The Extra-Strength Tips for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

There is a part of Photoshop that goes largely ignored, but give it a little well-deserved attention and you will find yourself feeling much more in control of things. I'm talking about the profusion of palettes that make up your workspace. They can become so untidy and so annoying as to completely ruin an otherwise enjoyable session tweaking your images. So, today we're going to talk about how to boss around Photoshop's unruly little palettes. You'd think there wouldn't be much to say about the palettes without getting into uses for specific ones, but in reality there is a tremendous number of things you can do to them, ultimately making find your daily Photoshopping experience much more satisfying.

Did you know that you can press Tab to hide all the palettes and then press it again to bring them back? Or, try Shift-Tab to hide all but the Tool palette and Options Bar. Or, type Tab and then Return or Enter and you'll end up hiding everything but the Options Bar.

If you've just tried to hide your palettes and you find that tab just isn't working, then you must be either working on a number field within one of the palettes (press Return or Enter to make tab work in that case), or you must have a dialog box open (like an adjustment or a filter, so click ok, to finish it so tab will work).

If your screen is set to display more than 800x600 pixels (like most 17" or larger displays), then you should find a dark gray area at the far right end of the Options Bar at the top of your screen. This is called the Palette Well, and was introduced in Photoshop 6. It's a Photoshop custom to click on the bar above the name of a palette to move that grouping of palettes, but if you want a palette to be stored in the Palette Well, then you're going to need to drag the name tab for a palette instead of the entire grouping. So, click on the name of a palette and drag it to that dark gray area in the upper right of your screen. Then, when you need to use the palette, just click on its name in the Palette Well and it will drop down and make itself available. When you're done using it, just click anywhere else on your screen and it will collapse itself back into the Palette Well. If you're not sure where you can safely click to make the palette collapse, then try typing Return or Enter instead.

If you're used to working in programs like Adobe Illustrator or Quark XPress where they have a palette across the bottom of your screen, then you might prefer to relocate the Options Bar to a place more like your other programs. Just click and drag on the left edge of the Options Bar and your can reposition it. The Palette Well will remain full size when the Options Bar is positioned at the top or bottom edge of your screen. But, if you move it away from either of those edges, then the Palette Well will shrink to conserve space. You can still drag palettes into the well and it will expand to make room for them.

You can conserve space with the palettes that are not in the Palette Well by double-clicking on the name of a palette. That should collapse it down so all your see is the name. Then, when you want to use the palette again, just double-click the name of the palette and it will pop open. You can drag the bar above the name of a palette and position it at the bottom of your screen. On a Mac, Photoshop remembers that your palette is touching the bottom of your screen so when you double-click on the name to collapse it, it remain at the bottom of your screen. In many versions of Windows, that doesn't happen... instead, the palette collapses relative to the top edge, which isn't quite as useful.

You're welcome to change which palettes are grouped together by dragging the name of a palette to the middle of another palette grouping. Or, if you'd like a palette to stand on its own, then just drag its name to an open part of your screen. In newer versions of Photoshop, you can even stack the palettes. To do that, drag the name tab of one palette to the top or bottom edge of another palette (watch the tip of the arrow cursor that appears, not the dotted outline of the palette to make sure you're at the edge). When palettes are stacked, you can move the entire grouping by dragging the bar that appears above the name tabs of the top palette in the stack (which I think is gray on the Mac and blue in Windows).

If you've gotten your palettes set up just right, then you might want to consider choosing Window>Workspace>Save Workspace to save that setup as a preset. Then, if you're palettes ever get messed with, you can just choose the name of the workspace you saved from the Window>Workspace menu and Photoshop will move the palettes to the position they were in when you saved that setting. I like to use this feature to save the palette setup that I use for different ways of working. So, I have one workspace for retouching (brushes, layers and history), another for creating collages (just layers) and still another for adjusting images (layers, history, info).

Oh, I almost forgot, when you use the Text tool in Photoshop, you can type Command-T (Mac), or Ctrl-T (Win) to toggle the visibility of the characters and Paragraphs palettes.

If you happened to make a complete mess of your screen after trying all these tips, then you can rest assured that you can get everything back to the defaults by simply choosing Window>Workspace>Reset Palette Locations. So, now that you know how to show your palettes who's the boss, I'll let you stop reading and get back to work.

-Ben Willmore