Prevent Palette Popping

Many pro designers use two monitors (or a very large widescreen monitor) to hold all of their design tools. For most users, though, infinite space is not a luxury. One of the biggest wastes of time is "palette popping." Many users open and close tools and palettes all day longdragging windows all over the place, closing and opening the same windows over and over. Here are three solutions to avoid wasting time.

Temporary Banishment

If you want to hide your palettes, you can quickly toggle them off and on:

• Press the Tab key to hide all of your palettes.

• Press the Tab key again and they return.

• Press Shift + Tab to hide everything except the Options bar and Toolbox.

• To focus on only the active window, press the F key once to blank out all other images, or twice to darken the edges of your screen. Press F and Tab again to go back to standard screen mode with menus and tools.

Sitting on a Dock

On the right side of the Options bar is the palette well. This is an empty space where palettes can be stored. When you drag palettes into the well, they are docked as drop-down menus. It's a good idea to put useful but rarely used tools like the Brushes palette and Navigator here.

A Custom Workspace

You'll find the more you work with Photoshop, the more you'll want different tools for different situations. For example, you'll want Layer Styles and the Color Picker handy for text work, but will turn toward the Histogram and Brushes palette when doing image restoration.

You can save any combination and arrangement of windows that you want to reuse. Then you can access it in one click with Workspaces. Effectively, using Workspaces enables you to switch between different production tasks (such as image touchup and type work) with ease. Plus, it is a way to customize the application and make it feel more welcoming to you. Let's try it out.

1.	Open the windows you need, and arrange them into the desired positions.
2.	To save the current workspace layout, choose Window > Workspace > Save Workspace.
3.	Enter a unique name for the workspace, and click OK.

To activate a workspace, choose Window > Workspace, and select a workspace from the submenu. To update a workspace, resave it with the same name. To delete a workspace, choose Window > Workspace > Delete Workspace.