Essential Graphics in Photoshop?

It’s all a matter of perspective: Some people are stunned at the things that they are used to in Photoshop that are not present in Premiere Pro and After Effects, like not seeing a Layers panel.

Having used all three applications for over 30 years, I can tell you that Essential Graphics is a relatively new feature (maybe not more than 10 years old) designed to make it a lot easier to edit graphics and text for video. For example, Essential Graphics is important for customizing motion graphics templates (MOGRTs). In fact one whole tab of Essential Graphics lists the motion graphics templates. But, Photoshop is not (primarily) a video editor. So Photoshop has its own tools that might be better suited for its still image editing. 

Put another way, Essential Graphics is available only in Adobe video apps, and is not available in any Adobe apps for any other media: Essential Graphics does not apply to InDesign page layout, Illustrator drawing, Acrobat document editing, Firefly generative AI, or Photoshop/Lightroom photo editing. Essential Graphics is only available for video editing.

Essential Graphics can do a lot of different things, so where we need to point you in Photoshop depends on what it is you are missing in Photoshop. If you can be more specific about what kinds of controls and options you are looking for, we can tell you where they are in Photoshop. So the big question you can answer for us is:

What do you do in Essential Graphics that you need to be able to do in Photoshop?

For example, if you want a single panel for editing the settings for a selected layer, including appearance, then Ged_Traynor already showed you the answer: In Photoshop (and also Illustrator and InDesign), it’s the Properties panel. However, some effects may be in the Layers panel.

@Manual from what I can see, the equivalent to the Essential Graphics panel in Premiere Pro would be the Properties panel in Photoshop

Not sure why you thought Photoshop had an Essential Graphics panel