Photoshop CS3 Essential Preference Settings

Photoshop CS3 Essential Preferences: Interface

Click on the Interface option in the list of Preferences categories along the left to bring up the new "Interface" options:

The "Interface" category may be new to Photoshop CS3, but many of the options here are not new at all. They've simply been moved here, and in some cases renamed, from other categories. The Show Channels In Color option, which you want to leave unchecked, used to be called "Color Channels in Color" and was found in the "Display & Cursors" category in previous versions of Photoshop. Show Menu Colors and Show Tool Tips were both previously found in the "General" category, along with Remember Palette Locations, which was previously called "Save Palette Locations".

The new option at the top, Use Grayscale Toolbar Icon, determines whether the "PS" icon at the top of the Tools palette appears in blue or gray. Here it is in blue, which is the default:

And here it is in gray:

It may not seem like an important option, but I find it helpful to set the icon's color to gray so that the blue color doesn't distract me when working on images. If you prefer to leave it blue, simply leave this option unchecked.

If you're new to Photoshop, I'd suggest leaving Show Tool Tips on. Tool Tips are those helpful little descriptions that appear whenever you hold your mouse over something for a second or two. Even if you've been using Photoshop for a while, I'd recommend leaving the Tool Tips on until you become more familiar with CS3, since the interface is quite different now than what we've been used to. Once you become more comfortable inside Photoshop CS3, you can simply return to the Preferences and turn this option off.

You'll want to leave Remember Palette Locations checked. With it checked, the next time you launch Photoshop, all of your palettes will appear in the same locations as they were when you last closed out of the program. With it unchecked, the palettes will be reset to their default locations each time you open the program. You can always reset your palette locations any time you want by going up to the Window menu at the top of the screen, choosing Workspace, and then choosing Default Workspace.

That covers everything new and/or important in the "Interface" category. Let's move on to the next one, File Handling.

Photoshop CS3 Essential Preferences: File Handling

Click on the words "File Handling" in the list along the left to bring up the options in the File Handling category. There's really only one option here that we need to look at for now - Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility:

What "Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility" does is it saves a flattened version of your image inside your Photoshop document along with all of your layers. You need to have that flattened version included if you're importing your files into, say, a page layout program like InDesign or even a multimedia program like Flash. If you know that you're going to be importing your Photoshop files into other programs like that, go ahead and set this option to Ask, which will cause Photoshop to ask you when you go to save the file if you want to include that flattened version of the image. The problem is, that flattened version of the image can increase the size of your file by as much as 30-50%, so if you have no intention of ever importing your files into some other application, there's no need to add to your file size, in which case I highly recommend you set this option to Never.

There's a couple of options here that are new to Photoshop CS3 - Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for JPEG Files and Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for Supported Raw Files:

Photoshop CS3 allows us to open both JPEG and TIFF files inside the Camera Raw dialog box, but by default, this option is turned off, and I'd suggest leaving it turned off for now because it's not quite as fun or straightforward as it sounds. The second option simply tells Photoshop to use Camera Raw for raw files, which makes sense and is turned on by default. I'd leave both of these options alone for the time being, but just know that they're there and they're new to CS3.

Next, we'll look at another brand new category in Photoshop CS3, the Performance Preferences.