FIGURE 3-8: Tool presets help you work faster and more accurately.

      Although just about any tool is a good candidate for tool presets, some are just plain naturals. Consider, if you will, the Crop tool. As I explain in Chapter 4, a photo from a high-end digital camera has an aspect ratio (relationship between width and height of the image) of 2:3, and common print and frame aspect ratios include 4:5 for 8-x-10 prints, 5:7, and 13:19 for large prints. (Some digital cameras shoot in different aspect ratios.) You’ll often find a need to crop an image to a specific size to meet your printing requirements. And, don’t forget resolution — printing in the correct size at the wrong resolution is simply a waste of paper and ink! Set up a number of Crop tool presets for your typical print sizes and relax, knowing that you’ll always be cropping correctly.

Another logical candidate for tool presets is the Type tool. When you consider all the options for the Type tool in not only the Options bar but also in the Character and Paragraph panels, you have quite a bit to select and track. To ensure consistent text from project to project, consider creating tool presets for each project, including (as appropriate) headline and body text, special effects and accent type, and even your copyright information. Keep in mind, too, that you can use Type tool presets in conjunction with the Character Styles and Paragraph Styles panels (which are discussed in Chapter 12).

Season to Taste: The Photoshop Settings

      The program-level Preferences and the Color Settings flavor all your work in Photoshop. The options that you choose in Photoshop’s Preferences (or simply the Prefs) control many facets of the program’s basic behavior. Choices made in the Color Settings dialog box determine how your work looks, both onscreen and in print. And when you get down to brass tacks, that’s what it’s all about — the appearance of your artwork.

      Standing orders: Setting the Preferences

Photoshop’s Preferences file stores a whole lot of information about how you use the program. Regardless of whether you prefer to measure in inches or pixels, how you like the grid and guides displayed, what size thumbnails you prefer in your panels, which font you used last — all sorts of data is maintained in the Prefs. Much of the info in the Preferences is picked up automatically as you work (such as the size and color mode of the last new document you created, whether the Character panel was visible when you last shut down the program, and which tool options were selected in the Options bar), but you must actively select a number of options in the Preferences dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-9.

      FIGURE 3-9: Use Photoshop’s Preferences to establish many program behaviors.

Many of Photoshop’s handy reminder messages include a Don’t Show Again option. If you someday decide that you do indeed need to start seeing one or more of those reminders again, open the Preferences and click the Reset All Warning Dialogs button at the bottom of the General pane.

      

Your custom styles, brushes, Actions, and the like are recorded only in Photoshop’s Preferences until you actually save them to your hard drive. That makes them vulnerable to accidental loss. Use the menus of the various panels and pickers to export custom items. And make sure to export them in a safe location outside the Photoshop folder — you wouldn’t want to accidentally delete your custom bits and pieces if you should ever have to (oh, no!) reinstall Photoshop, would you?

      Open the Preferences on a Mac with the keyboard shortcut ⌘ +K or choose Photoshop ⇒ Preferences to select one of the 17 specific subsets of Preferences to change. The shortcut for Windows users is Ctrl+K, and the Preferences submenu is under the Edit menu. The default settings are perfectly acceptable (after all, they are the defaults for a reason), but the following sections cover some changes to the Preferences to consider, listed by the section of the Preferences dialog box in which you find them.

      

Some of the changes you make in Photoshop’s Preferences are applied as soon as you click OK. Other changes don’t take effect until you restart the program. (You’ll get a reminder about that.)

      Preferences ⇒ History Log

      The History Log maintains a record of what you’ve done to a specific image. You can record when you opened and saved a file with the Sessions option, see a summary of what you did with the Concise option, or keep track of every command, every feature, and every setting you used with the Detailed option! And the log can be recorded to a text file or stored in an image’s metadata for retrieval by choosing File ⇒ File Info.

      Preferences ⇒ Tools

      One option not selected by default that you may find very handy is Zoom Clicked Point to Center. When you click with the Zoom tool, this option automatically centers the view on the point where you clicked.

When using the transform commands, Photoshop shows you numerically precisely what you’re doing. A small display shows the new dimensions (when scaling) or the angle (when rotating or shearing). You may find that to the upper right of the cursor isn’t a good location (perhaps while using the stylus in your right hand on a Wacom Cintiq tablet or iPad connected

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