The Photoshop Interface

These are some of the typical elements you will see when you open a file in Photoshop.
Click on a particular element or look below for a description of each.
More information on the different elements of the Photoshop interface can be found in the first chapter of The Photoshop Quickstart Guide.

Menu bar
Photoshop's many tools and commands can be found in the different menus along the menu bar.

Title bar
This bar is at the top of each document opened up in Photoshop. It tells you the name of the file (in this case, wave.jpg), the magnification of the image (80% in this example), and also the mode (RGB, which is the standard mode for images displayed on a computer monitor).

Document Window
This is the window that contains the image you are working on. You can have many document windows open at once even though you can only make changes to one file at a time.

Tool bar
This contains buttons for all the many tools that are available in Photoshop. Those tools that have a small arrow in the bottom right-hand corner (like the eraser tool, for example) have several different incarnations; if you click and hold down the mouse on that tool, the other options will appear.

Tool Options bar
The buttons, menus, and check boxes on this bar allow you to select settings for each tool on the Tool bar. The Tool Options bar is context sensitive, meaning that the available options change depending on which tool you are currently using.

Palettes
There are several different palettes, each one allowing you to view and/or edit different aspects of your image or tools. You can close any one of them by clicking on the X in the upper right-hand corner. If you are looking for a particular palette that is not in view, go to the Window menu and choose which one you would like to have visible. For more information on palettes, consult The Photoshop Quickstart Guide pgs. 10-19.