Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Meet the Application Frame

When you launch Photoshop CC for the first time, you’re greeted by the Application Frame shown in Figure 2-1. This frame confines all things Photoshop to a single resizable and movable window. You can grab the whole mess—documents, panels, and all—and drag it to one side of your screen (or better yet, to another monitor) so it’s out of the way. And if you open more than one document, they’re displayed in handy tabs that you can rearrange by dragging.

Chances are, you’ll either love the Application Frame or hate it. If you’re on a computer running Windows, you’re used to programs looking and behaving this way. But if you’re on a Mac and you’re coming from an older version of Photoshop (like CS3), this arrangement may feel a little odd; in that case, you can turn off the frame by choosing Window→Application Frame to make Photoshop switch to the floating-window view used in older versions of the program. (PC folks are stuck with the frame.)

Note

In Photoshop CC, you may spot two new icons at the bottom of each document window, to the right of the zoom-level indicator. The first icon, which looks like a tiny gear with two arrows to its right (labeled in Figure 2-1) lets Creative Cloud subscribers sync their preferences and presets to the Creative Cloud so they can access ’em on another machine (see the box on page xxvii for more on the Creative Cloud). The second icon, which looks like a rectangle with a curved arrow inside it, lets you upload an image to the ...