Learn how to make Adobe Photoshop your default image viewer and editor for popular file formats like JPEG, PNG and TIFF, as well as Photoshop's own PSD format, in Mac OS X. Written by Steve Patterson.
Even though every copy of Photoshop, whether it's a standalone version or part of a Creative Cloud subscription, includes a free and powerful file management program called Adobe Bridge, many Mac users still prefer the Finder for locating and opening their images. While there's nothing technically wrong with that, there is one annoying problem; Mac OS X, at least by default, ignores Photoshop when we open images directly from within a Finder window. Instead, it prefers to open them in Apple's own Preview app with its basic and very limited set of image editing features. Since Photoshop is obviously our editor of choice, let's learn how to easily configure Mac OS X so that our images will automatically open for us in Photoshop every time. Note that this tutorial is specifically for Mac users. For the PC version, see.
![Quick Photoshop App For Mac Quick Photoshop App For Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125396533/174320041.jpg)
Using a Photoshop-level image editor to do simple image editing would be an overkill and require a steep learning curve. For that purpose you can get Preview is the default quick file viewer that comes with macOS. We can safely assume that even Mac users uses the app every day to get a quick. Anyways I now use KeyCue for Mac which a tremendous tool for showing shortcuts while in the App itself. But it cannot provide every shortcut that you have compiled in your sheets. So again, thank you so much, as I’m too old and tired to do them any more.
This is lesson 2 of 10 in. Turning On File Name Extensions First, navigate to a folder on your Mac that contains one or more images. Here, I've opened a folder that's sitting on my Desktop.
Inside the folder are four image files. Starting from the left, we have a PNG file, a JPEG file, a Photoshop PSD file, and a TIFF file.
How do we know which file type we're looking at? We know because of the three letter extension at the end of each name. The TIFF file opens in Photoshop. Image credit: Adobe Stock. PSD Files Finally, while Mac OS X will usually set Photoshop as the default app for opening PSD files (since PSD is Photoshop’s native file format), it still never hurts to check.
Plus, if you have multiple versions of Photoshop installed on your computer, it’s worth making sure that your PSD files will open in the newest version, as we're about to see. I'll return one last time to my Finder window where I'll Control-click on my PSD file ('performer.psd') and choose Get Info. The PSD file opens in Photoshop.
Image credit: Adobe Stock. Where to go next. And there we have it!
That's how to make Photoshop your default image editor in Mac OS X! If you're also a Windows user, learn how to make Photoshop your default image editor in. In the next lesson in, we'll learn using the redesigned New Document dialog box!
Or check out any of the other lessons in this chapter:. 02. Make Photoshop your default image editor in Mac OS X. For more chapters and for our latest tutorials, visit our section!