I find the Custom Workspace and User Palettes system (Elite Version) very difficult to set up. A lot of it seems illogical to me and involves strange dependencies.
The six buttons to display tools by family (Light, Color, Detail, Geometry, Watermak & Effects and Local Adjustments) stand on their own and have no relation to the palettes: if I delete all Palettes they are still working.
Up until now, I’ve always found it too confusing and hard to figure out. That’s why I’ve never used it.
How do you use it? Do you build your workspace from scratch?
I’d love to hear any good ideas for creating a great workspace.
While I have (successfully) created my own workspaces, I tend to find it easier to use the pre-set workspace rather than creating my own palettes and such. Mostly because I don’t have a “one size fits all” workflow when I edit, so I’d rather just leave things as they are.
That being said, while it’s maybe not the most intuitive process, it is probably the most-customizable interface I’ve seen amongst any photo editor.
Agreed, I end up waffling back and forth and end up spending more time trying to figure out the “perfect workflow” rather than just using the tools.
I can imagine a professional photographer who has a very specific workflow for a large percentage of their work finding value in this. But for a hobbyist like me, who does very different things with almost every photo, I just can’t commit to any particular flow.
Not perfect, but consider using the “Active Corrections” toggle with a custom preset(s) that includes all the specific correction tools you intend to use routinely, even if the setting is the default. When turned on, “Active Corrections” filters out the unused corrections. This whittles down the corrections to the ones you “need”, while still maintaining the organization in the default palettes.
My default preset includes the corrections I “always” want to consider, then, in other custom presets, specific tools are added for the various B&W or “artistic” photo styles. You can always turn off a correction if the photo does not need it, or turn off the “Active Corrections” toggle to grab a rarely used correction.
This helps me by filtering out the rarely used corrections for most photos, provides a default starting point, and a working list of corrections to consider systematically.
For example, I rarely use selective tone or clearview in my normal work, so these are excluded from the light palette. I rarely use color/B&W/photo papers, so this only shows up in my custom presets. I use crop and retouch from the toolbar but rarely the other geometry tools. I rarely use anything for the fx palette. So as I work through the normal pallets, I only see the items I want to review in my structured workflow.
For me, this is crop/horizon, light, color, local, and sometimes details.
At some point, I got into the habit of saving the modified palettes using uppercase letters – and/or if the position had been changed (to the left side or to my second monitor), also appending a number.
Thanks for pointing out this video. I had come across a couple of YouTube videos which I found relevant, with different presentational styles and approaches, but both of which I thought useful. Apologies that there seems to be a glitch with my normal methodology of posting links, but if you can be bothered to do some minor searching I would recommend the following:
