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Introduction to Photoshop

Hi, I'm Ben Wilmore and I'll be your teacher in this Photoshop boot camp. And if you're wondering, why should you be taking this class? Who's this guy? What's her qualifications? That kind of stuff might as well just give you a kind of intro. So, you know, a little bit about me, um, I've been using Photoshop since before. It was called Photoshop, before Adobe had anything to do with it. And that means I've been using it for well over 30 years and more importantly than that, I've been teaching it for over 20 years. In fact, I've written over a dozen books on it. Here's one of my old books, see how thick that thing is, wrote that whole thing. And here's my latest book. You can find this at Barnes and Noble or Amazon or wherever it is you buy books. And what's good about that is I've taught so many times that I've gotten so many questions that I know how to anticipate the questions you're gonna have as we progress through a course. So I will hopefully answer your questions as you would be...

thinking of them. At least that's my plan. And you might be thinking is this class the right level for you? Well, I'm used to teaching from absolute beginners to literal NASA space astronaut kind of level people and everything in between. So, what I'm gonna do is whenever I introduce a topic, I'm going to teach it how I would like to be taught, that would mean imagine I didn't know the topic. What would be the best way for me to introduce it to someone knowing that I want to get them to the point where I am now or similar to it. Meaning that you can become uh a, a level of uh knowledge about Photoshop that is above what you would usually find in any beginning class, any intermediate class. Instead we're gonna get you to the point where you're upper intermediate and you're very comfortable with what you're doing. My goal is really to make it so you truly understand what you're doing and you feel confident and comfortable in Photoshop because all too often you take a class and you kind of learn recipes where you just kind of blindly follow the steps. And I don't want to do that. I want you to understand the steps that we go through so that you can customize them to do something that I never taught you in the class because you'll actually understand the individual tools you use. So you can combine them in any way you want. But even if you're an intermediate or semi advanced level user. You're gonna learn a lot here as well because there are a whole bunch of new tools. They're constantly adding new stuff to Photoshop and few people really get in there and, and notice all the changes that they've made and they don't think about necessarily the best way to utilize that, especially to utilize it in a way that it might not have been designed for initially and, but it can be much more powerful if you do. So, that's part of what we're gonna be doing. Now, if you have any questions, as I'm going through this, I have a Facebook group that you can join and ask as many questions as you'd like there, a lot of the other people taking the course, they'll also be in that group. And so you can kind of do a little bit of conversation between you guys and I in there as often as I can usually each day in the evenings and I answer as many questions as is practical, but I find so often other people beat me to it and they give great answers. And so I concentrate on the more difficult questions to make sure that they get nice coverage. So we're gonna have about two dozen lessons and we'll progress throughout starting from what I consider to be the absolute essentials. And if I cover a topic early on, like let's say masking or retouching, they'll likely be another lesson on that same topic later on in the course, that will be about a more advanced level of the same thing. You just need a little practice with the more fundamental features. Before you get into the advanced methods of uh working with that stuff. Before we dive into Photoshop, let's take a look at how we can preview our images, rename them and organize them a bit. And in fact, the programs we can use for doing that, we can also use to do some initial adjustments. And in fact, I would say over half of the images that I work with never actually make it into Photoshop. They just don't need to because in these two programs, I'm gonna talk about or three programs, uh I can often finish them. So the programs that Adobe offers for doing this are Adobe Bridge along with something else called Adobe camera, then Lightroom and another version of Lightroom called Lightroom Classic. And let's talk about the difference between those and how you might want to decide which one to use. And then I can give you a brief tour of each. So first Bridge Bridge is something where if you can install Photoshop and you usually do that through the Creative Cloud app that comes from Adobe, you will also have access to Adobe Bridge and Bridge is what you could call a file browser. The reason it would be called a browser is because in some ways it acts like a web browser. Think about a web browser. How useful is a web browser when you don't have any internet. If your internet is disconnected, you can't do much in a web browser. Well, the same is true with bridge but, but it doesn't have to do with being connected to the internet. It has to do with having the hard drives that contain your original pictures connected to your computer or not bridge can show you only the contents of hard drives that are actively connected to your computer. So if you have a huge drive that's sitting in your office and you're at home away from there, Bridge would not be useful when it comes to those images. Lightroom. On the other hand, there are two versions of lightroom. There's one, they just call light room and the other one is called Lightroom Classic. The one just called Lightroom. It can act as a file browser where you can just browse the files that are on your hard drive and, and do all that or you can tell it to take your original pictures and upload all the originals to the cloud so that they're stored on Adobe servers. And therefore you don't have to worry about having hard drive space or doing backups or other things like that because Adobe manages all that stuff. Then there's another program called Lightroom Classic in Lightroom Classic catalogs your photos. What that means is when you tell Lightroom Classic to pay attention to a folder of images, it remembers them, not just where they're stored, but what they look like. And because of that, you can disconnect the hard drive that contains the original pictures, grab your laptop and travel and you can still view all the images you've ever told Lightroom Classic to pay attention to. And that makes it very versatile and it makes it my main choice for working with images. Initially, I use Lightroom Classic, but you're welcome to use any of the other two options. Now, bridge, just so you know, has an advantage over either version of lightroom and that is lightroom ignores certain files. It wants to only show you images and that means mainly photographs, but it can do videos as well. And it's gonna ignore files that are from Adobe illustrator, uh Adobe in design PDF files, Microsoft word files, anything that is likely not a picture, it's just not gonna show it to you whereas Bridge can preview all that kind of stuff. And so even if I use Lightroom classic, I'm still gonna keep Bridge around for the time that I need to work with those kinds of files. And either version of lightroom has the potential to completely replace uh both bridge and another thing called A W camera, which is where you could do some initial adjustments to your images. So if you currently happen to use Bridge and you see me do something in lightroom, know that you could replace bridge with lightroom and that's what I've done in general. Uh But if you own lightroom, then it's still useful to have bridge around. And that is for non photo files and for files, you don't want to keep track of long term like images you just downloaded from the internet. You're gonna use them for 10 minutes and then throw them away or images a friend of yours sent to you. You're gonna work with them for a few minutes, you're gonna send them back and you're not gonna think about them again. Those are the kind of files that I work with using Bridge here we are in bridge. Let's take a quick look through some essential features. First, in the upper left, we have the folder list. And if you don't see a list of folders here, you might be instead on this area called favorites, but click on folders and this should reflect the overall structure of your hard drive. And so I could follow this to see exactly how many folders deep I'm currently viewing. But right now I'm viewing this folder called Iceland. And over here, I can see my images as little thumbnail images. And if I'd like to change the size of those, I have a little plus sign over here minus sign and a slider that allow me to control that to the right of that. I have a few different views right now. We're on this one thumbnail view. If I click on this, we'd have detail view where I can see more about the file or I can go one more over and see a list view where the thumbnail would be really small. And then there's one other over here called gridlock and that just makes it. So you're never gonna see half of an image here when you're scrolling. Instead, it's locked into a grid where you can see the full image. Whereas if I was on the other one, do you see how you can see just partial of this particular image? Whereas gridlock means show me the full images each time it's personal choice on what you'd like. If those thumbnails are too small, I'll hit the little plus sign here to get them bigger. And if I want to see more detail on an image, I'll click on the image. And in the upper right, you have this area called preview and you can control that size by clicking on these little borders that are here. And you're welcome to expand that if you'd like it to be a larger preview or a smaller one, if you want to see your image even larger, then press the space bar and space bar will cause it to fill your screen to get out of this view. Just hit the escape key. If you find that any of these panels that I might talk about are missing from your screen, you can go up to the window menu in this list, all of those panels you could possibly have the ones with the check boxes turned on are the ones we currently have visible. So if there's one that I use and you don't see it, you're welcome to go over there and turn it on from here. You can rearrange or hide any of these areas. So if you're not gonna use this area called export, just go to this little hamburger menu, these three little lines and you can choose closed panel. If you decide later on, you'd like it back, just head back up to the window menu and you could choose it again and it'll come right back in. You should also be able to change the layout of this. So if I click on the word export and I drag it up here, you'll see some hints in that. Am I gonna put it on the right edge of this, the bottom edge of this or do I want to put it up there grouped with the other headings that are there and then just let go. So you can arrange this however you'd like. So whatever you use most commonly, you probably want to have easy access to. And if there's something you rarely use, you can always come in here and just choose close panel. Just remember, you click on that little three dashes which you could call the hamburger menu and I'm gonna do that for a few of these to simplify what we have. So on the left, I have folders and I have favorites. Well, if you want something to become a favorite, then if you're in your folder list and you've navigated to the particular folder you'd like just right, click on it and you're gonna find a choice called add to favorites. So here I'll do that with a folder called Iceland. And now if I go over here to favorites, you'll see it's within this list. If you decide you no longer need it as a favorite, you could right click on it and choose, remove from favorites. So put the things you need to use quite frequently over here in your favorites, then you could just click on it to navigate to it and then switch over to the folder list to navigate further deeper into that folder potentially. But I'm gonna come back up here to the folder called Iceland. Then if you wanna create new folders and rename folders, all you need to do is right, click on a folder. In this case, I'll right. Click on Iceland and there, I'll find the choice of rename. And maybe I just call this 2006 Iceland because that's when I visited for these particular photos, I press return or enter. And now you can see the name has changed if I'd like to move pictures between folders, all you need to do is select the images and you could click on one image and hold shift and click on another. And you get all the images in between. Or if you want to select or deselect individual images, hold down the command key and a Mac control and windows. And then the individual images you click on will either become selected or deselected. And if you want to move them, just click on the image and then drag to another folder. I don't know why I would move it over here to Paris France. But now we have some Iceland images in this folder called Paris France. Let's click on that folder and there, I can see the Iceland images. I might as well move them back because I just wanted to show you how to move things and be careful when you're moving when you drag like this. I really wish they wouldn't have set it up this way, but you'll find a no symbol. That's right near your cursor your little arrow there. If you're in between two folders, you have to get the tip of that arrow on the name of the folder either here or up here, not in between. Otherwise when you let go, it won't move it. I wish it could not uh go to the little gap that is in between. If you want to rename a file, just click on the name of the file here. It should select the name and type in something new. If you want to rename a large number of images. After renaming one hit tab, it'll bring you to the next one tab, bring it to the next one tab, bring you to the next one and so on. It might change the order of what you're viewing in here. And that's because the sort order is determined up here under the view menu under this choice called sort. And so if you're sorting by file name instead of date created, then as you name them, they might suddenly get out of your view because they might have moved way down in your view. But if I set it to date created, now these should stay in approximately the same order as I reamed them, then let's say I want to open one of these images in Photoshop. All you generally need to do is double click on it as long as it's not a raw file. If it's a raw file, you can still double click, but it's gonna send you somewhere else other than Photoshop. But for now, let's just double click on this. We can see it opened it right into Photoshop. But let's say that for a particular kind of file, you don't want it to open it in Photoshop. So what controls that? Well, let's go back to bridge. And if I wanted, let's say all JPEG files to open in some other program, what I could do is right, click here. And if I right click on this image, one of the choices that you'll find in here is open with and you could send this to any other program. And if you don't find the program you desire in this list, there's a choice called browse. If you did that for this one time, it would open it in a different program. Like here, I'll open it in preview, which is kind of the built in image viewer on a Mac and suddenly it's open in preview, but let's close that and quit preview. And let's say I wanted that to happen every single time I open a JPEG file. If so you'd either right, click here, choose open with and choose change associations or that does. The same thing is coming up here in choosing settings which on windows would be under the edit menu and then choosing file type associations. But it's nice because it brought me into here and it also highlighted that particular file format. And right over here, I could choose what program should open that kind of file. But you might be thinking, when would you ever want to do that? Well, you might download the beta version of Photoshop and have both the normal version and the beta version installed. And right here, you could choose which version would you like it to open in? Or maybe I come up here and I type PDF because bridge can browse not just photo images but all sorts of other things and maybe I don't use it. Adobe Acrobat for that. I would rather use, uh what's built into the Mac, which is called preview. I don't see it in this menu though. So I just choose browse and I go to my applications folder, which is right here. It already brought me there and I just need to scroll down here until I find the app that I want to use. It's preview. So I'm gonna just type pr so it brings me down to the PR S and I'll hit open. So now PDF files would open in preview instead of acrobat and then I'll just click. OK? Now, somewhere in one of these folders, I think we have raw files. Yes. And here we have raw files. Uh Photoshop cannot work with raw files directly. Instead it needs something to be done to those raw files before it can do it. And so when you're in bridge, if you double click on a raw file, it's gonna bring you into this. This is Adobe camera raw and Adobe camera raw. If you ever see me use, it offers the exact same adjustments that are available in either version of light. So anything you ever see me doing here could be done in lightroom and this can be used for doing initial adjustments. We'll have a separate lesson on it. But just know anytime you double click on a raw file, it will always bring this up. Then you'd have to hit the open button on the right side in order to get the image all the way to Photoshop, head back to bridge just for a moment. And you should also know that the there are other options. Let's say that I selected multiple images I could then go up here to the tools menu and there should be a sub menu called Photoshop. And here is where you can do extra things. We're not going to get into this right now. We will later on when I talk about working with multiple images in Photoshop, and then we can end up using these choices. But this is just a special way of sending things to Photoshop so that I could for instance, load these files into Photoshop layers. I have three images selected. So when I choose that I get a brand new file in Photoshop and if you watch over in my layers panel, it ends up stacking those images one on top of the other as separate layers, but we'll get into what you'd want to use that for later on here we are in Adobe lightroom, know that there's two versions of lightroom, lightroom and lightroom classic. And this is the version known as lightroom in it. In the upper left, you have the choice of local in order to browse images that are on hard drives that are actively attached to your computer similar to what you would do in bridge and then you have cloud and that's for images that you have told this program to upload to Adobe servers. And I'll show you how to do that in a few moments. When you're on this area called local here, you have an area called browse and that's where you're gonna find the structure of your hard drive where you could navigate down to different folders and preview what's in there right now. I'm previewing this folder called Cydney. And if I'd like to change the size of the thumbnails, I go to the slider in the lower right and just change it. Uh You are limited in how large they can get in bridge. And in also lightroom classic, you can make these much larger, which I sometimes like to do. Uh You do have a few options though, for viewing these in the lower left, there are three icons and this one's gonna give you this kind of grid view. Uh The one that is next to it is gonna give you compare view. That's where you can see just two images side by side. And you can choose if you want them one above the other or there's an icon over here to put them one above the other, which is this setting or you can click on the icon to the left, which would put them side by side. If on the other hand, you want to view a single image and you want to view it large, then that is what the third icon is for. And you can get to that view at any time by just pressing the space bar. And if you want to get back to the view where you see this thumbnails, either click this icon or type the letter G for grid. So if you think of G for grid and space bar for big, then you can navigate uh in there. As long as you're viewing images over here where it says local, then you can go to your folder list. And if you right click on any folder, you're gonna find the choice to rename a folder. If you'd like. In this case, maybe I come in here and add the year that I was visiting in this case 2014 and we've changed that or if you want to create a folder inside, right, click and choose create folder in and then you could create a sub folder. I'm just gonna call this one rejects. So those might be the images that I don't think are very good. And now I'm going to find that there's a sub folder. If you want to move images between folders, let's say I find this sleeping guy to be a reject. So I click on him and drag him right in there into the rejects. If I want to rename an image, you might think you could come up here and click on it. Well, you could do that if you were in bridge but not here. Uh If you right click on it, you're not gonna find it in here. Instead, you gotta go to the right side of your screen and way down at the bottom. There's a little information icon. And if you click on that, this tells you what's known as metadata, like things like uh maybe what day the image was captured its original file name in camera settings. Well, there you're also gonna find the file and if you happen to right, click it there, you're gonna find the choice called rename. And maybe I wanna come in here and name this more similarly to the other images. So I'll say 2014 Sydney, oops, I hang smells uh Australia and then I'll just press return. And now if you look over here, you can see that I misspelled Sydney because I didn't put it at an end. But all I need to do is come back here on the right and say I want to rename it and then I can easily correct my mistake. Let's close up the info panel. Let's just quickly discuss how would you then adjust images before opening them in Photoshop? Well, when I hit the space bar to view something large that also brought me in where over on the right side, I have some icons, one of which is this one and this is where I would find adjustments and at least half of the images I work with. All they need is the adjustments that are found right here in lightroom. It's only when I have something that lightroom would be inefficient with or it would be impractical to do in lightroom that I open something in Photoshop. If I decide this image needs to head to Photoshop, then I go to the file menu and that's where I'll find the choice of editing Photoshop. And now we're in Photoshop with that particular image. Let's take a brief look here at Lightroom Classic. So you know how to get around and do a few basic things. The first thing is in Lightroom Classic to get your images to show up, you need to click the import button in the lower left. Now this since this is not a class on how to use lightroom, we could do this for a whole day teaching you how to use this. I'll just show you a few basics over here on the left is your source. That means where are the pictures that you would like to import? I'm gonna come down in here and just point this at a folder that I know has some images in it. Then if that is our source on the left side up here at the top, it wants to know what do we want to do with these images when we tell lightroom to keep track of them, would we like to just add them where they're currently at. If you do, the file names are not gonna change and their location on the hard drive that they're currently on will also not change. You could instead move them to a different folder. Maybe they're just in a temporary location, you need to put them somewhere else. We also have the choice of copy and that's usually what's used. If you just put a storage card from your digital camera into your computer, you want to copy them off of that card and on to another drive and copy is usually what's used. Copy as DNG would do that and also convert your images to a GNG file. But that's a personal choice there and beyond what I'm going to cover here. So this is what you would use if you're copying from a storage card from your digital camera over on the right side is where you choose, where are those images going to end up if you told it to move them or copy them. If you choose the choice called a over here on the right where it says destination, that would go away because a means leave them in the same spot. So let's say I chose move and over here, I would tell it, where would I like to store those files? Well, if this is my hard drive full of my photos, maybe I want to put those uh in the 2006 folder because that's when they were shot so I could click there. And if I want to put them in a sub folder, I could name one right here. There are all sorts of other options over here on the right side. But it's beyond what I want to cover right now, you would simply need to click the import button. And once you did that, these images would be kept track of in lightroom, but these are copies of images I already have in there. So I'm gonna click cancel. Once you have images imported in the light room over here on the left side of your screen, you find this area called catalog and there is a choice right here called previous import. And if you were to click there, you would see the images that you just imported. And if you want to see where the folder is that they got moved to, if you move them, you can right, click on an image here and there's a choice called go to folder and library. And therefore in that list just below called folders, this would navigate you to where that image ended up. So you could look at any other images that were in the same folder. If you want to rename a folder just right, click on it and you'll find the choice of rename and you could bring it to anything you want. But I'm not gonna do that because I don't want to mess up my folder system and if you'd like to create a folder inside of one of these, I just right click on it and you're gonna find a choice called create folder inside. And if you use that, you would create a brand new empty folder inside of that one, then you could expand this to see the sub folders. And if you wanted to move any of these images, you could select them and just drag them to whatever folder you'd like them to end up in. And let go. I'm not gonna do that because this is really the copy of lightroom I work on. So if I move them, I could mess up my organization. If you want to change the name of a picture, then click on the image and go to the right side of your screen. If you expand the right side, there's this area called metadata. And within there, it will tell you the file name and you can just click on that field and type in a new file name. If you'd like, if you have many different images to rename, like there's a whole folder of images here, I'll type command a to get every image in the folder, then you'll see the file name there. And instead of clicking there and typing something in, click the icon to the right of it. That's where you can rename a large number of images. And if so this comes up and you usually do this using templates you only set up the template once and then you choose it from this menu. And then if there's any custom text that needs to be typed in, you put it here, but you can create your own preset by just choosing edit. And here you can build a file name. In this case, I wanted to take the, the year, the month and the day that these images were captured in, then put in whatever custom text I typed in over here. And afterwards number the images and you build this kind of thing up using these choices below where you hit the insert button and it pops it up here. Once you're done, you can click on the menu at the top and then you can save the current settings as a new preset. And that's what I've done when I created this. But I don't actually want to rename these files. If you want to adjust an image, just click on it and go to the upper right and choose develop. And this is where you'll find the same settings that you'll see me use when I use Adobe Camera because Adobe Camera is what people use if they don't use lightroom and it offers the exact same adjustments that you see here. And if you end up adjusting a lot of images, it's useful to know of a few keyboard shortcuts. Because up here at the top of your screen, usually go to the library module to organize your images and view them as thumbnails. And you go to the develop module to actually adjust them to move between those two type, the letter G for grid and D for develop. So G for grid D for develop and that's how I usually move between the two. If you needed to open an image into Photoshop, come up here to the photo menu and in there, you'll find a choice called edit in. And right here is a choice called edit in Photoshop that would send this image straight into Photoshop. You also have alternative choices in here. If I had more than one image selected, I would have some choices down here become available. Those are things we can cover in later lessons. But the main thing here with Lightroom Classic is it's not gonna show you every single image on your hard drive. It's gonna only show you the images that you've imported. And so that's why you gotta hit that import button and tell it which folders of images it should pay attention to after you've imported. Be sure any renaming of folders or files or moving of files is done right here in lightroom. Otherwise, lightroom can become out of sync with the actual contents of your hard drive. And if the name of a folder that an image is contained within is changed, not in lightroom, but on your computer's hard drive, suddenly you'll see a question mark over here to say, hey, I can't find that folder or if you change the name of a file, it will tell you that that file is missing. But if you make those kinds of changes using lightroom, then there's no problem. It changes the information on your hard drive on the original pictures and it updates lightroom. So everything stays in sync. Now, let's take a tour of Photoshop. So first off in Photoshop on the left side is all your tools. And when you click on a tool up here at the top, this is known as the options bar and this contains all the options or settings for whatever tool you have active. So as you change from one tool to another, you're gonna find the choices found up here in the options bar change because the move tool, which is the top one has different options than if you're in a painting tool. Then over here on the right side of your screen is the layers panel and the layers panel shows you what your image is made out of. And that's what you're actually changing is whatever is active over there in the layers panel. And in this case, we just have one piece which is known as the background, but we could just as easily build this image up by stacking one layer on top of another and we'll get into layers in another lesson. And then finally this panel up here called properties. This changes depending on what it is you're working on. If you work on a particular type of layer, let's say it's a layer that contains text, this will give you settings for what font do you want to use and how big the text should be. Uh Or if I have multiple layers, this is going to give you choices for aligning or distributing those layers. But this will change based on what you're currently working on and it's often where you need to go to dial in changes to whatever it is you're working on. One other essential thing would be the color picker on the left side to your screen. There are two squares of overlapping color. The top color up here, which is currently black is known as your foreground color and that's usually the color a particular tool will use. So for instance, here, I'm in the paint brush tool. And if I click and drag on my image, the reason this looks black is because my foreground color is set to black, the background color, which is the color that's underneath is not used all that often. But on occasion, you want to have two colors that you switch between quickly and this little double arrow would switch them. So now I'm gonna be painting with white instead. And so having those two colors can be useful to change what colors in there, just click on either one of those and this comes up. This is your color picker, you can click on the bar at the top, put it wherever you'd like and you want to choose the general color you want from this vertical bar. And then over here you'll find different shades of that color, darker ones at the bottom, brighter ones at the top, more colorful ones on the right, less colorful ones on the left. And you just drag around in here to get a shade of the color that you've chosen there. The numbers that are found over on the right they're used if you need an exact color. Like if you're reading a magazine article, they might tell you to end up choosing a color that is 46 red, 46 green and blue. And you could call those numbers off of the telephone to somebody else. They could type them into Photoshop and they would get that exact color. There are many different ways of measuring color. So here you have HSB, here, you have R GB Lab and Cnyk and it's only one of those that you would need to type in because if I type a different number in here, you'll see all those other numbers changing here. I'll type in 50 and you'd see a lot of those numbers changed. There's just different ways of measuring color and somebody might read off one of those particular combinations. Once you got the color you want, you just click OK? And like I said, you could also click on your background color and you could dial in a color for it as well and then use the little arrow that's there to switch between the two so that if you wanted to paint or do other things, uh, you can quickly change between those 21 other picker you'd probably want to know about is the brush picker. And that is right now, my brush is this really thin one. And if I go when I'm in a painting tool or retouching tool up here in the options bar, you're gonna find this icon right here. It's actually a preview of your brush. It's attempting to show you how soft the edge is and the number that's below it tells you how wide it is. If you click on that, then this opens up in the main settings for your brush are here, which is your size and the hardness of the edge of your brush. Do you want it to have a soft edge or a hard one? You can see it preview up here. I actually rarely use this to change my brush because there are keyboard shortcuts you can use for changing the size and the hardness and you have to do it so often. I mean, I do it hundreds of times a day that coming up here, it would just be inefficient. I would rather keep my mouse in here by my picture and be able to simply change it using my keyboard. There are a couple of different methods for doing this and here's the most common, uh, choices. If you look down at your keyboard on the right side, just above the return key, at least on a Mac are two keys that look like kind of half squares. You might call them the bracket keys. If I press the right bracket, my brush will get larger and I can just press and hold it down if I want to and the left one will get a smaller. You gotta be careful though because sometimes you'll open up an image and you won't see this circle. If you ever don't see the circle, it means the circle is probably larger than your screen. So that if I went like this and I just kept going and going and going and there's a way to zoom in on your picture, which I'll do right now. I'll show you how in a few minutes right now, my brush is larger than my screen. It's as if that circle you'd usually see is out in the room outside my screen. And when that's the case, you'll just see the center of the brush. If you use those bracket keys to make the brush smaller, eventually you'll see the circle start to appear. But you can be a little confused when on occasion, you just see a Crossair. There is one other time when you're just gonna see a cross here And that is, if on your keyboard, you press the caps lock key, the caps lock key turns the cursor into a cross here so that you could precisely click the center of it on something on my keyboard. I actually have the caps lock key disabled because it's a key I just generally don't use and I have some special software that allows me to use it for other purposes. But if you happen to press capslock, you're gonna find this looks like a cross here. And when it does, you could get the exact center of it on something. Then there's another way of changing your brush size. And this involves using your keyboard and clicking at the same time on a Macintosh, you hold on control and option those two keys are right next to each other on windows. It's a bit different. You hold on alt just one key and I think you press the right mouse button because you usually have two mouse buttons on windows, but I'm on a Mac. So I'm gonna hold down, control an option and just click. And now it tells me the diameter of the brush and it tells me the hardness setting. And if I want to change those things, if I drag up and down, I'm gonna change how soft the edge of the brush is. If on the other hand, I drag to the right or left, I can change its size and it's nice because you get a visual preview of it and you can actually tell how soft the edge of your brush is right there on the image itself. The overlay will always be red. It doesn't mean that you're about to paint with red. When you let go and you actually click, you're gonna get your foreground color. So remember on a Mac that's control an option and then click your mouse and keep the mouse held down on windows, I believe, although I haven't tested it that that should be the alt key in pressing the right mouse button. All right, I'm gonna undo all this stuff. You can come up here and choose undo. You see the keyboard shortcut is command, Z control Z and windows. I'm just gonna type command Z multiple times to clean up our image. And I'm also gonna get out of this tool. So I don't accidentally click on my picture and change it. But now you should probably know how to navigate your image to do. So you can come up here to the view menu and you'll find various options such as zooming in zooming out uh and getting to specific sizes like 100%. You that type of thing you also see in here you have keyboard shortcuts and that's what I use. Zoom in and zoom out is command plus and command minus. That would be control plus and control minus and windows. So I'm just gonna type those if I want to zoom in or if I want to zoom out. If once you're zoomed in on your image, you need to move around because you can't see the whole image. You could use the hand tool on the left side of your screen. There's also a zoom tool below that you can click in your image with to zoom in and out. Uh But that hand tool you use for moving around. Well, I use my keyboard to do that because I need to do that. I would say thousands of times a day that I need to move around. And I don't want to switch out of whatever tool I was using on the picture. So to temporarily access the hand tool, press and hold down the space bar for as long as you have it held down, you're gonna get the hand tool and you can move around. Then remember to zoom, it's command minus or command plus space bar, you can move around. And once you get used to that, you can navigate around your document very quickly. There's also two little tricks that have to do with these tools. If you go to these tools and you double click on the hand, double clicking on the hand is gonna zoom out to fit your entire picture within your screen. And so it's a convenient way of quickly getting to that point. If you double click on the zoom tool, that's gonna instead zoom, you up to what's known as 100% view. And that's where you can see all the detail that's in your picture. So double click on the hand to fit in window and double click on the zoom to get to 100% view. Once you become more advanced and you get used to keyboard shortcuts where you're not trying to memorize hundreds of them. Instead, you know, most of the important ones, then you could substitute instead up here into the view menu, you're gonna find the choice of fit on screen and you'll see the keyboard shortcut is command zero and uh 100% view is command one. So that's what I actually use. I do command zero and command one. But when I'm new to Photoshop, it's usually a little easier to remember to double click on these particular tools to get you to those views. It's always more than one way of doing things in Photoshop. And it's just a matter of trying to remember one of them, whichever one you're most comfortable with. Let's rearrange the panels that are on my screen if I ever mention one of these panels and when you look, you can't find it, then go to the window menu. This lists all the panels you could have in Photoshop. And therefore right now, I'm just looking at my layers and my properties, at least in the front of what's currently there. Um Then if I need something else I could come in here, for instance, I'll choose history and suddenly the history panel will pop open, we can organize these and also close them. So let's say here is the color uh panel and maybe I don't use this much instead I click over there on my foreground color and that's how I changed my color because this would do the same thing. Well, I can go to this little menu in the upper right and I can choose clothes to get rid of just that tab. Maybe I don't use swatches, gradients or patterns. Well, if you come over here, you're gonna find the choice of clothes tab group. And that means all the tabs that are grouped together, then they'll all get out of there. So we could simplify this. Maybe I don't use adjustments. Fine. Come on in there and close it. Maybe I don't use libraries, close it. And then if you ever find, you do need one of those, you can always come back to the window menu and make it show up again by just choosing it here. So for instance, I use the info panel a lot and I don't see it right now. So I'm gonna come up here to the window menu and choose info. Oh OK. There it is. Then if I want, I could move the info panel, all I need to do is click on its name. If I click on its name and drag to an open part of the screen, it'll become its own independent floating panel that I could click on this bar at the top and reposition or let's say I wanted to be on the right side of my screen in with some of these. Well, if I click again on the name, I could drag this over here and I just need to look for feedback. If I were to drag it to right here, I see a blue vertical bar appearing and that means this would appear in between what we're currently seeing on the right side and the left side of that blue bar. So if I let go, you see, there's a whole separate panel in there or maybe I want to put it up here at the top of this. Well, I just click on its name, I drag up here and I look for feedback right now. This is indicating I would group this in with properties. But if I keep going a little bit higher, then eventually I see a horizontal blue bar indicating it's going to appear above properties and there it is. And so you can group these together. However, you'd like if I brought properties and info together like this, now they're gonna be separate tabs where I could only use one or the other and not both at the same time. So you just need to think about what you want to use and stack it, however, is useful for you, if you look here, you see some icons, those are also panels just like this one. And if you click on the icon, it will expand temporarily, click on the icon again and it collapses back down to the icon. It doesn't have to be icons. The way you control that is you see this little double arrow at the very top. If I click on that, it will expand it. So they're normal where you see them just like these. Or if I went to these on the right side, you see the double arrow, I'll click on it and now they're icons. And when they look like icons, there are two widths you can have, you can have it. So it's wide enough that you can read what the names are or you can make this skinnier by just kind of grabbing this divider bar and pulling it over. Now it's skinny enough where all you see is the icons, then you could click on one of these, it would pop open and when you're done using it, click the icon again to get it to collapse down. But I wanna have these expanded. So I'm gonna click that double arrow to expand them. And it's these that I only use on occasion. So I'm gonna click, it's double arrow to get it back down to icons. But if you're not yet used to what these icons mean, then you could always grab the edge that's here. The left edge there, pull it out so you can see enough where the names appear. And then once you've used Photoshop enough where you get used to the icons, you could always come back here. Save a little space and kind of collapse that down. When I click on one of these, you'll see right here, you see these two are together and that's because they're kind of grouped together here and then you see this little horizontal line. Well, let's say I put something else in there. Maybe I came up here and I decided, well, what do I want to use? Maybe I wanna use something called actions. So I open that up and it shows up in that same grouping. Do you see that all three of these tabs uh are grouped together and all three of their icons are kind of stacked in the same area? Well, if I click on one of these, I could drag it down here. And now instead of being in that group, it's gonna be all by itself. So you see that little line saying, hey, I'm separate from this. That means if I click on one of these, then I'm gonna see both of these two options in there. But I'm not gonna see this because you see that line separating them. So this one will be independent and therefore I could have maybe switch between these. There's even a choice where if you find you just use something for a few seconds and then dismiss it. For instance, I come in here to the choice called color. This is just a replacement for the color picker. Well, maybe I put it over there on that little bar and then I don't need these. So I choose close tab group. OK, I just got it there. But when I use that, I don't want it to stay here. I want it to just I click and when I come over here and I click on my image to do something, I want that collapse. Well, you can right click on it and there's a choice in there called Auto collapse iconic panels. And if I choose that, now when I come in here and I choose a color, let's say I chose this one. If I click over here on my image that's gonna collapse and then I can come over here and use it again, pick another color. And when I click over here on my image, it's gonna collapse. But just know turning on that setting affects all of the panels that are in this icon form. And so right click and if you want to, you can auto collapse them. It's a personal choice. I mainly bring it up in case someone else got on your computer and made it so they automatically disappear. And now you know how to make it. So they don't, once you have all these panels set up the way you like them and you'll do that over time where you get used to which panels you use a lot and which ones you barely ever use then go to the icon near the upper right of your screen. Do you see this icon right here? If I click there, these are what's known as workspaces. A workspace is a collection of these panels organized in a particular way. And so right now I could say I want a new workspace and I'm gonna call this boot camp just because that's why I'm creating it and I'm gonna come in here and hit save. Now. It just remembered that I had the info panel up here properties down there and these icons in there. And if I go back up to the menu, I would instead switch to one of these others. These are all saved layouts. So here, if I choose photography, you notice now we have different panels showing up here. If I come up here again and choose painting, now I'm gonna find ones that have to do a painting. But these, you can set up yourself, maybe you like your panels to be a certain way while you do retouching and you like them to be set up in a different way when you do something else. Well, if so move them around, however you would like and once you get them dialed in exactly the way you want, just come up here and say you would like a new workspace. Now, I created this one called boot camp just to show you how to move things around. I actually don't want things set up this way. So I'm gonna go up here and after choosing that name, I'm gonna choose delete workspace. Just so I don't get a clutter of them up here. If you see here, all these ones, those are all because I've ta taught how to organize these panels many different times. And I've never gone down here to delete them afterwards. It'll just ask me to confirm and now that particular workspace is gone. When you switch between workspaces, let me come down here to the one called motion. For instance, if I end up making a change like here, I can pull on this edge to make this smaller, uh Maybe I move channels somewhere else or get rid of it all together. Maybe I come over here and close it. It's going to remember those settings. And so the next time I switch to a different one of these choices, like I'm gonna go to painting and then in here I move things around or use it and I come over here and return to that one called motion. It now remembers that this wasn't as tall. And then over here I had hid one of those tabs. So it's not gonna always make it look exactly the way it was. The moment you created a workspace. It just remembers what it looked like the last time you were using that workspace. So changes you make, you could say update that if you didn't want it to, if you decided, oh, I changed this in some way. I dislike that tab that was here. I really needed. Well, then you can go in here and there's a choice. Reset, reset means bring me back to what this looked like at the moment. I saved it. So when I choose reset, notice adjustment showed up in here again, it doesn't remember the size of all these. So this thing at the bottom didn't suddenly get taller. So you can go up there, use this if you want to, but it's not essential. It's just if you find that you like the setup being different for different tasks, then you probably want to come up here and once you get it dialed in exactly the way you want, create a workspace. But for now, I'm gonna set this to essentials because that's the default and I messed with things in here, hiding certain panels and all that I can then come up here and say reset essentials. So mine probably looks just like yours does. If you recently installed Photoshop, before I send you off, let's visit Photoshop's preferences. I'm gonna come up here and choose settings which would be found under the edit menu. If I was on windows, I'm not gonna go through every single preference. I'm only gonna show you the preferences that I always change so that you'll have an idea of what you might want to tweak. And I'm gonna start off here under interface where I'm gonna turn on this check box called neutral color mode. And this is kind of ridiculous. The only thing this does is it makes this button over here, which is the only element in the entire Photoshop interface that generally has a color that's not needed and it makes it gray. So turn that on and then that button once I click, OK, will go gray. That's it. No need for it to be blue. Uh I'll then come down here to workspace. And there's this choice called large tabs. If you work on a tablet where you're using your finger to tap on the screen, then it's good to have these tabs and all these panels to be tall. So you have a big region you could tap on. But if you're on a computer, there's no need for the large tabs. So I'm gonna turn that off. And when I do these tabs get small so I can fit more stuff on my screen, then let's go down to tools. Uh And in here there's something you might not want to turn off right now if you're new to Photoshop and that's called rich Tool tips. And that's where if you hover over a tool over here in the tools panel, a huge tip shows up, that's got graphics in it and a lot of text. Well, once you get used to what the tools do, then those things can be annoying. And so I turn that off. Uh but you might want to leave it on for now, just know that I typically turn it off. Then down here's a choice called over scroll. If over scroll, I wanna have turned on. Let me turn it off to show you what it does. If you're viewing an image like this with ober skull and you can see the entire picture, meaning you're zoomed out enough, you can see the whole picture. If you use the hand tool, you can't move it around your screen, it's stuck in the middle and it's only if you zoom up until you can't see the entire picture that you could move it so that it's up here at the top or something. But if I come in here to my tools and I turn on over scroll, then uh I can move my picture around and so it's not stuck in the middle. And so that's why I like to make sure in my tools that I have over scroll turned on. Next, I'm gonna come down to file handling and in file handling, there's a choice that says ask before saving layered Tiff files, I save layers in Tiff files every single day. And if this is turned on, it's gonna ask me if I really wanted to do that. Uh I'm gonna turn that off because I find that to be overly annoying down here where it says maximize compatibility. Uh instead of having it set to ask, I want to set it to always what that does is whenever you save something in Photoshop file format, it saves not only the individual layers that were used to make the file, but it also combines those layers together into what's known as a flattened version of the image. And that's required if you're gonna use a program like uh lightroom or Lightroom classic, it has to be turned on. Otherwise it can't handle the file because those programs don't understand what layers are. So they, they are otherwise unable to work with the file. Then let's come down here to the choice called performance and with performance over on the right side, there is a choice called history states and this should be called undoes. This means how many steps are you able to go backwards when you choose undue in 50 might sound like a lot. But each single time you let go of the mouse button when painting that is counted. So if you click a bunch of little times uh with retouching and things, you can easily go above uh 50 where you might need to go beyond that. So I like to type in a higher number. I'd usually type in around 100. Now I'm gonna be able to back up 100 steps when I choose undue and that's it. There are a whole bunch of other preferences. You're welcome to look through. Those are the ones that I change every time I get on a new installation of Photoshop or get on somebody else's machine and need to work there for a while. So now you should have an OK idea for how to preview your images before sending them over to Photoshop. Your various options for getting them to Photoshop and have a OK feeling for the layout of how the program works. And with those preferences tweaked, I think you're ready to really start getting into the class.