Tools and Panels Primer in cs6

Tools and Panels Primer


By default, all panels are docked. Those gray borders
around the panels are actually the docks, and they are
permanently stuck to the sides of the Photoshop window.

The panel well that was found in
previous versions of Photoshop is
no longer available. It has been

Clicking and dragging the gray boundaries doesn’t move
a panel dock (Figure 1.2), but you can expand the dock
vertically or horizontally.

completely replaced by the docking
system.

Figure 1.2 Panels are enclosed in
docks—special constructs attached
to the edge of the screen. You can’t
move a dock, but you can resize or
collapse it.

If you want to move a panel to a different part of the
screen, grab the title tab of the panel and drag it out of the
dock (Figure 1.3).


















Figure 1.3 Move a panel out of the dock by clicking its title tab and dragging it.
When a panel is undocked, you can place it wherever you want.

You can resize the width of any dock by clicking its edge

If you really mess things up, you
can easily set all the panels back to
their default locations. To do this,
reselect the current Workspace by
choosing Window > Workspace >
Essentials.

and dragging. If you move your mouse pointer over the
edge of a panel, the cursor changes to a small arrow. When
you see this arrow, just click and drag to expand the panel.
Within a dock, you can click the border between panels to
change the size of any panel. As you enlarge one panel, its

neighbors will shrink.