Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Tweaking Photoshop’s Preferences

As you learned earlier in this chapter, Photoshop is pretty darn customizable. In addition to personalizing the way its tools behave and how your workspace looks, you can make lots of changes using the program’s preferences, which control different aspects of Photoshop and let you turn features on or off, change how tools act, and fine-tune how the program performs.

Tip

Tooltips work on preference settings, too! So if you forget what a setting does, just point your cursor at it for a second or two and you’ll get a tiny yellow explanation.

To open the Preferences dialog box, choose Photoshop→Preferences→General (Edit→Preferences→General on a PC), or press ⌘-K (Ctrl+K). When you choose a category on the left side of the dialog box, tons of settings related to that category appear on the right. The following pages give you an idea of the kinds of goodies each category contains, and you’ll find guidance on tweaking preferences sprinkled throughout this book.

General

The General section of the Preferences dialog box (Figure 2-12) is a sort of catchall for settings that don’t fit anywhere else. Most of these options are either self-explanatory (Beep When Done, for example) or covered elsewhere in this book. A few, however, are worth taking a closer look at.

Unless you tell it otherwise, Photoshop displays the Adobe Color Picker (see Other Color Scheme–Generating Tools) anytime you choose a color. If you’re more comfortable using your operating system’s color ...