From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

Opening files in Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Opening files in Photoshop

“

- [Narrator] When you first launch Photoshop, it displays a home screen to help guide you to the files that you want to work with. Now, don't be alarmed if you're new to Photoshop and your home screen doesn't look exactly like the one that you see here. Adobe often updates and customizes the content that appears in this screen. Now, I'm currently recording these videos using the public beta of Adobe Photoshop. Anyone with a Creative Cloud subscription and includes Photoshop can become a part of the Creative Cloud beta program to test apps and share feedback directly with Adobe. If you work for a large company or institution, you may need to check with your IT department to see if it's appropriate for you to install and work with the beta. Throughout this course, I'll be highlighting the differences between the beta and the final shipping version so you'll have a clear understanding of what to expect. As the product is updated, you might notice some slight changes as potential features are introduced into the beta. This is all part of today's development process, and I'm excited to share these updates with you as we go along. Now, if you've already been working with Photoshop, you'll see your recently open documents down in this area. For now, I'm going to choose to hide the suggestions. To open a new document from the home screen, we can click on the new file. Across the top of the new document dialogue, we'll see a number of different categories as well as a recent and saved categories. We can click on any one of the categories in order to see the default document presets. We can click to view more presets, and if we scroll down, we'll see a number of templates. The presets and templates that you see here might differ as Adobe updates them. Depending on the monitor that you're on, you can also enlarge this window in order to see more templates and presets. We'll use the options on the right-hand side of the screen in order to define the size of our new document. I'm going to change the width to 12 and then the height to 8, and we can see that it's set to inches. We can also quickly change the orientation by clicking on one of the icons, set the resolution in either pixels per inch or pixels per centimeter, choose a color mode as well as a bit depth, and the background color. Under the advanced options, I'm going to change the color profile from working to Adobe RGB. We'll cover many of these options in more depth later in the course. Now, if we think we're going to open files using these settings often, we can create a preset. I'll click the downward-pointing icon, and then we can give it a name, in this case, 8 by 12 inches and 8 bit. Once I save the preset, we can see it under the saved area as well as under recents. If I ever wanted to delete a saved preset, I could simply click on the trash icon. I'll go ahead and open this by just double clicking on it, and when I do so, Photoshop will open the document and hide the home screen. I'll go ahead and click Got It in order to dismiss this, and then I'm simply going to close the file by clicking on the X icon, or we could choose the file menu and then select close. As soon as we close all of our open documents, we will return to the home screen. Now, if I want to open a specific image, I can click open and then navigate to the file that I want to open. The first time we open a document, Photoshop is going to ask us if we want to open a document from the cloud. I'm going to choose on your computer instead, and then I'm going to navigate to the desktop where I've downloaded the exercise files. I'll choose 01, opening files, and then double click on the Iceberg.JPEG file to open it in Photoshop. Now, Photoshop supports many different file formats, which again we'll talk about in depth later in this course. To access the home screen while a file is open, we can click on the home icon, and to hide it, we can click on the Photoshop icon. You can also open files or create a new document by using the file menu and choosing new or open. All right, let's go ahead and close this document, and when we return to the home screen, we can see that that document is automatically displayed in the recent files area. The home screen has additional options. We can click on learn in order to view Adobe's built-in tutorials. The generative workspace option enables us to generate AI to batch create images. Now, this is a feature that you will only see if you're working with the beta. Your files will display any files that you've saved from Photoshop into the cloud as a cloud document. The cloud document is a special file format. They're stored in the cloud and they're optimized for transferring Photoshop files between devices like your desktop and your iPad. We can also see files that have been shared with us, and if you use Lightroom, you can access your files from the home screen. If you're working with Lightroom Classic, you can see the files that you've placed into a collection and synchronize with the cloud, and then open the smart preview into Photoshop. We can also see any deleted files. Those are files that you've deleted from the cloud that you can recover for 30 days. We'll cover these options in more in depth in later chapters, but as you can see, there are several quick and easy ways to create new documents, save new document presets, and open files in Photoshop.

Contents