Adjusting the Photoshop preferences

Hi! In this video we’re going to look at changing your preferences to work with web. Now, by default, Photoshop comes out of the box ready to do a lot more print orientated work, so what we need to do is go into preferences and change it for web.

Now, first thing we’re going to do is turn on our rulers, okay, so we’re going to go to view and down to rulers and what that will do is it’ll show me how wide this document is. Mine is set to centimeters because I’m in Europe and yours will be set to inches if you’re in America. Now what’s happening here is you can see its showing me about 16 centimeters. Now when we’re dealing with web we don’t want to know what the centimeter value is, we want to know what the pixels are, so we need to change this unit of measurement to pixels.

To do that, we’ll go up to on a MAC, go to Photoshop CC, go to preferences and go to one that says units and rulers. Now if you’re on a PC it’s in a slightly different place, you go to edit and right down the bottom here there’ll be one that says preferences and then you go to units and rulers. So whichever one lets make it to units and rulers and what we want to do is, mines set to centimeters, yours might be set to inches or millimeters. Lets change the rulers to pixels.

The other thing we need to change is the type. Okay? Type uses points typically when we’re dealing with print. For what we want to do is switch it out to pixels because that’s the measurement we use dealing with web. When I click okay, you’ll notice that its now roughly about 1200 pixels wide and when I go to the typetool, which is this T here, you’ll notice that I’m dealing with pixels instead of points.

One thing to note is that if you’re a person that is moving from print to web you’re going to have to go back and change those preferences every time you want to work on a different type of document.

So to do it on a MAC we’re going to Photoshop, down to preferences, and go down to units and rulers, remember if you’re on PC its under edit, preferences, units and rulers and you’re going to put it back to either inches and centimeters and type goes back to points.

Bit of a pain but that’s what we have to do. I’m going to click cancel because I want to leave it as it was set to pixels.