Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Menu Bar

Home of the File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, and Help Menus

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll do a quick overview of the Menu Bar, part of the Photoshop Interface.

Photoshop's Menu Bar (Windows version).

If you've been using a computer for any length of time, you're undoubtedly familiar with the concept of a menu bar, usually located at the top of the screen. With most programs, it's where you'll find the standard options to open, close, save, and print files, as well as various other options and commands specific to that program.

Photoshop is no different. You'll find the Photoshop menu bar in its usual place up in the top left corner of the screen, and it's where you can open, close and save your Photoshop documents, change your Photoshop preferences and keyboard shortcuts, crop and resize your photos, and view Photoshop's Help file. But those are just the most basic options. Photoshop's menu bar allows you to do so much more.

As you can probably imagine, a program like Photoshop has more options than you can wave a Magic Wand tool at, so to try and keep things simple and well organized, Adobe has divided the options into categories. The words you see in the menu bar (File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, and Help) are not options themselves but rather the main category names. There's 9 main options categories in total, and clicking on a category name will open a drop-down box displaying all the various options that Adobe has placed in those categories. Starting from the left, we have:

• The File Menu
• The Edit Menu
• The Image Menu
• The Layer Menu
• The Select Menu
• The Filter Menu
• The View Menu
• The Window Menu
• The Help Menu

Select the Photoshop menu categories above to learn about them in more detail.