Photoshop Settings

Workspace Preferences: Optimizing Screen Real Estate

Your workspace settings dictate how documents and menus behave on your screen. Optimizing these can give you significantly more room for your actual canvas by reducing UI clutter, which is especially important if you are working on a laptop or a single-monitor setup.

• Auto-Collapse Iconic Panels
• Auto-Show Hidden Panels
• Open Documents as Tabs
• Enable Floating Document Window Docking
• Large Tabs
• Align UI according to OS settings
• Enable Narrow Options Bar

Under the Options Section

• 1. Uncheck “Auto-Collapse Iconic Panels” (Personal Preference) (Keeps your workspace clean and maximizes canvas area)

When the option is unchecked, and you open a panel (like Layers, Properties, or Brushes) from its icon, it stays open until you manually close it. Checking this option tells Photoshop to automatically collapse the panel back into an icon as soon as you click away from it to work on your document. This prevents floating menus from cluttering your screen and blocking your view.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Check "Auto-Collapse Iconic Panels"

• 2. Check “Auto-Show Hidden Panels” (Improves workflow when using the ‘Hide Panels’ shortcut)

Pressing the Tab key is a popular shortcut to temporarily hide all your tools and panels for a distraction-free view of your canvas. When this setting is checked, you can simply hover your mouse cursor at the very edge of your screen, and the hidden panels will temporarily slide back out so you can grab a tool without pressing Tab again.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Check "Auto-Show Hidden Panels"

• 3. Check “Open Documents as Tabs” (Keeps multiple files organized)

If you open multiple images in Photoshop, this setting ensures they open in a neat, browser-like tab bar at the top of your workspace. If you uncheck this, every image will open in its own overlapping “floating window,” which quickly creates a chaotic and messy workspace.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Check "Open Documents as Tabs"

• 4. Check “Enable Floating Document Window Docking” (Allows easy snapping of floating windows)

Sometimes you need to pull a document tab down to create a floating window (for example, to look at two documents side-by-side). Checking this box allows you to easily snap that floating window back into the main tab bar by dragging it to the top of the screen until a blue highlight appears.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Check "Enable Floating Document Window Docking"

• 5. Check “Large Tabs” (Improves readability)

This simply increases the size and text of your document tabs. It is highly recommended to leave this checked, especially if you are working on a modern, high-resolution monitor where standard text can appear too small to easily read at a glance.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Check "Large Tabs"

• 6. Uncheck “Align UI according to OS settings” (Personal Preference) (Prevents weird UI scaling issues)

This setting tries to match Photoshop’s interface scaling to your Windows or Mac operating system scaling settings. Unless you are experiencing specific issues where the Photoshop UI looks disproportionately huge or tiny compared to your other apps, it is usually best to leave this unchecked to let Photoshop handle its own rendering.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Uncheck "Align UI according to OS settings"

Under the More Options Section

• 7. Check “Enable Narrow Options Bar” (Personal Preference) (Condenses tool settings for smaller screens)

This setting shrinks the Options Bar (the horizontal menu at the top of the screen that changes depending on which tool you currently have selected) so that the icons and text take up less space. If your screen is feeling cramped or you find that some tool settings are being cut off at the right edge of your screen, enabling this is a great solution.

Note: Changes to this specific setting will not take effect until the next time you restart Photoshop.

Navigation: Edit > Preferences > Workspace > Check "Enable Narrow Options Bar"