Today’s Question: I noticed in one of your (excellent) video tutorials on Photoshop that you had the “Save a Copy” command on the menu highlighted in green. How did that color get added, and can I do something similar for the menu commands I use most often?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can assign a highlight color to individual menu commands in Photoshop in the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus dialog. The colors you assign can be preserved by saving a workspace configuration that includes your customized menu options.
More Detail: Photoshop enables you to assign a highlight color to individual menu commands, so you can color-code commands in different categories or mark the commands you use most frequently for quicker access.
To get started go to the menu and choose Edit > Menus. This will bring up the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus dialog, opened to the Menus tab. You can navigate among the menu commands by expanding the sections for each top-level menu you’d like to update commands for and locating the applicable command.
To the right of each command there are options for Visibility and Color. You can click the eye icon to toggle the visibility of menu commands off or on, so that for example you can hide menu commands that you know you’ll never need to use. More importantly in the context of today’s question, you can click in the Color column for a menu command to bring up a popup menu where you can choose a color to use for the command.
You can save the menu configuration within the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus dialog, but I recommend simply saving the updated menu configuration with a saved workspace. You can click the OK button to close the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus dialog when you’re finished configuring the highlight colors for menu commands. Then go to the menu and choose Window > Workspace > New Workspace. This will bring up a dialog where you can enter a name for the new workspace, and to preserve your changes to the menu configuration turn on the “Menus” checkbox. You can then click the Save button to save the workspace.
You can select the workspace you want to use by choosing Window > Workspace and the name of the saved workspace from the menu. You can also reset the current workspace to the saved configuration (such as after having moved some panels around) by choosing Window > Workspace > Reset (with the name of the current workspace shown after “Reset” on the menu).
I demonstrated how to configure menu colors along with the overall Photoshop interface in Chapter 1, Lesson 4, “Configuring the Photoshop Interface”, in my new comprehensive course on “Photoshop for Photographers”. You can learn more about this course on the GreyLearning website here:
https://www.greylearning.com/courses/photoshop-for-photographers-2024
