Create Custom Clean Photoshop Workspaces and Toolbars

What are Custom Photoshop Workspaces?

Custom Toolbars and Photoshop Workspaces greatly simplify my life. Photoshop, being a versatile tool for various artists, can be overwhelming due to its extensive toolbar filled with many tools that I rarely use. To streamline my workflow, I’ve created a custom toolbar that declutters and eliminates unnecessary tools, ensuring that everything I need is readily accessible.

Additionally, I’ve customized my workspaces within Photoshop based on my specific tasks, whether it’s photography, photographic composites, or design work. This approach allows me to reduce clutter on the right side of my screen and maintain a clean and efficient workspace. In the following video, I’ll demonstrate my customized toolbar and walk you through the process of creating personalized workspaces. Keep in mind that everyone’s needs differ, so feel free to adapt these selections to suit your preferences.

Custom Photoshop toolbars and workspaces offer several significant benefits:

1. Efficiency: By creating a custom toolbar, you can remove tools that you rarely use, ensuring that only the essential tools are easily accessible. This speeds up your workflow because you don’t have to hunt for the tools you need among a cluttered toolbar.
2. Reduced Visual Clutter: Removing unnecessary tools from the toolbar and customizing workspaces minimizes the visual clutter on your screen. This can help you focus on your work without distractions and makes it easier to see and access the tools and panels that are relevant to your current task.
3. Personalization: Customization allows you to tailor Photoshop to your specific needs and workflow. You can organize tools and panels in a way that makes the most sense to you, increasing your comfort and productivity within the software.
4. Task-Oriented Workspaces: Different tasks in Photoshop may require different sets of tools and panels. Custom workspaces let you create specific environments for various types of work, such as photo editing, graphic design, or retouching. This means you can switch between workspaces seamlessly, optimizing your efficiency.
5. Streamlined Workflow: Custom toolbars and workspaces help streamline your workflow by removing unnecessary steps or distractions. This can result in faster project completion and a more enjoyable experience when using Photoshop.
6. Reduced Learning Curve: For beginners, customizing toolbars and workspaces can simplify the initial learning process. You can start with a simplified set of tools and gradually add more as you become more familiar with Photoshop.
7. Consistency: Once you’ve set up your custom workspace, you can maintain a consistent environment, making it easier to pick up where you left off and reducing the chances of errors caused by unfamiliar tool locations.
8. Increased Productivity: A well-organized workspace can improve your overall productivity by minimizing the time spent searching for tools and settings, allowing you to focus more on your creative work.

In summary, custom Photoshop toolbars and workspaces enhance your efficiency, reduce clutter, and enable you to personalize your Photoshop experience to match your specific needs and preferences. These benefits can lead to a more enjoyable and productive experience when working with this powerful image editing software.

Photoshop for Photographers

“Photoshop for Photographers” was designed as a supplemental resource for my class, “Photoshop for Photographers.” The goal is to teach you how to use Adobe Photoshop step by step. I understand this path is not for everyone and there is no reason you have to follow this process. However, if you want to really learn the program, I would suggest learning everything on the video and then move on.

“Custom Photoshop Workspaces simplify the complexity of the program.”

JOHN WHITEHEAD IMAGES

Photoshop Requirements and Hard Drives

Working in Adobe Photoshop and with photography is more than just installing software and saving images to your computer. Computers these days are using solid State Drives SSD, which are fast, but do not have a large storage capacity. If you start downloading a bunch of photographs to your computer, it will not take long until you get a “Scratch Disk Full” error. This means your internal hard drive is full. Just to run a computer and Adobe Photoshop you need a sufficient amount of free space. Image previews are usually stored in a computer’s cache. This a temporary storage so it can quickly retrieve previews without recreating them every time you look at them. I cover this in the my Photoshop Preferences Tutorial. Personally, I store all caches on an external hard drive. At this moment I have 4 different hard drives hooked up to my computer. Two SSD’s and two enterprise optical drives, each performing a different task. All these drives are backed up via BackBlaze.

Another important aspect of running any of Adobe’s products are them requirements. Adobe lists the minimum requirements to run each of their programs, but you never want to be using the minimums, or the speed will drive you nuts. You need to realize that that your computer and every other application you run have requirements. So if you have Photoshop’s min of RAM 4GB, that will not allow any for your computer to run or a browser like Chrome. Below I will have two lists. One is some reasonable minimum requirements to run Adobe Software and what I am running. The second is a list of issues you will run into with insufficient hard drive space, and low minimum requirements. Just about every online student that I teach run into these issues. I hope this helps.

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I have a Facebook Group called, “Learn Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Bridge.” I created this group because I get a lot of questions on YouTube that are hard to answer unless I can see the issue. This will allow a place you can ask questions, and more importantly post images and videos.