

Author: Webmaster