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A: Yes. You can actually save all your favorite tools and most-used palettes in the exact locations you want with a few easy steps.

By Kim Herrera, Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop

When I'm at the office I have the benefit of multiple large-screen monitors. This is not the case when I’m at home or traveling with a laptop. I found the best solution was to save custom workspaces for each work environment. First, let's organize the arrangement of your palettes.

Close all palettes you don't plan on using. (Don't just collapse them, close them.)

From the Windows menu choose the palettes you want to display.

Drag the palettes into workspace area that you want them to appear in. The palettes I use most I leave in the work area; the ones I use less I drag up to the top left Palette Well for easy accessibility.

Go to Window> Workspace> Save Workspace and name it. Note: avoid punctuation marks in the name, such as /,:), etc.

Your workspace appears in Window>Workspace>

Now let's customize the tool presets. Customizing the tool presets is a way to allow easy access to tools you use most frequently with the same settings over and over. Instead of forever resetting your brush size to the right softness and diameter, or having to type in 5 x 7 in your crop tool repeatedly you can save it once as a tool preset with Photoshop’s Preset Manager.

To create your tool preset, first show your Tool Preset Palette. Window>Tool Preset

Choose a tool and change the options for that tool to what you need.

Choose New Tool Preset from the palette menu.

Name it and click OK.

Now you can customize different sets for whatever work environment or job you have at hand. I have a few different sets that I use. One is for portrait retouching and consists of paint brushes, healing tools, crop tools, and layers palette.

I have a separate set for product image photography jobs that consists of the Navigator palette, the pen tool, and special color swatches for the product. You can begin to see the many different uses for preset tools and saved organized workspaces.

Oh… and did I mention if you crash in Photoshop you can easily reload any saved workspaces and tool presets? Simply go to the pull down menu on the right side of your Tool Preset Palette>Load Tool Presets.

Ultimately, working organized is working smart, and that makes working easier and more productive.

Kim Herrera, Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop, is the color management expert for Logan Photography at Studio Exchange, Santa Ana, Calif., and runs KCH Digital, a digital artistry, education, and consultancy firm.