Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

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 in each category, and you’ll find guidance on tweaking preferences sprinkled throughout this book.

Tip

You can cycle through the preferences categories by pressing and holding the ⌘ key (Ctrl on a PC) while tapping the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard.

General

The General pane of the Preferences dialog box (Figure 1-12) 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.

Figure 1-12. The General preferences include the incredibly ...