Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Help Menu

Adobe Help Center, System Info, Updates, How To's, And More

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at Photoshop's Help Menu, new and improved in CS2.

Photoshop's Help Menu is fairly straightforward in that nearly every option you'll find in this menu category has to do with, well, help with Photoshop. As with the other menu categories, the Help Menu has been divided into related sub-categories of options, as indicated by the horizontal lines. The Help Menu may be simple and straightforward, but Adobe has made some significant improvements to the Help section as of Photoshop CS2. Let's take a closer look at each section. Help and Welcome The first group in the Help Menu is where you'll find the single most important option in this category, "Photoshop Help". This is also where Adobe has made significant improvements. Much like the File Browser in previous versions of Photoshop has now become a completely separare application in Photoshp CS2, so to has the Help section. It is now its own separate application, called the "Adobe Help Center", which you can bring up with by selecting "Photoshop Help" from the Help Menu or by pressing the F1 key on the keyboard, which is of course the easier and quicker way. Also similar to the new Adobe Bridge, the Adobe Help Center is no longer specific to Photoshop. If you have additional Adobe products installed on your computer, such as Illustrator or InDesign, a drop-down box at the top of the Help Center will allow you to select all of the Help information for those programs as well.

Inside the Help Center over on the left is a scrollable section with four tabs at the top, "Contents, "Index", "Search", and "Bookmarks". The Contents section displays a collapsible tree view of all the various topic covered in Help which you can click through to get to the topic you're looking for. Index lists the same information in alphabetical order.

The third tab from the left, Search, is a bit misleading because it doesn't actually allow you to search anything. Instead, it displays the results of your search. The search box itself is located in the Help Center's menu bar at the top of the screen. This is where you can search for a specific topic in the Help Center and the results of your search will appear in the Search tab.

Finally, the Bookmarks tab displays a list of any and all pages inside the Help Center which you've bookmarked. Like the Search tab, the Bookmarks tab doesn't actually give you the option to bookmark anything. It simply displays a list of all the pages you've bookmarked (the Bookmark option itself is up in the Help Center's menu bar along with the Search box). The nice thing about this feature is that if you have additional Adobe products installed as well, like Ilustrator and InDesign, and you've bookmarked various Help topics inside the Help sections for those applications, the Bookmarks tab will display a list of all of your bookmarks regardless of which application they're for. You can easily tell which application the bookmark is for because the name of the application is listed along with the help topic.

Plug-In Information

The second group under the Help Menu contains just one option, "About Plug-In". Clicking on this option will bring up a list of every plug-in currently installed, and selecting a plug-in from the list will bring up various bit of information about that specific plug-in, including copyright info, the author's name, and a brief description of what the plug-in does.

If you're thinking, "I've never purchased any additional plug-ins for Photoshop so I probably don't have any listed", go ahead and click the "About Plug-In" option. You'll be surprised to see how many plug-ins you actually do have installed. The reason is because many of the features and filters that you would think are built in to Photoshop are actually plug-ins. Even something like the "Save For Web" option, which is found in the File Menu and allows you to save a web-optimized version of your image, is really just a plug-in which Photoshop installs automatically.

Of course, if you do own additional plug-ins which you've installed, they will also be included in the list.

Export and Resize

The third group under the Help Menu contains a couple of options which are actually wizards, "Export Transparent Image" and "Resize Image". Both of these wizards are designed as a way for people too lazy to take the time to learn Photoshop to complete a couple of simple tasks. Of course, you're not one of these lazy people since you're taking the time to read this and learn Photoshop properly, so let's just forget these two options even exist..

System Info

The Help Menu's fourth group contains one option, System Info, which does nothing more than bring up information about your computer and the version of Photoshop you're running. This information may be helpful if you're receiving technical assistance, or if sitting back on a Saturday night reading technical information about your computer is something you like to do.

Registration and Activation

The fifth Help Menu group is where you can register and activate your copy of Photoshop.

Updates

Moving down the list, the sixth group contains a couple of options, the first being "Updates" which brings up the Adobe Updater and is where you can update not just Photoshop but any other Adobe products you have installed as well to the latest versions, if a newer version exists to the one you currently have installed.

Below that is the "Photoshop Online" option which, when clicked, opens up your web browser and takes you to Adobe's Photoshop website.

How To...

The second last group in the list offers a bunch of shortcuts to specific topics in the Adobe Help Center. These options, such as "How To Print Photos", are essentially the same as if you had these topics bookmarked inside the Help Center.

How To Create How Tos

And finally, the final section in the Help Menu, "How To Create How Tos", shows you how to add more topics to the "How To..." section above.