Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

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 2-1, which Adobe recently simplified slightly.

Figure 2-1. Top: The New dialog box is where life begins for any Photoshop file you make from scratch. The settings here let you pick, among other things, the document’s dimensions, 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. New in this version of Photoshop is the ability to pick a custom background color. To do so, click the swatch next to the Background Contents menu (circled) to summon the Color Picker. Bottom: Whatever you enter in the Name box appears in the document’s title bar (circled).

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 couple of 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. (That said, if you’ve got the know-how, you can dip into your Mac’s Terminal app—or use a third-party program—to ...