Quick Tip: Increase Your Real Estate in Photoshop
By Brian Auer • July 5th, 2007The Photoshop interface can get to be quite cluttered with toolbars, histograms, actions, layers, etc. Every one of these things decreases your available viewing area for your photo, making it harder to work with. So when you need more room, press the “TAB” key — it hides the toolbars and give you a nice (nearly) full-screen view of your image. This is effective for things like fitting the image to the screen or working at 100% magnification. The newer versions of Photoshop will temporarily bring back a toolbar when you mouseover the sides of the screen — which will allow you to change tools and such. If this doesn’t work for you, just press the “TAB” key again and your toolbars will reappear. Ta da!
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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Another trick is to grab a cheap / small secondary monitor. If you check your local freecycle, you can often get 13-17″ CRT monitors for free.
Use your second monitor to house all your toolbars
I use a small secondary monitor and my jaw still dropped when I read this. Incredibly useful, thank you.
Thanks for the tip. I get tired of moving the toolbars around! My previous solution was just to buy a bigger monitor…
Amusingly useful; didn’t know that!
Do you know, that had been doing my head in for years! I use photoshop regularly but I’m not an accomplished user and it really annoyed me having all of the toolbars in the way of an image. When I closed the toolbar, I’m such a divot that I could never work out how to re-open them. thanks for the tip, don’t even know how I stumbled on this page, it has just solved one of lifes little mysteries though!