In this tutorial I will look at the standard Photshop user interface and run through the uses of all visible tools so you have a good idea of what I will be referring to in the following tutorials when I apply many of these tools and functions to example images.
The Basic GUI (Graphical User Interface):
1. Toolbox
2. Menu Bar
3. Layers Palette
4. History Palette
5. Navigation Palette
6. Image Window
1. Toolbox
When multiple tools share a single toolbox slot, you select the tool you want from a menu-style list by click-holding on the icon and dragging out onto the menu to select the tool you want to use. Also, when you position your cursor over a tool, Photoshop tells you the name of the tool and how to select it from the keyboard.
The following list is a general catalogue of the of the most useful tools in the toolbox with quick summaries as to how you can use them.
Rectangular Marquee
Drag with this tool to enclose a portion of the image in a rectangular marquee, which is a pattern of movin dash marks indicating the boundary of a selection.
Elliptical Marquee
Drag with the elliptical marquee tool to enclose a portion of the window in an oval marquee.
Move
Drag to move a selection or layer. In fact, the move tool is the exclusive means for moving and cloning portions of an image.
Lasso
Drag with the lasso tool to select a free-form portion of the image. You can also alt-click with the lasso to create a straight-sided selection outline.
Polygonal Lasso
Click hither and yon with this tool to draw a straight sided selection outline. Each click sets a cornerpoint in the selection.
Magnetic Lasso
As you drag with the magnetic lasso tool, the selection outline automatically sticks to the edge of the foreground image. Bear in mind, however, that Photoshop's idea of an edge may not jibe with yours. Sometimes works wonders - sometimes is too much trouble.
Magic Wand
Click with the Magic Wand tool to select a contiguous area of similarly colored pixels. To select noncontiguous areas, click in one area and then shift click another.
Crop
Drag with the crop tool to enclose the portion of the image you want to retain in a rectangular boundary. Photoshop tints areas outside the boudary to help you better see which image areas will go and which will stay when you apply the crop.
Slice
The slice tool and its companion, the slice select tool come into play when you're creating web graphics. You can cut images into rectangular sections - known as slices - so that you can apply web effects, such as links, rollovers and animations etc.
Healing Brush
The clone stamp tool (also known to long-time Photoshop users as the Rubber Stamp tool) has alwasy seemed like a miracle worker when removing unwanted elements from an image. Although excellent results were possible, you still had to be careful that the texture and shading of the cloned area matched the area you were replacing. Although the healing brush tool seems at first just like the clone stamp - its special 'healing' process lets you clone details from one area without obscuring the texture and shading of the other.
Brush
Drag with the Brush tool to paint soft lines. If you're thinking that sounds dull, wait until you learn about the multitude of settings available to you in the Brushes pallete.
Pencil
Drag with the pencil tool to paint jagged, hard-edged lines. It's main purpose is to clean up individual pixels when you're feeling fussy.
Clone Stamp
This tool copies one portion of the image onto another. Alt-click the part of your image you want to clone, and then drag to clone that area to another portion of the image. Get playing with this tool as it's extremely useful for airbrushing.
Red Eye Removal
First found in Elements, this tool is much appreciated by users of CS2. Used to get rid of the bizarre glow in the eyes of those too close to the camera's flash, this simple tool restores the pupil based on simple options bar settings.
Eraser
Drag with the eraser tool to paint in the background color or erase areas in a layer to reveal the layers below.
Gradient
Drag with this tool to fill a selection with a gradul transition of colors, commonly called a gradient. You can click the gradient icon in the toolbox and select a gradient style from the options bar.
Paint Bucket
Click with the paint bucket tool to fill a contiguous area of similarly coloured pixels with the foreground color or a predifined pattern.
Blur
Drag with the blur tool to diffuse the contrast between neighbouring pixels, which blurs the focus of the image. You can also alt-drag to sharpen the image.
Sharpen
Drag to increase the contrast between pixels - which sharpens the focus. Works similary to the blur tool.
Smudge
Works as it's name implies - drag to smear colors inside the image.
Dodge
Drag with this tool to lighten pixels in the image.
Burn
Drag with this tool to darken pixels.
Horizontal Type
Also known simply as the type tool, click with this tool to add vector text to your image. The other type options selected by click-hold-dragging include vertical type, vertical type mask and horizontal type mask.
Pen
Click and drag with the Pen tool to set points in the image window. Photoshop draws and editable outline, much like a path in Illustrator - that you convert to a selection outline or stroke with color.
Freeform Pen
Works similarly to the pen tool, but is completely freehand.
Rectangle (Vector Shapes)
There are 6 vector drawing tools, each represents a different type of shape, shift-dragging while drawing these on the workspace maintains the proportions to create perfect squares, circles etc. The polygon tool (number 4) gives the option to choose the number of sides and the custom shape tool provides a selection of predefined shapes to choose from.
Toolbox Controls
Well that's about it for CS2's main tools, except for a few more called controls - which are for selecting colors and controlling the workspace.
Foreground Color
Click the foreground color icon to bring up the color picker dialog box. Select a color and press enter or return to change the foreground color, which is used by the pencil, paintbrush, airbrush, gradient, paint bucket, text and shape tools.
Background Color
Click the background color icon to display the color picker and change the background color as above. There are also several different uses for the background color including creating gradients between foreground and background as well as having the immediate ability to switch between the 2 easily.
Switch Color
Click the switch color icon to exchange the foreground and background colors.
Default Colors
Click this icon to return to the default fore and background colors - black and white.
Other toolbox controls include quick mask tools, different window size options and a quick transfer into Adobe ImageReady - Photoshops companion Web graphics program.
2. Menu Bar
The main menu bar within Photoshop is generally the same as most applications - just containing it's own options. There are far far too many options to go into in this tutorial but over the series I will delve into them and relate/refer to different options and controls accessed through the menu.
3. Floating Palettes
When you first launch Photoshop, all the palettes appear in one of the two places - on-screen and in the docking well (the grey section on the far right of the top menu bar - contatining tabs for brushes, tool presets and layer comps) - that is, except for 2 of them - the charcter and paragraphs palettes. With the default workspace in use - the navigator, history, layers, color swatches and tools are visible. Again, there are far too many palettes to get into depth in this tutorial but I will investigate them individually later throughout the series.
To hide palettes you can simply click on the x in the top right corner or to fully control them click on 'window' in the main menu bar and tick/untick the desired palettes.
To briefly describe the main default palettes:
Navigator
With the help of this palette you can control the view of your image - this is useful for working with images larger than your standard viewing size or if you are zoomed in. Use the view box to move around the image which will translate to moving around your full size main image. You also have the ability to adjust magnification and manually zoom in and out.
History
The history palette provides a history of all the changes or simply anything you have done with your image for the past (programmed) number of steps. To adjust how many states the history remembers - go to 'edit - preferences - general' in the main menu bar and change the history states box.
Layers
Within Photoshop each item placed on the workspace has it's own layer - this way you can easily manage, move, add effects to and basically manipulate each object in any way without affecting the other items/layers. Within this panel you can choose to hide/lock/unhide specific layers by clicking on the small box to the left of each layer. You can also rename and move layers in front/behind one another. At the top of the palette you can see controls to adjust the oppacity (how opaque it is) and fill (useful for vector shapes with a colour fill to maintain the outline) and change the layer blending mode (the drop down box with 'normal' as a default). Tools at the bottom of the layers palette provide the options to delete, duplicate and add new layers and even folders to help categorise the layers - this is extremely useful when working with large projects that require lots of individual images.
Again, I will come back to the layers palette many times within these tutorials.
6. Image Window / Workspace
This is the large area in the center of the screen where you can see your canvas once you have chosen the size and resolution by going to 'file - new' in the main menu bar. To further adjust the dimensions of your canvase size you can right-click on the title bar of the workspace and go to 'image size' to adjust resolution or 'canvas size' to play with the actual canvas measurements.
The workspace contains horizontal and vertical rulers along the top and left sides - these can be turned on or off by going to 'view - rulers' or using the shortcut (ctrl+r). In the bottom left of the workspace it states the zoom level which can also be changed here by simply clicking in the space and changing it. The workspace size can be changed by pulling at the edges when the double sided arrows appear or by clicking the different size options at the bottom of the toolbox.
When dealing with more than one file/project at once - Photoshop will generate individual workspaces for each file - these windows can be minimised and maximised within Photoshop just like normal windows.
Next Time...
This about covers the basics of the visible workspace you encounter when opening Photoshop. In the next tutorial I will take an example image and apply many of the tools and functions mentioned in this tutorial to demonstrate the different ways they can be used and to help get to grips with them...
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This tutorial was created by Nathan Beck (RedSwish) for use on the Photomime website and other chosen sites. I spent a lot of my time on this tutorial so please don't copy it to pass off as you're own... otherwise enjoy! More coming soon.
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