Photoshop® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Taking the Chef's Tour of Your Photoshop Kitchen

In This Chapter

• Understanding the general guidelines for working in Photoshop

• Working more efficiently with customization

• Determining your preferences and color settings

• Troubleshooting Photoshop

I know you're hungry to dive right in and start mixing up some masterpieces, but before you fire up the stove, look around the Photoshop kitchen. Get to know your spoons from your ladles, your pots from your pans, figure out how to turn on the blender . . . that sort of thing.

In this chapter, rather than going through all the Photoshop menus, panels, and tools (which would take several hundred very boring pages), I show you some basic operational concepts. (But don't worry — you can read about how to use specific commands and tools throughout the book, in the chapters most appropriate for them.) Here you discover such things as how to spot which menu commands have dialog boxes, what the little symbol in the upper-right corner of a panel does, and which tools don't use the Options bar. You also read about customizing your Photoshop environment for faster and more efficient work. Next I show you how to set up Photoshop's Preferences and Color Settings. And to wrap up the chapter — perhaps the most important section in this entire book — I explain what to do when Photoshop doesn't seem to be working properly.

Food for Thought: How Things ...