Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Opening, Viewing, and Saving Files

Chances are good that if you’re holding this book, you’ll be spending a lot of time in Photoshop. So the ability to shave off a minute here and there from routine stuff can really add up. Heck, if you’re lucky, you’ll save enough time to read a book, ride your bike, or catch an episode of Battlestar Galactica.

One way to steal back some of that time is to work more efficiently, and that means learning a slew of tricks for the less glamorous stuff like opening, viewing, and saving files. And since you’ll be doing these things so often, it’s important to form good habits up front so your documents are set up properly from the get-go. It’s truly heartbreaking to find that the artwork you’ve spent weeks creating is too small to print, or you saved the file in such a way that you can’t change it later on. Finally, since a key part of working with images is navigating around these vast pixel landscapes, tis chapter teaches you some handy ways to move around within your onscreen images.

Creating a New Document

Photoshop gives you plenty of ways to accomplish most tasks, including creating a new document. You can choose File → New, but it’s faster to press ⌘-N (Crtl+N on a PC). Either way, you’ll be greeted with the New dialog box shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. The New dialog box (top) is where life begins for any Photoshop file you create. The ...