In the previous versions of Adobe Photoshop, whenever you create or open a new document. You end up with a free floating window; this is ok but sometimes, you end up with so many free floating windows that some could be hidden below others and your workspace could get pretty messy. In Adobe Photoshop CS4, there’s a solution to that in a new feature called tabbed documents. If you open a several documents in Photoshop CS4, they do not float freely but instead they snap together in a single document window in a form of tabs.



To cycle through the documents, you can either click on the tabs or you can make use of a keyboard shortcut by pressing the Ctrl+~ in a PC or the Command+~ key on a Mac. Pressing Shift+Ctrl+~ or Shift+Command+~ goes the other way around. One thing to remember about the order of cycling through tabs is that, the documents are ordered in the order by which document is opened first and not on the order of their placement on the document window.

If you want to remove a document into its separate free floating window, there are two ways to do that. You can either drag the tab away from the tabbed document window and release, and it will float to its own free floating window,



Or, with the tab selected in the single document window, Go to the Window menu, select Arrange and then choose Float in Window.



You can also select Float All in Windows to release all documents in their own windows or, Hit Consolidate All to Tabs to bring them back into tabbed form.
If you don’t like the way Photoshop CS4’s behavior of arranging documents into tabs, you can always disable it by editing Photoshop’s preferences. On a Mac you access those by going to the Photoshop menu at the top of the screen, in a PC Its under the Edit menu, choosing Preferences, and then clicking on Interface.



In the Preferences dialog box, uncheck Open Documents as Tabs and Enable Floating Document Window Docking in the Panels & Documents section of the dialog box.



There is another related feature in Photoshop CS4, and that is the ability of viewing multiple documents in various layout arrangements. You can view the different layout arrangements by going to the application bar and selecting one of the layouts.



These layouts are useful if you want to compare one document to another, or move or copy a layer from one document to another. Feel free to experiment with what layout you are most comfortable with.
And that comprises our tutorial on working with document layouts.