How to: Get rid of tabbed image behavior in CS4

Last Friday I attended an official Adobe Seminar day at Bournemouth University and sat through one of the most entertaining lessons on Photoshop i've had in quite some time, unfortunately this was mainly due to an amusing American speaker, whose talent for whacky commentary and slick presentation skills rather over shadowed the basic level of the techniques showcased. However one thing I did take away from the session was a great little fix for a really annoying design change from CS3 to CS4, and one that I know annoys several many other photographers as well, pro retouchers included.

I am of course referring to the tabbed window default behavior in CS4 that automatically tabs image files into one window when opened. This is extrememly annoying when trying to drag & drop different images quickly into a layer stack when compositing as in this mode layers cannot be dragged & dropped meaning that each image has to be opened pulled out of the tabbed window pane and then dropped into the master image stack, which seems a totally counter intuitive and inefficient method for what should be a relatively easy operation.

Now before people point out that images can automatically be loading directly into the layer stack via the File>Scripts> Load files into stack.. I know this. I'm talking about the general visually intuitive drag and drop interface that was so easy in CS3 and that crucially allowed images that where already open to be quickly stacked into layers.

But low and behold with an ironically simply click of a button it is easy, its just not something that anyone bothered to mention, well at least not me until now.

So here it is just take your horribly tabbed window.

Hit this sheepishly conspicuous 'Arrange Documents' button here: (highlighted in red)


Select the appropriate arrangement ( Tile all in grid works well for me).

Hey presto all your tabs should now appear gridded just like in the good old days and ready to be drag and dropped into layer stacks. If you preffer this style its easy to make sure you never hav the tabbs show up by defualt again. Just head to the Photoshop>Prefferences>Interface tab and un-check the box marked 'Open documents as tabs'

Hope this is as much help to your work flow as it is to mine.