Photoshop CS2 has a ton of new features, added to the existing plethora of features, turning Photoshop's menus into small novels. The latest version of Photoshop allows you to customize your menus as much as you could imagine. This tutorial will show you how to tame your new mess of menus.
Start by going to Edit > Menus or Ctrl + Alt + Shift + M. You should see a large dialog box similar to this:
You can see that Adobe already has a few presets programmed in, with the normal features to save, load and delete presets. The preset files are stored in your Photoshop CS2 > Presets > Menu Customization folder on your hard drive.
You'll also see that you can alter your Palette menus along with the Application menus. Your Palette menus are the fly-out menus you see when you click on the little arrow on the right in your Palette. And the Application menus are along the top of, well, the application.
So let's get to customizing... click on the arrow of whichever menu you want to start customizing.
You basically have two options: whether the menu is visible or not, and what color the menu is.
Personally, since I have never had a reason to adjust the Pixel Aspect Ratio, I'm going to turn it off. Just click on the Eye icon and it will disappear.
It also grays out all of the sub-menus underneath that item.
Now, when I go to my Image Menu, I can no longer see "Pixel Aspect Ratio." What I do see though, is the "Show All Menu Items" at the bottom.
So, you can see your menu items are hidden, not lost forever.
One of my favorite new CS2 features is the Smart Object Layers. Since I'm finding myself using these features a lot, I'm going to highlight them.
In my Menus editor, I scroll to find Layers then find Smart Objects. Click under Color on "None" and a drop down of color options open.
I chose Red. Now, when I go to my Layers menu in the program, it looks like this:
Pretty cool, huh?
Now all I have to do is save my settings by clicking on the Diskette Icon at the top.
Name my settings and save!
Click to enlarge
In case you didn't notice, there's also a way to edit Keyboard Shortcuts Ctrl + Alt + Shift + K. It's a very similar setup to editing the menus, so I'll let you figure it out.
