Open Panels?

Many of Photoshop’s features are found within the panels (they’re kind of like palettes that pop out from the side of the screen), and the most-often-used panels are already visible onscreen by default (like the Color panel, the Swatches panel, the Libraries panel, the Layers panel, and so on) and appear on the far right of the window. There’s also a thin horizontal panel across the top of the window called the Options Bar (when you’re using one of Photoshop’s tools, it shows all the options for that tool here). To keep your screen from being totally cluttered with panels, some panels are nested behind other panels, so all you see is a small tab sticking up with the name of the panel (see above left, where you see the Layers panel, and to the right of its tab you see two other tabs for panels that are nested with it—the Channels panel and the Paths panel). To see one of these nested panels, just click on its tab, and the full panel appears (see above right, where I clicked on the Channels tab, and now you see the Channels panel). Of course, there are a lot more panels than what you see onscreen at first. To open any closed panel (there are around 30 in all), go under the Window menu (at the top of the screen), and you’ll see all of them. Choose one and it opens onscreen, alongside the existing panels that are already open.

TIP: HOW TO MAKE PANELS “FLOAT”

If you want a particular panel to be detached from the rest, so it “floats” on its own, just click-and-drag a panel tab away from the rest of the panels and it “floats.”