Preferences
To set Photoshop “Preferences” go to Edit>Preferences>General.
General
In the General dialog box accept the default settings of, Colour Picker
set to “Adobe”, Image Interpolation set to “Bicubic”,
UI Font Size set to “Small”. The History States defaults to
20. This means that Photoshop will keep a record of the last 20 operations
you performed, so if you are unhappy with your operations you can backtrack
to an earlier state. If you wish you could increase the history states
to a higher figure which would give you more options to backtrack, but
on a downside, a higher “History States” would use more of
your Random Access Memory (RAM), which would slow Photoshop down. I would
recommend that you use the default setting of 20.
The only other changes we are going to make are in the Options section.
We need to tick “Automatically Launch Bridge” this will load
the Bridge browser everytime we open Photoshop. The Bridge browser makes
it very easy to locate and open our images into Photoshop. The other option
we need to tick is “Zoom with Scroll Wheel” this allows the
scroll wheel of your mouse to become a permanent zoom tool, this is a
very useful short cut when working with your images. All other options
should be left as the defaults and match the image below.
Click
Next to continue.
File
Handling
The next dialog box is File Handling. The image below shows the File Handling
default settings. You shouldn’t need to make any changes, but be
sure that your default settings match these before you continue.
Click Next to continue
Display
& Cursors
In the Display & Cursors dialog box set the Painting Cursors option
to “Normal Brush Tip”, this will show us the size of the brush
tip we are working with. You can also opt to use the “Show Crosshair
in Brush Tip”, if you wish. Set the Other Cursors
to “Precise”, this will show us a precise position of the
tool we are using, instead of the standard default tool cursor.
Click Next to continue
Transparency
& Gamut
The only option we need to change in this dialog box is the “Gamut
Warning”. The Gamut Warning is an option in Photoshop that when
activated will show us colours that are beyond the printing range of our
inkjet printers (more about this at a later date). The Gamut Warning defaults
to a mid grey, this should be changed to a more vivid colour which very
rarely appears in the types of photographs we shoot. To change the Gamut
Warning click on the grey square, this will bring up the Colour Picker.
In
the Colour Picker dialog box, first ensure the “Only Web Colours”
is un-ticked. Next ensure the “H” radio button is on (black
dot in it). At this point you can choose your own colour by using the
colour picker or you can type these values into the RGB fields to give
you an adequate vivid colour, R 255, G 0, B 200. These values have given
us a bright pink, (85% Magenta). Click OK.
When
we now activate the Gamut Warning in Photoshop, the out of Gamut colours
will be visible in the bright pink colour we have just set.
The “Transparency & Gamut” options are now set. Click
Next to continue.
(Go to page 3 below to continue with this workshop).