Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual

Arranging Open Images

The Application Frame (Meet the Application Frame) and tabbed document workspace help you keep track of several open documents. If you turn off the Application Frame, your documents can get scattered across your screen. However, you can herd those open windows together by using the list of commands that appears when you choose Window→Arrange (see Figure 2-13). Here are your choices:

• Cascade stacks your windows on top of each other, putting the largest one on the bottom and the smallest on the top.

• Tile resizes your windows to identical sizes and arranges them in rows and columns.

Figure 2-13. You can use the Arrange command to create order out of chaos by tiling (top) or cascading (bottom) your windows. You can also use the Arrange Documents menu (shown opened here) in the Application bar to view your windows in a variety of ways. You can't cascade tabbed documents because they're attached (or rather, docked) to the top of your Photoshop workspace. The fix is to choose Window→Arrange→Float in Windows first, and then choose Cascade.

Up To Speed: Document Size vs. Canvas Space

One thing that's super confusing to Photoshop beginners is the difference between document size (also known as image size) and canvas size. In Photoshop, the canvas is the amount of editable area in your document (it's the same as your document's dimensions) and you can add to or subtract from ...