Photoshop ships with a workspace designed to showcase every panel for every possible use case. It’s like walking into a kitchen where every utensil is displayed on the counter. Technically everything is accessible. Practically, it’s a mess.

Building custom workspace layouts for your specific tasks is one of the highest-impact productivity moves you can make. It takes ten minutes and saves you thousands of clicks over time.

Why Custom Workspaces Matter

Every time you hunt for a panel, you break your creative flow. Every time you accidentally close something and have to go to Window > whatever to bring it back, that’s friction. Workspaces eliminate that friction by putting exactly what you need on screen and nothing else.

Different tasks need different tools. Retouching portraits needs different panels than compositing landscapes, which needs different panels than designing social media graphics. One workspace can’t serve all three well.

Building a Retouching Workspace

For portrait and skin retouching, here’s what I keep visible:

Left side: Tools panel (narrow, single column)

Right side, top to bottom:

  • Layers panel (this needs the most space)
  • Properties panel (for adjustment layers)
  • Channels panel (for luminosity selections)

Hidden: Everything else. No Swatches, no Paragraph, no 3D, no Timeline. Gone.

I also maximize the canvas by using Tab to toggle panels off when I need to see more of the image. With a retouching workspace, Tab toggles between “panels visible” and “full screen canvas,” both of which are useful states.

Building a Compositing Workspace

Compositing requires different tools:

Right side:

  • Layers panel (large — you’ll have dozens of layers)
  • Properties panel
  • Libraries panel (for assets you drag in frequently)

Bottom dock:

  • Color panel
  • Brushes panel

The key difference from retouching is the Libraries panel. When compositing, you’re constantly pulling in elements — textures, overlays, stock images. Having Libraries docked means drag-and-drop access to everything.

Building a Design Workspace

For graphics and social media:

Right side:

  • Layers panel
  • Character and Paragraph panels (you’ll need both for type work)
  • Swatches panel (for brand colors)
  • Properties panel

Top bar: Make sure the Options bar is visible with the type tool’s formatting options easily accessible.

How to Save a Workspace

Once you’ve arranged your panels:

  1. Drag panels to reposition them. Dock them to edges, group them as tabs, or float them.
  2. Resize panels by dragging their borders
  3. Close panels you don’t need (right-click the tab > Close)
  4. Go to Window > Workspace > New Workspace
  5. Name it (e.g., “Retouching”, “Composite”, “Design”)
  6. Check “Keyboard Shortcuts” and “Menus” if you’ve customized those too
  7. Click Save

Your workspace now appears in Window > Workspace and in the dropdown at the top right of the interface. Switch between workspaces with a single click.

Pro Tips for Workspace Management

Save a “Reset” state. After creating your workspace, immediately go to Window > Workspace > New Workspace and save it again with the same name. This sets the reset point. If panels get moved around during a session, Window > Workspace > Reset [name] snaps everything back.

Use keyboard shortcuts to switch. Assign shortcuts to your workspaces under Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts > Window > Workspace. I use Shift+F2 for retouching, Shift+F3 for compositing, Shift+F4 for design.

Keep the Layers panel large. This is the single most-accessed panel in Photoshop. Give it the most vertical space. Stack other panels as tabs behind less-used panels.

Use dual monitors wisely. If you have two screens, put your image on the main display and all panels on the secondary. Window > Arrange > New Window creates a second view of the same document, so you can have a zoomed-in detail view on one screen and the full image on the other.

Audit your workspace monthly. As your editing style evolves, your workspace should evolve too. If you notice yourself constantly opening the same panel from the Window menu, dock it. If a docked panel hasn’t been touched in weeks, close it.

A workspace should feel invisible. When everything is where your hands expect it to be, you stop thinking about the interface and start thinking only about the image. That’s the goal.