Configuring Photoshop

To make Photoshop behave the way you want it to, you ll probably need to configure some of the hundreds of options it offers in the Preferences dialog box. You may also want to change your color settings in the Color Settings dialog box and use the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box to create custom keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Configuring Photoshop

Windows [Ctrl]-[K], Mac [ z ]-[K]

Display the General sheet of the Preferences dialog box

The General sheet of the Preferences dialog box is the only sheet that you can access directly with a keyboard shortcut from Photoshop. (You can access the other sheets directly from the Edit Preferences submenu on Windows and the Photoshop Preferences submenu on the Mac.) Once you ve displayed the General sheet, you can access the other sheets by using the following keyboard shortcuts:

Windows	Mac	Preferences Sheet
[Ctrl]-[1]	[ z ]-[1]	General
[Ctrl]-[2]	[ z ]-[2]	File Handling
[Ctrl]-[3]	[ z ]-[3]	Display & Cursors
[Ctrl]-[4]	[ z ]-[4]	Transparency & Gamut
[Ctrl]-[5]	[ z ]-[5]	Units & Rulers
[Ctrl]-[6]	[ z ]-[6]	Guides, Grid & Slices
[Ctrl]-[7]	[ z ]-[7]	Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks
[Ctrl]-[8]	[ z ]-[8]	Memory & Image Cache
[Ctrl]-[9]	[ z ]-[9]	File Browser

Windows [Ctrl]-[Shift]-[K], Mac [ z ]-[Shift]-[K]

Display the Color Settings dialog box

Use the Color Settings dialog box to choose the set of color settings you want to use (for example, North America General Purpose Defaults) and make any necessary tweaks to them.

Windows [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Shift]-[K], Mac [ z ]-[Option]-[Shift]-[K]

Display the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box

See Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts, later in this chapter, for a discussion of how to customize Photoshop s default keyboard shortcuts and create further shortcuts of your own.