Customizing Your Photoshop Workspaces

It’s been around awhile, but with Photoshop CS2 the ability to customize and save your workspace has become a lot easier

If you’ve used Photoshop awhile you’ve surely settled into the layout of palettes that works best for you. I like to keep my Layers and History palettes nice and large at the top-right, with my Character and Paragraph palettes below, Paths and Channels palettes at the bottom-right and all my other palettes docked in the well.

Well, since Photoshop CS you have had the ability to save your palette layout as a workspace by selecting Window->Workspace->Save Workspace…. Not only is it a great way to keep your palette layout saved, but you can configure alternate workspaces for specific tasks or workflows. For example, you could give the Histogram and Channels palettes prominence in a Color Correction workspace. You could bring out the Brushes, Color and Layers palettes together for an Artistic/Painting workspace. Or make a workspace for your widescreen monitor and regular one.

Photoshop CS2 brings new depth to the workspace feature:

• It’s now possible to save customized menus, labeled menus and keyboard shortcuts in your workspace
• Several workspaces come standard with Photoshop CS2

The downside to the workspaces included with Photoshop CS2 is that they affect the menu bar only—no palettes are harmed in the making of these workspaces. They’re great when you are having trouble picking out the web design or painting selections from the rest of the menu items, but they don’t drag out the proper palettes for you. My favorite included workspace is “What’s New in CS2″, which highlights all the menu items new to this latest version of Photoshop.

If you haven’t been using the workspaces feature yet, try it out. Macromedia has included it in their Studio 8 as “Workspace Layouts” (and as “Panel Sets” as far back as MX 2002) but Photoshop CS2 is the first app I know of that has allowed so much control over menus, palette layout and even keyboard shortcuts. I think this foreshadows a future trend where the end user, not the corporation, is in control of the tools and interface of any given application.