#How to Turn off Photoshop’s Large Animated Tooltips

By default, Adobe Photoshop displays large animated tooltips (called “rich tooltips”) when you hover over tools. They’re handy at first, but can quickly become annoying. Here’s how to turn them off.

Types of Tooltips in Photoshop

Photoshop shows two types of tooltips: 1) regular tooltips, and 2) rich tooltips. A regular tooltip displays the name of the tool you’re hovering over. Like so:

But a rich tooltip shows how a tool works with animation. Like this:

When rich tooltips are enabled, Photoshop hides the regular tooltips. Turning off the rich tooltips lets you see the regular ones, but you can also turn off all tooltips if you want.

How to Turn off Rich Tooltips in Photoshop

To hide animated tooltips, first, launch Photoshop on your computer.

If you’re using a Windows PC, click the “Edit” menu at the top of the Photoshop window and select Preferences > Tools. If you’re a Mac user, click “Photoshop” in the menu bar and select Preferences > Tools.

In the Preferences window that appears, uncheck the “Show Rich Tooltips” option. Then, click “OK” on the right to save the changes. (On some versions of Photoshop, you might see this option listed as “Use Rich Tooltips” instead.)

If you want to disable regular tooltips as well, uncheck the “Show Tooltips” option, which is located above the rich tooltips option. Otherwise, it’s OK to leave those enabled.

If you change your mind and want the rich tooltips back, just reopen Photoshop Preferences > Tools and place a check mark beside “Show Rich Tooltips.” Then click “OK.”

While you’re working on cleaning up the Photoshop interface, you might want to remove the unwanted menu items from the app. This makes the Photoshop menus look cleaner.

RELATED: How to Hide (and Unhide) Menu Items in Adobe Photoshop