Introduction: Photoshop Basics: The Palettes

Welcome to photoshop basics, we are going to cover the palettes. Palettes are all the useful little boxes that provide groups of functionality specific to certain tools or tasks. The Photoshop interface has a hefty amount of palettes displayed by default but more of them hide inside the "Window" menu.

In Later versions the photoshop you are able to hide and show as many of these palettes as you want and save the layout as you are used to doing this in flash and other applications. For the purposes of this tutorial we will cover all the palettes in Photoshop CS and at a later day we will update these tutorials to CS2 and its added functionality. Let's get started:

1. The Palette Dock

Our first option we will be discussing will be the Palette Dock. The dock has by default your Tool Presets, File Browser, Brushes and Layer Comps, but of course you can drag and dock any palette in this area.

The file browser has been replaced by Adobe Bridge in Photoshop CS 2.

2. The Brushes Palette

The Brushes Palette contains all of your brush tips and all the settings for any given tip (To learn more about creating Brush Tips in Photoshop, view this tutorial). We will attempt to cover this section in greater detail in another tutorial where we will attempt to explain what all the attributes do.

3. The Info Palette

This palette as its name implies, contains a whole bunch of useful information about your selections, colors and coordinates. The palette can be customized to provide information tailored to your specific focus (print, web, etc.) by using the Info Options Menu:

This tool is even more versatile in Photoshop CS 2 where you are able to add a larger number of options to be displayed. Many of them previously visible in the document's status bar (bottom of the photoshop window, make visible by hitting Window> Status Bar if hidden).

4. The Navigator Palette

The navigator palette is most useful when working at high zoom levels or on unusually large files. The function of this tool is the same as the Pan Tool (Spacebar), Zoom In (CTRL +) or Zoom Out (CTRL -) but it is most useful in allowing us to jump instantly to a part of the canvas when we are already zoomed in.

5. Tools Preset Palette

Tool Presets stores settings for a particular tool, you can also make your own or import new ones. This functionality allows you to store different settings you may have used in a tool to accomplish a specific effect and reuse it later. This however differs from the Actions palette which executes a sequence of commands to recreate the desired outcome.

6. The History Palette

The History palette stores up to 99 photoshop events and it allows you to go back and forth between any of these states. The amount of history events to be stored needs to be adjusted in your preferences and although it can go up to 99 it is wise to keep it at a more moderate number specially if have a lower end machine.

This palette also allows you create a Snapshot, which basically stores a copy of your file in memory at the current state of the history. Other useful feature is the ability to create New Document from any history state.

7. The Actions Palette

The Actions palette allows you use already prerecorded scripts or it allows you to record your own. To create a new action you simply press the "New" icon (second from the left), name it and hit OK. Not press the record button.

From this point on, Photoshop will record every command that you register to the interface. There are some things which cannot be automated but they are very few. When you are done recording you press the stop button. To execute any action, just click on its name and press Play.

8. The Styles Palette

The styles palette allows you to save layer styles you may have created or to apply styles already provided by photoshop.

9. The Swatches Palette

The swatches palette is most useful when you are working within a defined color space since it allows you set the swatches to specific types (Pantone, Web Safe, etc). For the most part if you are not working under heavy color type restrictions you can get away with just working on your default workspace an converting your colors for the desired output.

This approach however will prevent color fidelity from medium to medium.

10. The Color Palette

This palette allows you mix and select colors based on your color space in the same fashion explained for the swatches palette.

11. Character and Paragraph Palettes

The Character and Paragraph Palettes provide you all the control you may ever need over your text and text formatting, this includes: Kerning, Leading, Line Spacing, etc...

12. Histogram

The Histogram palette shows the tonal and color information of an image. By default, the histogram displays the tonal range of the entire image, this means all of the channels are displayed at once. It is possible to display the histogram for a specific layer in multi layer documents.

13. Channels

The Channels Palette contains the channels being used in your image as well as a composite channel and any alpha channels or masks present in selected layers.

14. Layers Palette

This palette provides the majority of the control over your image, allowing you create new layers, delete them, add adjustments, masks or effects. It is safe to say that you will be spending most of your time on this palette when working on Photoshop.

15. The Paths Palette

Finally we have paths. This palette allows you store and manage all of your vector shapes or clipping paths.

16. Conclusion

As you can see Photoshop has a very large amount of information tucked away in all these palettes as well as some very useful functionality. Although we have covered a lot here, there is still much to learn as each one of the palettes carries within itself a large amount of options and tools which are available by pressing the inconspicuous triangle on the right hand side of the palette.

For now however you should have an idea of where to find what in your palettes and with a little bit of help and work learning all the other stuff will come in time. Good Luck!.