Before we start to do any processing in Photoshop, there are a few things we can set up to make life easier for ourselves, the info included in this article will help you now and in the future so it’s worthwhile reading to be aware of the points contained within. First of all we’ll deal with Photoshop’s preferences as over a period of time and use the Photoshop preferences file can corrupt and it will stop you using the program completely. I’ve seen many people having trouble with this in the past and they go to the extent of uninstalling and reinstalling Photoshop in an attempt to correct the problem when all that is needed is to reset the preferences file to allow you to use it again. Here is how to reset your preference file if you ever need to do it;

Start up Photoshop and immediately press these keys together, on your keyboard.

For Windows PC use: Shift+Alt+Ctrl
For Mac use: Shift+Option+Command

You will get a box open on your screen asking you do you want to delete your Photoshop settings file, click “Yes”. Don’t worry, all it is doing is deleting settings and Photoshop will now boot up and be like brand new...as if it has never been used. And you can then go through the steps below once again to set things up to your liking. This little tip can save you hours of frustration, remember it!
But we can go further than that, we can backup or save our preferences file in case one day things go wrong and your prefs file becomes corrupted by browsing through your computer and finding the prefs file, copying it and saving it somewhere safe. Here is where to find your preferences folder
In Photoshop CS3 for example here is where the preference files are kept.

Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\[ USER NAME ]\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\
Mac: Computer/Users/[ USER NAME ]/Library/Preferences/

In each of the two locations above you will see a folder named “Adobe Photoshop CS3 Settings”, right click on the folder and choose “Copy”, then right click somewhere else (your desktop for example) and choose paste. Your preferences file has now been saved to your desktop and to use the settings all you have to do is copy the folder from your desktop over to one of the locations above depending on your system. The location for all version of Photoshop will be similar, so just browse to your version and save your prefs files as described. Saves a lot of frustration later…believe me!

Editing your preferences

To set up your preferences click on “Edit” move your mouse down to “Preferences” then across to “General” (or you can use the Keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+K”), a box will open up with a multitude of settings that can be changed.

I’ve made a screenshot of the first four pages of my settings as these are the ones I mostly change about. I’m not suggesting for one minute that you set everything as I have it, I’m putting them here for information purposes only..I quite regularly change things in here to suit whatever I’m doing at that time. I’ll mention a few things worth changing after these screenshots. Note in each screenshot the menu left, is on a different page.

That’s the first four pages of my preferences as they are today; here are a couple of tips/suggestions related to the Photoshop prefs file.

1. Photoshop CS4 only: On the performance page you have an option for “GPU Settings” Tick the box next to “Enable OpenGL Drawing” and it will greatly increase Photoshop`s performance by using your computers graphic card, providing that is you have a supported graphic card, but fear not as most reasonably modern graphic cards will support this feature as my own graphic card is a bottom of the range cheapie, now around 3 years old!
2. On the same page and for most Photoshop versions you will see “History and Cache”, you can set this to whatever you like and if like me you set it to 50, this remembers the last 50 things you did to a photo in Photoshop. Note, when you save your file after working on it then later reopen it once again it will not remember what you did previously..history states are only remembered during the session you are actually using them.
**3. On the “file handling” page (Most version of Photoshop) you will see “Maximize PSD file compatibility, set this to always then in future if you upgrade your Photoshop version you should not suffer problems with opening files from older versions.**
4. On the “interface” page make sure there is a tick against “Show Menu Colours”; this will help with things I’ll mention later in this article.

Customizing the menus

Photoshop’s menus have many items in them which can confuse people and part of Photoshop’s ethos is being able to customize various parts to suit how you work or what you work with, hence why it is used by many different people with different end results in mind, for example Photographers, web designers, Illustrators etc so some things you’ll never understand or even use So let’s change a menu, we’ll use the “File” menu as an example.

Click on “Edit” scroll to the very bottom of this menu and then click on “Menus” and a new dialog box will open, then double click on “File” within this new dialog box and you’ll see all the commands under that heading, that you would normally see under “File” on the menu bar of Photoshop itself. Next to each command will be a box with an eye in it then after that will probably be written “None”.

"Edit/Menus"

Double-Click "File"

If you click on the eye next to a command, the eye will disappear and the command will also disappear from view in Photoshop’s File menu also, it’s not gone forever…just hidden! And any Photoshop menu that has hidden items on it will have a new command added at its very bottom called “Show all menu items”, clicking on this command reveals what has been hidden.

Hiding things you do not use is good for a start, but we can go further and colour some of the menu items as well. Clicking on the word “None” will reveal a colour choice dropdown box so you can highlight certain menu items, you could choose “red” for most often used commands and yellow for the least often but to help you remember it’s an important one although less frequently used…sort of a reminder.

The customised "File" menu, some items hidden others coloured with "show all" link at the bottom.	Clicking the Show all link reveals once again, items that where hidden.

One of the best features is that you can actually save all of these customizations into one set, name it and use it whenever you want to by coming back to "Edit/Menus" and loading it up. So for example you could remove most of the commands from a menu, colour some of those and save that set as/for "Going to print" or "Going to web" or whatever other use you might need, all in all it helps you to best use your time wisely without too much brain ache. To save a set, look to the top of the menus panel and you'll see a box named set, just to the right of this are options to save, modify or delete settings.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I touched on this in the first article and discused how this could speed up your work inside Photoshop, even how to find some of the shortcuts. If you click on "Edit/Keyboard Shortcuts" or just click on the tab "Keyboard Shortcuts from the menu panel in the last section of this article you'll be faced with another similar options box to the last one. Here you can browse, change, save various options once again. By default the menu shortcuts will be displayed but just above that is a dropdown box where you can change to see lists of other Photoshop shortcut key combos, namely for the toolbox and Palettes. You can save out settings into different groups as you can with the menu options and you can also set up a shortcut key if one does not exist. Simply tyoe the shortcut you wish to use next to the command and if it is aready in use Photoshop will warn you so you can make another choice.