Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Creating a New Document

Photoshop gives you a variety of ways to accomplish most tasks, including creating a new document. Sure, you can choose File→New, but it’s faster to press ⌘-N (Ctrl+N). Either way, you’ll be greeted with the New dialog box shown in Figure 3-1.

You’d think naming a document would be simple: Just type something in the Name box and you’re done, right? Not quite. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• If you’re working on a Mac, don’t start file names with periods. Files whose names start with periods are invisible in Mac OS X (meaning neither you nor Photoshop can see them), which makes ’em darn hard to work with.

  

  Figure 3-1. The New dialog box (top) is where life begins for any Photoshop file you make from scratch. The settings here let you pick, among other things, the document’s size, resolution, and color mode, all of which affect the quality and size of the image. You’ll learn more about these options in the following pages. Whatever you enter in the Name box appears in the document’s title bar (circled, bottom).

• If folks need to open your files on both Mac and Windows machines, don’t put slashes (/), colons (:), angle brackets (<, >), pipes, (|), asterisks (*), or question marks (?) in the file names, either.

• Leave file extensions on the file name (the period and three letters at the end of the name, like .psd, .jpg, and so on). The file extension makes it easier ...