Photoshop CS3 Essential Preference Settings

If you've just installed Photoshop CS3, whether you've upgraded from an earlier version of Photoshop or this is your first experience with the program, one of the first things you should do is make sure you have everything set up properly in Photoshop's Preferences, which have been changed quite a bit in CS3. You may not find any options here that would, say, cause your computer to explode if set incorrectly, but there are definitely some options that will help both you and Photoshop work more efficiently. We're not going to cover every single preference, since your head would undoubtedly fall onto the keyboard before we made it to the end, but we'll look at some of the more essential ones, the ones that give us the biggest bang for the buck. Or at least, they would if it actually, you know, cost something to make changes to the options, which it doesn't. But if it did, boy, these are the ones I'd be changing if I was looking to get my money's worth.

Photoshop CS3 Essential Preferences: How To Access The Preferences

If you've been using a previous version of Photoshop, one of the things you'll notice with CS3 is that Adobe has reorganized and renamed some of the Preferences and even added a couple of brand new categories which we'll look at in a moment. Before we do though, we need to know how to access the Preferences. If you're on a Windows system, go up to the Edit Menu at the top of the screen, choose Preferences, and then choose General. On a Mac, it's a little different. Rather than going up to the Edit menu, go up to the Photoshop menu instead, then choose Preferences, and then choose General. Or, an even faster way to access the Preferences is to use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+K (Win) / Command+K (Mac). Regardless of how you get there, you'll be presented with the Photoshop Preferences dialog box, set to the "General" options:

Photoshop CS3's Preferences dialog box set to the General options.

One difference to note right away between Photoshop CS3's Preferences dialog box and previous versions of it is that there is no longer a drop-down list at the top where you go to select the various categories. Instead, they're now all listed conveniently along the left-hand side:

The various categories are now listed along the left-hand side of the Preferences dialog box.

Since we already have the "General" Preferences open, let's start by looking at a few important General options.

General Preferences: Image Interpolation

In the General Preferences section, the first option we need to look at is the second one from the top, Image Interpolation:

The "Image Interpolation" option in the General Preferences.

"Image interpolation" has to do with how Photoshop handles the pixels in your images when you resize them. Photoshop CS3 comes with the same interpolation options that we've had since version CS, so there's nothing new here, but it's important that we set this option correctly because it affects image quality.

The general rule with the interpolation options is that we use Bicubic Sharper for reducing the size of an image, and Bicubic Smoother when enlarging images. There's also another general rule though that says we never, ever enlarge images in Photoshop unless we have no other choice because enlarging images forces Photoshop to create new image information out of thin air, which hardly ever works out well. So, since we'll be making our images smaller 99.99% of the time, it's a good idea to set our Image Interpolation option to Bicubic Sharper. Setting this option here also affects other areas in Photoshop, like what happens when we crop or transform images. So go ahead then and set this option to "Bicubic Sharper".

General Preferences: Automatically Launch Bridge

The next option worth looking at in the General Preferences is Automatically Launch Bridge:

The "Automatically Launch Bridge" option in the General Preferences.

This one isn't quite as important as the Image Interpolation option we just looked at, and in fact it's really more of a personal preference, but worth looking at anyway. This option determines whether or not Adobe Bridge will launch automatically when you open Photoshop CS3. If you find that you use Bridge a lot when working in Photoshop, turn this option on. Bridge usually takes a few seconds to load, so if you have it launch with Photoshop instead of manually launching it later, you won't have to sit there waiting for it. If, on the other hand, you don't find yourself using Bridge all that often, leave the option unchecked.

General Preferences: Export Clipboard

Another option definitely worth looking at in the General Preferences is Export Clipboard:

The "Export Clipboard" option in the General Preferences.

Unless you're in the habit of copying Photoshop files and pasting them into other programs, which is highly unlikely, turn this option off (uncheck it). Leaving it on will only slow your computer down for no good reason and may even throw up a nice little error message from time to time. No need for it.

General Preferences: Use Shift Key For Tool Switch

Another one of those personal preferences options is Use Shift Key For Tool Switch:

The "Use Shift Key For Tool Switch" option in the General Preferences.

This option has to do with how you access tools in Photoshop's Tools palette which are hidden behind other tools. For example, the Elliptical Marquee Tool is hidden by default behind the Rectangular Marquee Tool, yet both of them have a keyboard shortcut of M. With this option checked, you would access the Elliptical Marquee Tool by holding down the Shift key and then pressing M. With the option unchecked, you'd simply press M twice, once for the Rectangular Marquee Tool and then again for the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Maybe I'm just lazy, but having to add the Shift key to the keyboard shortcut seems like an unnecessary step. I'd rather just press the letter twice, or three times depending on which tool I'm after. Your choice.

That covers the essential options in the General Preferences. Now let's look at a brand new category in Photoshop CS3 - theInterface.