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We all discover Photoshop differently, often learning about tools and features relevant to our needs. However, this can lead to knowledge gaps that may hold your skills back. Part 1 of this book, Raising Your Photoshop Game, not only focuses on new and updated features but also essential skills and builds upon them, starting with Chapter 2, which establishes a streamlined interface and tools setup.First, we'll customize the interface, modifying panels and tools so that they're easier to locate, putting the most effective features front and center in your interface while keeping less frequently used features just a mouse click away. We'll reorder the Tools panel, stripping away redundant tools in place for your favored go-to, high-impact tools, and set up keyboard shortcuts that make little-known features easy to activate or modify a tool with ease.Then, we'll explore digital imaging 101...

Technical requirements

The project files for this chapter can be found at:https://packt.link/gbz/9781806021710

Creating a bespoke workspace

It's one thing to know your Photoshop tools and features, but quite another to make them more accessible. Delving into a rabbit hole of sub-menus to find a time-saving tool burns valuable time, diminishing its effectiveness. At first, the extra mouse clicks might seem inconsequential, but over the course of a year, that could amount to dozens of hours wasted when you could have been meeting deadlines faster. I would suggest thinking about which tools and panels you use most frequently and prioritizing your screen real estate.In the following exercises, we'll look at customizing panels, tools, and shortcuts. You can adjust these techniques to suit your individual workflow.

Quality-first approach

You've probably heard of the saying, garbage in, garbage out. Well, this holds true in Photoshop as well. Just because an image looks fantastic on screen, it doesn't guarantee it will when printed. Trust me – the last thing you want to experience is the horror of unboxing thousands of prints containing pixelated or blurred images.PSD is by far the most powerful image format, offering tremendous flexibility within the application. The PSD format supports up to 250,000 layers in a single document, allowing you to scale, rotate, or reposition each component of your design with ease. Or, if you prefer, you can hide or even delete a layer without it affecting the rest of the composition.Layers are a common facet of nearly all Adobe desktop applications and are especially critical to saving time. Because of the tight integration between other Adobe products, such as Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects, and Dreamweaver, you can...

Online resources

One of the toughest challenges in creating great-looking projects is capturing and acquiring high-quality assets. If, unlike me, you are a fantastic photographer and possess the necessary equipment to take your own photographs, some images remain out of reach due to their geographical location, making it too costly to shoot in person. Online resources and stock images can bridge that gap.In this section, I want to share some resources I regularly use for my projects, which save valuable time and money. I've focused primarily on free content, but I also included a handful of sites that offer incredible high-end paid stock content.