Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Edit Menu

Undo/Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts, And More

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at the Edit Menu, part of Photoshop's Menu Bar located at the top of the screen.

Like Photoshop's File Menu, the Edit Menu is where you'll find a lot of things you'd expect to find in an Edit Menu, like Cut, Copy and Paste, Undo and Redo, a Spell Checker, a Find and Replace text option, and also like the File Menu, a whole bunch of options that are specific to Photoshop. Let's take a brief look at each of the Edit Menu's various sections, which are grouped together by the horizontal lines you see throughout the list. Undo and Redo The first group under the Edit Menu is our Undo and Redo section. If you make a mistake while working on a document and want to undo the change you made, simply choose Undo from the Edit Menu and your document reverts back to the step before you made the change. If you then change your mind and decide you didn't want to undo that last step after all, simply go back to the Edit Menu and you'll notice that the word "Undo" has changed to "Redo", allowing you to redo the step. While Undo and Redo are great features to have, they're extremely limited in the sense that they can only undo and redo the last change you made. There is no way to do multiple undo or redo's in Photoshop. Or is there? Why of course there is. Photoshop wouldn't be the world's best image editing program if you were stuck with one lousy undo and redo. That's where the next two options, "Step Forward" and "Step Backward" come in. Depending on how much memory you have in your computer and how many History states you've set up in Photoshop's preferences, you can step forward and backward through all your changes to your heart's content (or at least until you've run out of History steps or system memory, or both).

Fade

The second group under the Edit Menu has one solitary option it in, with the highly descriptive title of "Fade". What the "Fade" command does is allow you to make changes to the last filter or effect you applied to your image. It pops open a dialog box which allows you to change both the opacity of the filter or effect and the blend mode. There's one very strict condition with this option though - it only works as long as you haven't done anything else first after applying the filter or effect. As soon as you do something else, the "Fade" option becomes grayed out and is no longer available, so if you want to use the "Fade" option, choosing it must be the very next thing you do after applying to filter or effect.

Cut, Copy, Paste

The third group of options under the Edit Menu is where we find the standard "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste" commands which you're undoubtedly familiar with. One option you may not be familiar with is "Copy Merged", which is used when you have a document containing multiple layers and you want to make a copy of all the layers but have them merged into one layer above all the original layers, which is very useful to do when retouching or restoring a photo.

Another option you may not be familiar with is "Paste Into". "Paste Into" allows you to cut or copy a selection of an image and then paste it into another selection in the same image, or in a selection in a different image. It sounds a lot more confusing than it is, and it's used mainly for creative effects.

The final option in this section, "Clear", is basically just another word for "Delete" in that it will delete anything inside of a selection.

Spell Checker & Find And Replace

Photoshop may be at heart a pixel-pushing image editing application, but Photoshop's text and type abilities continue to improve with each new version. Since Photoshop 7, Adobe has been including both a Spell Checker and a Find and Replace command with Photoshop, and this fourth group under the Edit Menu is where we find them.

Fill & Stroke

The fifth options group under the Edit Menu is where we find the options to fill and/or stroke a selection. If you're familiar with other graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator, you'll be familiar with the terms. "Fill" refers to the area inside of a selection, which we can "fill" with a solid color or a pattern. "Stroke" refers to the outline of the selection, which we can color independently of the fill color.

Defining Patterns, Brushes and Custom Shapes

The sixth group under Edit is where we can define new patterns, brushes and custom shapes to use in our documents.

Purging Photoshop

The Purge command under the Edit Menu is located all by itself in its own group, and it allows us to free up system memory that's being used by the Undo command, the Clipboard, the History palette, or all three at once. This is useful if your computer has limited resources available and you're finding that the size of your document is causing Photoshop to perform poorly. Keep in mind though that once you've purged the information from your system's memory, it's gone forever, so it's a good idea to invest in as much memory for your system as you can afford. No amount of memory is enough for Photoshop, but still, the more you have, the better your chances of avoiding any noticeable performance issues.

Adobe PDF Presents and the Preset Manager

The File Info option, grouped all by itself, does precisely what it's name implies. It brings up a rather large dialog box where you can view, add and edit information about the document, such as the Document Title, Author, Description, Copyright Information, and much, much more.

Color Settings & Profiles

The second last group under the Edit Menu deserved an entire website unto itself and has to do with Photoshop's color settings and profiles.

Keyboard Shortcuts, Menus & Preferences

Finally, way down at the bottom of the Edit Menu is where we can change the default keyboard shortcuts that Photoshop comes with. We can even make our own shortcuts that didn't exist by default. How cool is that?