Adobe Photoshop Noob

[Foen]

Having gotten thoroughly fed up with Corel PSP, its inability to work on my machine and Corel's achingly inept support, I finally took the plunge and acquired a copy of Adobe Photoshop. Lovely - it installs and runs just fine on my PC ... except there seems to be a problem between keyboard and seat.

While I can figure out how some of the clever stuff works, I am at a loss to understand a couple of really basic things:

There don't seem to be any icons on the toolbars for File menu stuff, like Open or New. It seems odd to have to navigate menus for such frequently-used commands, so I'm sure I'm missing something; and
There doesn't seem to be a status bar or anything that records the current location of the cursor, the size of the area being selected etc. This is dead handy for grabbing the right amount of an image for use in icons or frames, where did they put it?

Can anyone offer some advice please?

Stuart

[Oberoten]

I expect you have a newer version than I do.
Either way I might be able to answer some questions.

F8 will bring up the info-tab. This one shows the data you requested from the toobar.

As for open/close, new part it is the same old CTRL-S // CTRL-N // CTRL-W thing as always. Sadly no option for it to show on the topbar since that is used for tool-settings.

- Obe

[Zeus]

I'm running CS4 so hopefully its the same version as you have or close.

As Oberoten states either F8 or Window->Info from the menu bar will open the Information panel which you can dock on the left/right/top bars depending on which workspace setup your running. It should contain all the information your looking for.

As for File icons etc. I mainly use the keyboard shortcuts of Ctrl+N (New), Ctrl+O (Open), Ctrl+S (Save), Ctrl+Shift+S (SaveAs) and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S (SaveforWeb) so have never really even looked to see if they could be enabled. I'll have a poke and if I find anything I'll post an update here.

Aside from that how are you finding Photoshop?

[Bidmaron]

Foen, I too am having problems with PSP. I have thought about upgrading to Ultimate PSP X2 (I just have whatever the non-ultimate version of X2 is). I am using Vista 64, and the support idiots charged me $15 to tell me it won't work on my machine due to a registry conflict. I don't want to give up on PSP because I'm used to the program (old dog - new tricks kind of guy), and I can't afford the huge price of adobe stuff.

My problem I have with PSP is I have uninstalled and reinstalled by every technique known to man, but when I start the program, it just stops itself without narry a warning even. (no window ever opens, although the task bar at bottom shows it and then it closes).

Is that your problem too?

[Foen]

Same problem in Vista x64 Business. Sometimes the window opened briefly, but then crashed back out again :o(

[Bidmaron]

You are right that Corel support sucks. Do you have PSP X2 Ultimate? I am tempted to upgrade to that to see if the problem is fixed. Currently, I have just PSP X2.

[Foen]

I couldn't bring myself to spend more money on PSP and didn't go for Ultimate.