Photoshop Documents, Viewing Modes and Files
Let's start a blank Photoshop document by going to File in the text-menu and choosing New. The resulting dialog window will look something like Figure 6.1. The first item is a field where we can establish a Name for
this file. Let's type in the name that we'd like to have for this file,
for instance, "website". If we skip this feild, the document will be
named by Photoshop as "Untitled". This is fine, the file can be named
later when it's saved.
Next, is a drop-down menu labeled Preset (Figure 6.2) that allows us to choose from some previously defined document types. For now, let's choose "Web". When we do this, many of the options that follow are changed for us. We will explore this interface in more detail in later sections of this series. Let's accept these default values by choosing the OK button positioned in the top right of this dialog window (Figure 6.1). When we do that, a new window will open in our workspace (Figure 7).
Controlling the Viewing Mode with keyboard shortcuts
If our interface doesn't look like the image above, we may be in the wrong viewing mode. Photoshop gives us a convenient way of moving between viewing modes while we work on images. A. We can toggle the interface palettes and context-menu on and off by tapping the TAB key on our keyboard. B. We can toggle between window states by tapping the F key on our keyboard. Let's take a moment to experiment with these keyboard shortcuts and observe the different views. Now, from the text-menu let's choose File, then Save. The save dialog appears on the screen. The save dialog window should feel familiar to us as it is common in most of the programs on our computer. Here we can name our file, if we haven't already. Then we can choose a location for our file and save the work we've done (Figure 8).
The file type we use to save our work is a Photoshop Document. The extension of the file name is .psd. So, if we named our file "website", the file name of the saved file would be website.psd. |