I’m not sure if I’ve ever shared this before on this site, but this is one of my original Photoshop CS3 tutorials, giving an introduction to the user interface – looking at the windows, menus and toolbars as you first get started with the Photoshop CS3 user interface.

Below is a transcript of the video tutorial.

Hello, and welcome to this edition of PhotoshopDemos.com. I’m going to show you a couple little basic tricks about the new toolbar in Photoshop CS3. I’m a little excited tonight just because I’ve made several attempts to make some video recordings, screen captures, using the Cam Studio free version. And, needless to say, it’s been a total freaking disaster.

So anyway, yeah, finally I got some settings set up, so I’m hoping that this is going to work out. Without further ado, I want to show you some new tools.
As you can see in Photoshop CS3, you have a toolbar for Photoshop. And it looks a little bit different at the very first sight. You basically have a long strip of tools versus the previous version that looks something like this.

So this little arrow will basically set your toolbar back to its normal previous state that you were used to in previous versions of Photoshop. They’ve done everything that they can in this version of Photoshop to reduce the amount of crap that you have to use in Photoshop while you’re working.

So notice all these new little arrows up in the top of your tool menus and that will quickly allow you to minimize or maximize any of your toolbar settings in Photoshop. Basically, all your palettes have been condensed and shrunken down into small little sections. They’re a lot easier to get to and view.

The only thing that you’re going to have to get used to is some of these new little icons that maybe you’re not familiar with and just kinda remember what they are, like Actions is the little play button. And this one here is like your history and your actions, whatever.

I mean all these menus can be customized. But the key here is just knowing that you can collapse or expand any of your menus at any time.
The other thing with this particular menu, you’ll notice that you have, again, you can always click on this particular section to get the Photoshop help if you need to do that. And you can click the arrow to collapse or expand the toolbar into a double or single row. And like always, any of the icons that have that little arrow down in the corner, and I know it’s really hard to see, so either you’ll have to turn on your accessibility or your…you know, if you have trouble seeing this, you’re just going to have to either look closer to your screen or increase your screen resolution, because some of the icons are a little bit hard to see.

But yeah, basically any of those little arrows in the lower part of the actual icon mean that you can actually click and hold on that particular icon and you’re going to get this fly-out menu with several different options.

So if you hit T, you are going to get any of these options here. And basically, these little things here, the P and the T’s that you see on like the text tool if you hold this out, the T here, that just means that those are the shortcuts keys that you can use to scroll through those different text options. So if you hit T, you’ll basically scroll through the different types here.

So if I select Horizontal Type Marker and I hit T, if I’m on another tool or something it’s going to bounce right back to that. So if you want to leave one of them as a default, you can actually go through and set like…if you want to leave this as like the Free Pen tool, if you want to leave it that one or whatever, you can select that one.

So within your toolbar, you actually have several other different options within that toolbar. It’s not just like a matter of clicking on one and then scrolling through. Like basically just click and hold for a few seconds and this other little dialogue will pop up so that you can get some of these other options.

The nice thing about your toolbar too is if you want to collapse it you can do that as well. And then, also, if you want to come up here, you can optionally hide your tools or you can enable them here if they’re not showing.

So if you go into a different mode, you’ll notice if you hit F on your keyboard, that enables fullscreen or not fullscreen. And what that does, as you’ll see here, is if I open up a document…and let’s see, let’s just find something. I’ll just open up one of these…how about a picture of Hillary Clinton looking like the Joker?

Yeah, basically, I downloaded this photo because I thought it was rather comical. Somebody had taken this photo and made it look like the Joker, painted her face white and her hair green and stuff. It’s pretty funny.

But anyway, so you’ll notice how it opened in this window; like it left the toolbar and everything where it is. Well, if I go into fullscreen mode, you’ll notice that you get some different options here. So you’ll see that now this is a floating window; this is now a floating window. And if I hit F on my keyboard it’s going to toggle through the different modes. And you’ll notice that now this is in full mode. And if I hit F again and then use my spacebar, it’s going to turn into a hand and I can move this object around.

Now, the key with this whole thing is, is if you hit F you’ll go into having the back of the screen black, and you don’t necessarily want that. But the other thing is that you can actually drag your toolbar to where you want it.

So again, if you want to match that back up to the side, expand and track the arrows on the side. But if you want to pull your toolbar out, you just drag it out like that and then you can move it around like that. Hitting the F key will toggle between fullscreen modes. If you go into fullscreen, you can basically take that, pop it right back in the side. And you’ll see that that changes.

So those are some ways to familiarize yourself with the toolbar. I hope that helped. Play around with it, see what your different popout menus are. If you have any questions or concerns or anything else, just visit PhotoShopDemos.com. Thanks for watching. Talk to you next time.