Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Document Window

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at the Document Window, part of Photoshop's user interface.

Photoshop's Document Window

For all of Photoshop's features and capabilities, options, palettes, tools, and raw pixel-pushing horsepower, it really boils down to one thing - how good we can get the image to look. And in order to know how we'll we're doing, we need to be able to see the image as we're working on it. That's where the Document Window comes in. This is where we get to actually see the image when we first open it, and what effect all of our changes are having on the image.

The screenshot at the top of the page is of a photo I took recently of a hot air balloon passing overhead, and the image is appearing inside the Document Window for me to view it inside Photoshop. There's more than meets the eye though with the Document Window, as it doesn't only show the image. There's also some very useful information being displayed along the top and bottom of the Document Window, as we'll see in a moment..

The top of Photoshop's Document Window showing information about the image.

The screenshot above is a close-up of the top of the Document Window from the first screenshot on the page. As you can see, we're not only seeing the photo of the hot air balloon in the window. We're seeing additional information about the image as well. Starting from the left, "_MG_5527.CR2" in the name of the image (that's the name it was given automatically by the camera). Incidentally, the ".CR2" extension on the end indicates that this image was opened from the Camera Raw format as opposed to a standard jpeg image. The next bit of information listed, "25%", represents the current zoom value of the image. In other words, the image is currently being displayed in Photoshop at 25% of its actual size.

Following that, in parenthesis, we have "Background", which indicates that I currently have the Background layer selected in the Layers palette, followed by "RGB/16", which is telling me that the image is currently using the RGB color mode, and is a 16-bit image, which is the bit depth I chose when I opened the image inside Photoshop's Camera Raw dialog box.

The bottom of the Document Window showing additional information about the image.

The top of the Document Window isn't the only place you'll find information about the image. The screenshot above is a close-up view of the bottom of the Document Window from the screenshot at the top of the page. The value of 25% on the far left is another indication that the image is currently being viewed at 25% of it's actual size, just like it says at the top of the Document Window. The difference here though is that unlike the information at the top, which is strictly read-only, the information along the bottom can be changed. For example, you can click your mouse inside the box showing the current zoom level at the bottom of the Document Window and type in a new value, which will change the document's zoom level. Want to view it at 50% instead? Simply click inside the box, type 50%, and hit Enter (Win) or Return (Mac) on the keyboard and the zoom level will change. A handy trick is to hold the Shift key down when hitting Enter or Return, which will keep the focus inside the box, allowing you to type in another zoom value immediately and try it out without having to first click inside the box again.

Moving a bit further to the right, you'll see information that reads "Doc:45.6M/45.6M". This information represents the current size of the document. It may seem strange having "45.6M" displayed twice, but what you're seeing here is two separate bits of information. The first "45.6M" number on the left is telling me that if I flattened all the layers in the image into one layer, the layer would be 45.6MB in size. The second "45.6M" number on the right is telling me what the combined size of the image with all of its layers is. In other words, the unflattened version of the image. Normally, the number on the right is much higher than the number on the left, since every layer you're using in the document takes up a certain amount of memory depending on the contents of the layer. However, in this case, I took the screenshot right after opening the image in Photoshop, and when you first open an image, it contains only one layer, the Background layer. So in my case here, since I only had one layer in the document, both the flattened and unflattened versions were exactly the same. If I was to make a copy of the Background layer, the number on the right would double in size, since I would then have two layers, both containing 45.6MB worth of image information.