Photoshop has so many dierent work areas and tools that it can become confusing, or even intimidating, to use Photoshop in a production environment. Fact is, there are only three particular zones or areas that you really need to become familiar with: Tools, Menus, and Palettes. In this rst chapter, I’ll cover how to set up the general Photoshop workspace. Setting up your workspace for ecienty production will create a more pleasing experience, allowing you to focus on the main objective: getting your work done.

Creating your own ecient production environment will take just a little experimenting. It’s kind of like learning how to use to a Wacom tablet; you have to put away the mouse for a few hours, but once you become comfortable with the tablet, it creates a more productive experience.

Most of the time, my physical oce is pretty well organized. OK, sometimes it appears to be organized chaos. But the fact is, it’s fairly well constructed for productive work. When I’m working in Photoshop, retouching or creating montages, setting up the working environment for production is actually much easier than it is in my physical oce. Because it’s so important to focus on the task at hand when you’re working in Photoshop, I’ve designed the following methods to eliminate what I call “Visual Confusion”—the state of having too many things to look at when I’m working in Photoshop.

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