Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The File Menu

New Document, Open, Close, Save, Print, Import/Export, Automate, and More

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at the File Menu, part of Photoshop's Menu Bar located at the top of the screen.

Photoshop's File menu is where you find many of the standard options you'd expect in the program, such as opening, closing and saving documents. A quick glance at the screenshot on the left though shows that there's quite a few more options than just those. Just as Photoshop's many options and commands have been categorized into 9 main menu categories in the Menu Bar to keep things simple, the options under each main category have also been grouped together into sub categories to make things easier. If you look closely, you'll see that under the "Open Recent" option is a horizontal line. There's another horizontal line under "Edit in ImageReady", and additional lines as you go further down the list. It may appear at first that these lines are there to underline or highlight certain options, but what they're really there for is to keep similar options grouped together. Creating/Opening A Document The first group, consisting of "New", "Open", "Browse", "Open As", and "Open Recent", is our "Let's open a document!" section. These options give us the ability to create a new Photoshop document, or open an existing document. You're not limited to opening just Photoshop documents though. Any number of file formats can be opened in the program, including jpegs, gifs, png files, tiffs, eps files, and the list goes on and on. You can even open Pixar files in Photoshop, for those of you who, you know, work at Pixar ("Toy Story", "Finding Nemo", etc.). The only odd duck in the list is "Browse" which doesn't create or open a document at all. Instead, it opens up the Adobe Bridge (in Photoshop CS2) which allows us to browse and navigate through all of our existing documents. The Bridge replaces the File Browser from previous versions of Photoshop and is now a completely separate program. You don't need Photoshop open to access the Bridge, although you certainly can access it from within Photoshop, as well as any of Adobe's other programs like Illustrator and InDesign.

Edit In ImageReady

The second group isn't really a group at all since it contains only one lonely option, "Edit in ImageReady". ImageReady is a companion program to Photoshop (it installs with Photoshop) and is used mainly to create graphics for websites. Clicking the "Edit in ImageReady" option will open ImageReady (if it isn't open already) and transfer your document over to ImageReady so you can do all sorts of web-related stuff which we won't cover here since ImageReady is a huge program in its own right and would require a completely separate website to cover it.

Closing/Saving A Document

If the first group was our "Let's open a document! section, this third group under the File Menu is our "Let's close our document!" section. Again, not overly exciting but it definitely has some useful options for us. The first option, "Close", will close only the document you currently have active. If you're only working on one document, it will close that document. If you have multiple documents open at once, selecting "Close" will close only the document you currently have active. To close every document you have open at once, select "Close All".

"Close and Go To Bridge" will, as the name implies, close your document and then open up Adobe Bridge where you can select the next file you wish to work on. Again, Adobe Bridge is only available if you're using Photoshop CS2, otherwise you'll see the File Browser in place of the Bridge.

The next four options in this section are for saving our document. If you're working on a previously existing document or you've created a new document and have already saved it at least once, choosing "Save" will save it again in its current state, overwriting the previously saved version.

If you've created a new document and have not saved it yet, choosing "Save" will automatically bring up the "Save As" option instead, which will allow you to choose where on your computer you'd like to save the document, and in which format. (It doesn't have to be saved as a Photoshop document. Other formats such as jpeg, gif, png, eps, tiff, and lots more can also be selected).

The next option, "Save A Version", is a more advanced option which we won't cover because it requires that you have Version Cue installed, which is only available as part of the full Adobe Creative Suite package.

"Save For Web" brings up a dialog box which allows you to save and optimize your document for use on a website. You may be wondering why Photoshop has a "Save For Web" feature when ImageReady, not Photoshop, is what handles all of Photoshop's web-related options and functions. The simple answer is that while you may never have a need for any of ImageReady's more advanced web-related tools (unless you happen to be a web designer), it is quite common to want to save a copy of a photo for uploading to a website or for emailing to someone after working on it in Photoshop, so Adobe included the "Save For Web" option right in Photoshop so we wouldn't have to keep jumping over to ImageReady just to do that one thing. It's interesting to note though that Photoshop's "Save For Web" dialog box is actually powered by ImageReady, so you are technically working inside ImageReady when saving a file for the web in Photoshop, even though ImageReady is nowhere to be seen. Strange, but true.

The final option in this group, "Revert", will revert your document back to the state it was in the last time you saved it. So if, for example, you open an existing document in Photoshop, make a bunch of changes to it, then decide you're not happy with anything you've done and you want to revert back to the way the file was when you opened it, choosing Revert will do exactly that.

Placing A File

The fourth group under the File Menu is for placing an existing file inside an open Photoshop document. Rather than opening two separate documents and then dragging one inside the other, Place allows us to essentially open one document directly inside another document.

With a document already open inside Photoshop, choosing the "Place" option brings up a dialog box allowing you to locate the file on your hard drive that you want to place inside your document. The file will then be inserted into your document on its own layer. In Photoshop CS2, when you place a file inside an open document, the file is placed as a Smart Object, which is a powerful new addition to Photoshop CS2. We'll cover Smart Objects in a future section.

Importing/Exporting A File

The fifth group under the File Menu is for importing and exporting files. Most of what's in this group qualifies as advanced topics which we're not going to cover here. One exception though is the Import option which allows you to import an image into Photoshop directly from your scanner. If you have a scanner hooked up to your computer and you have the drivers and other necessary software for it installed, your scanner will appear in Photoshop's Import options (you'll have to close and then open Photoshop again to see your scanner listed if you installed your scanner while Photoshop was already open). Of course, every scanner comes with different software with different options, so you'll have to consult your scanner's manual for instructions on how to use it.

Automation And Scripts

The Automate and Scripts group under the File Menu is where Photoshop can do all sorts of cool things for us while essentially on automatic pilot. You can have Photoshop create PDF presentations, or Web Photo Galleries, or Picture Packages and Contact Sheets which are great if you're a photographer. You can also create panoramic photos out of individual photos using the Photomerge option.

File Info

The File Info option, grouped all by itself, does precisely what it's name implies. It brings up a rather large dialog box where you can view, add and edit information about the document you're working on, such as the Document Title, Author, Description, Copyright Information, and much, much (much!) more.

Printing A Document

The next group under File Menu contains all of Photoshop's options for printing a document.

Jumping To Another Program

The next group is another one that contains only one option, the "Jump To" option. This option, which is also found in ImageReady and is quite honestly one you may never use, allows you to jump to another graphics or html editing program which you have installed on your computer. Since these other programs have nothing to do with Photoshop, we're obviously not going to cover them here.

Exiting Photoshop

And finally, way down at the bottom of the list is our last group, again with only one option, "Exit". Fairly self-explanatory. Choosing "Exit" will close Photoshop completely. If you have documents open when you choose "Exit" and you've made changes to these documents since the last time you saved them, Photoshop will ask you if you want to save the documents first before closing the program. You can choose to save or not save the document(s), or you can choose "Cancel" when asked to save the document and that will cancel Photoshop's shut down process and keep the program open and running.