Saving Your Workspaces

Earlier I looked at using the Window > Workspace > Save Workspace command to save a palette arrangement, and you may have noticed that there are two more boxes in Save Workspace dialog box: Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus. Although a Photoshop workspace can save the state of the palettes, keyboard shortcuts, and menus, you may not want to save all three every time. For example, you may have different task-oriented palette arrangements but one set of favorite keyboard shortcuts. If you want to remove any possibility of accidentally altering keyboard shortcuts when you change palette arrangements, don't enable the Keyboard Shortcuts checkbox when you save a workspace.

Moving Workspaces to Other Machines

Your workspaces only work on your machine. If you do a lot of work on other computers at a client's site or in a computer lab, though, you may want to save your workspaces to a disc or flash drive so you can load them onto the machine you're using. Workspaces are stored in the WorkSpaces folder, which is in the following folder paths

Mac OS X:

   Computer/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings/WorkSpaces/ 

Windows:

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   C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe  Photoshop CS2 Settings\WorkSpaces\ 

You can distribute workspaces to other computers in a workgroup or classroom by copying files from the WorkSpaces folder to the same folder on the other computers.

Resetting the Default Workspace

It's sometimes useful to set the Photoshop workspace back to the factory defaults; for example, when your machine will be used by someone who isn't familiar with your workspace configuration. You can start over by choosing Window > Workspace > Default Workspace.

Keep in mind that the Default Workspace command resets the current palette arrangement, keyboard shortcuts, and menus, so if you want to keep your customizations to any of those areas, save them before you reset to the default workspace. For example, save your current shortcuts as a keyboard shortcut set in the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus dialog box.