Tool Menu and Presets

Over the next couple of months we will be looking at and using the Tool Menu in more depth for our digi scrapping. We have already covered some of the basics of the Tool Menu, but a bit more detail never hurt anyone! One of the great things about Photoshop Elements are the "preloaded" files it contains, full of exciting "toys". These are known as Presets and contain several types of Photoshop objects such as brushes, shapes and color swatches.

When you purchase new digi stamps in the form of Photoshop brushes (.ABR format) or Custom Shapes (.CSH format) you may wonder where you will place them once you have them unzipped? The starting point for most of these is within the Adobe program folder on your pc. If you navigate to your Photoshop folder and expand the Photoshop Elements folder, you will see a bunch of folders listed beneath. The one we are interested in is called Presets. Click on that and you will find many of the types of object format that come supplied by Adobe for use in your software.

You can see I have combined my screen prints above, to more easily see the flow as you drop down through your folder structure. With some versions of Photoshop Elements you may have no choice as to where you place your objects. In PSE7 for instance, you would store your Custom Shapes in the Customs Shapes folder within the Presets folder. Others, such as gradients and brushes can be stored in the relevant Presets folders or in folders external to Photoshop, as you will see a little later.

So how do we access these Presets in Photoshop and how do they interact with the Tool menu? Take a look at the screen print below of the Tool Menu from PSE7. Remember that there are more tools available in Photoshop than first meets the eye. Look at those icons that have a little drop down arrow at the right. This means they can be expanded to show other, similar tools.

Here I have selected the Custom Shape Tool. Notice now that at the top of the screen an Option Menu has appeared? This is unique to each different tool or set of tools. If there are more choices to make, you will again see a little drop down arrow at the side of the option boxes. In this case I have clicked on the arrow and brought up the options available in PSE7. You can see the different sets of Custom Shapes, allowing you to select just a set to use, or pick all of them, so you can scroll through and choose. If you had installed any free or purchased Custom Shapes into the Custom Shape Presets, then this is where you would be able to see and select them.