Quick Tip: Increase Your Real Estate in Photoshop
The 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!
Andrew Ferguson
July 5, 2007Another 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 🙂
Aaron
July 27, 2007I use a small secondary monitor and my jaw still dropped when I read this. Incredibly useful, thank you.
nan
May 17, 2008Amusingly useful; didn’t know that!
Ed
June 5, 2008Do 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!
Maria Gudelis
July 17, 2008I’m must getting to know Photoshop (a big step up for me from Picassa!) and your solution to get more real estate in Photoshop for my pictures is AWESOME – thanks for the tip! Maria Gudelis