Digital Photography Community

Photoshop Tutorial - Basics - The File Menu

In the next eight tutorials we will be looking at the eight Photoshop menus and some of the more common options and submenus inside them. This tutorial will cover the File Menu and its common options.

The eight menus are of course the ones that you see at the top of the Photoshop program window (minus the "Help" menu, and Mac users have a "Photoshop" window, since OS X adds that extra window as a matter of course).

The Photoshop Menus

This Photoshop tutorial is again meant as a foundational lesson, and if you are generally familiar with the program already, you will probably want to skip this lesson. I won’t be using many screen captures on this one. Mainly because it is easy to follow on your own screen, and it would take up too much space.

If you have an earlier version of Photoshop or you are using Photoshop Elements, then not all of the menu options will exist in your version. That is just fine, most versions of Photoshop can do most of what you will ever need to do. Newer and more advanced versions just give us more options, and most of the newer options just make it easier to do what the others could already do.

File Menu

The file menu holds the basic functions of most File Menus in most programs (Open, Save, Close, etc.) But there are a few common options that are unique to Photoshop that you should become familiar with. I won’t go over all the extra File Menu options because most of them are advanced and I rarely have to use them, but here are some you might want to get to know:

• Open Recent - This is a nice feature that Photoshop shares with other programs. It lists the last ten files you have opened and it allows you to quickly find a recent file.


• Save As... - This is pretty straight forward, but it is a nice one to know. It allows you to save the changes you have made to the file, but to save them as a new file (and in a new place if you want) without saving over the original file you opened. An even better technique than this, however, is to make a copy or duplicate of the original file and open up and work on that copy instead. That way you don’t have the ability to accidentally save changes over the original.


• Save For Web... - If you want to put an image up on a website, you will want to make it pretty small in comparison to the size images need to be for printing. You will also want to save it in a format that websites use as well as make its size as efficient as possible so it loads fast, but is still a quality image. Save For Web helps you do that more easily.


• Revert - If you have messed up so badly that you need to start over, the Revert option will (in essence) close the file without saving it and open the orignal again.


• Automate - This opens up a sub menu with a bunch of options. The automate options are varied, but a few of them come in really handy. You can play around with the Contact Sheet, Web Gallery, and Picture Package for presenting groups of photos. The Batch and Fit Image options are what I like to use often and they will come up more in my tutorials


• File Info... - This one is fun, you can open up any image and if the meta tags (the hidden file information) is stil there, you can see such things as when it was taken, by what camera, what settings were used, etc. You can also add copyright information, a title, and other keywording.


• Printing - You will notice there are actually a lot of printing options. Printing is actually a very advanced skill set if you want to get exactly (or as close as possible) what you want the first print. We’ll be doing a whole group of tutorials that involve printing and color management (which is getting your various digital devices and software to agree on color and density so what you get out of a printer is what you saw on your monitor and what you saw through your camera).

I haven’t discussed a number of the File Menu options, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or important, it is just that these ones will probably come most in handy for normal use. For the other menus I will also not be covering half or more of the menu options. I will note again that the various Printing options are very useful, but those will come later in basic and advanced printing tutorials.