Get Organized in Photoshop
This guide shows you how to organize your photoshop file and environment. It's quick and dirty, but well worth reading.
Preface
Just a note: I don't have a Macintosh to work with, so some commands may be different. I'll trust if you already have a Mac you know enough about what you're doing in Photoshop to figure things out.
A few years back my college newspaper sent me on a conference for newspaper editors. Besides for the non-existant all-night partying for which I did not take part of or get drunk because that is against school policy, there were a few learning sessions, in which the top journalists and editors in the field would come speak to us and teach us.
One of the lectures was the photography editor for National Geographic, who took us through some advanced tricks in photoshop. His whole lecture took an hour, but I ended up walking out of that session with more knowledge of photoshop than I ever learned from one of those self-help books. I'd like to impart that knowledge to you today.
Background Organization
This may sound rather dumb, but organization is vital to making a great photoshop. For starters there is the default setting that Photoshop opens up to:
As you can see, most of the tool pallettes open up on the side...and I bet you won't even use more than 2 of them. Remove any you don't need (the navigator) and shrink the rest down (double click the blue area on pcs) and lay them across the bottom of the screen like so:
Layer Organization
Organizing your psd files are even more important that having a clean background space.
For starters you should name your layers. Simply rightclick on your layer in the layers pallette and choose layer properties. Then you can change the name. This is very useful (and vital) when working with many layers.
Another important thing to do is to organize your layers in folders. This will allow you to affect changes to all of the layers in any one folder at once. For instance, you can move all of the contents of a folder at once, simply by dragging a folder around. You can also hide all of the contents of a folder at once, by clicking the eye.
To create a folder, click on the folder button on the layers pallette menu. Then right click (PCs) on the folder to rename it it (Choose LAYER SET PROPERTIES). When your folder is ready, drag and drop the desired layers onto your new folder. The folder should highlight blue and then the layer will appear indented beneath it.
You should organize all of your layers, no matter how small, in this manner. This is especially useful for going back and making easy changes later.
As you can see, you now have ALOT more room to work with, and your pallettes are still available if you need them.
Also, this tip courtesy of [steveo], pressing the TAB key in PCs will give you the entire desktop to work with.
Final Notes
Duplicate your images in stages and save them. It's useful to organize your computer like so:
Set a general folder for all your editing jobs >
Beneath it, make new folders for the different sites / jobs you make them for >
beneath it, make a new folder for each entry you make
beneath that, make 2 folders: 1 for the final product and 1 for the stages.
Inside that stages folder your images should be saved like so:
#######-1a.psd
#######-1b.psd
#######-1c.psd
.......
#######-2a.psd
and so on. Obviously the idea here is to save your work in case of a computer crash - but also so that you can go back to another starting point easily should you mess up badly somehow. (And of course, it's much easier to write tutorials when you have stages to get back to ;)
Like I said - this was quick and dirty, but take these ideas to heart and you'll see just how much more efficient your photoshopping will become.
