Lessons

Lesson Info

Intro to Photoshop

we need to have some sort of introduction to photo shop because we have been in there yet. So let's just do, ah, semi basic tour of the interface. Not gonna show you everything. Single thing that's there. I'm just going to give you the overview of what's the most important mindset to have when you're in there. And so I'm just gonna open an image and let's see what we can, uh, come up with. So in photo shop, first off on the left side, we have our toolbar at vertical bar on the left. Those of the various tools you can use on your image. Click on one of those click on your picture and you're doing something to it. If I choose one of these tools, then across the top of my screen is a bar called the Options Bar, and those are the options for the tool I'm currently selected. So if I change the tool that I have selected in the vertical bar on the left, the options across the top change to reflect the options for whatever tool I'm using. All right, so these are the tools those the options for...

the tool that I have. If you look at your toolbar, you'll notice that some of the tools have tiny little triangles near them. See him. It'll kind of lower, right? Tiny little triangles we know means if you click and hold on, that will be more choices popping up. So that means this isn't just one tool. There's more than one tool. It's kind of like the tools were stacked on top of each other. Save space. And if you click and hold, you can get to the other tools that are stored in that same spot. If I switch to the other tool, it will replace the one that was there. It's as if we just put it on the top of the stack of tools of sitting there, and we're using that tool now. I want to switch back. I click and hold and I can switch back. But if you see that any one of these does not have a triangle, most of them do. You'll notice, Ah, this one doesn't. That means there's no clicking and holding on it. You just click and let go, cause there's only one tool sitting there. There's not a stack of tools The reason why they stack tools is if they have them all visible. You couldn't see your picture there just peed tools everywhere. And so instead they stack the ones that are very similar to each other because they don't expect you to use necessarily more than one of those at a time. If you don't know what the name of particular tool is, just like if you don't know the name of any particular icon anywhere in photo shop, just hover over it without clicking. So if I move, my mouth's on top of this and his paws, I should get a tool tip that tells me the name of the tool and to the right of it is the keyboard shortcut to access the tool. Usually, tools have a single key that you press to switch to them. So this is up. Here is the move tool, and you'll see the key for it is V. So if I just press the letter V, it would switch to that tool. Where is the one blow? It's the marquee tool. It's keyboard shortcuts M for marquee, so you can get used to those if they're certain tools that use all the time. Just hover over the tool and see what the keyboard shortcut is. Be for brush in this case, so remember you to choose the tool you want to use from the left side of your screen, then across the top of your screen and what's called the Options bar are the settings for that particular tool. One thing that's useful to know about is whenever you choose a tool, you will find that the icon for that tool, this tool in this case will be duplicated on the left side of the options bar. You see it there. That's just to remind you that all these options relate to that tool. But do you notice a little triangle there? That means something's hidden in there. You can click there, and these would be presets for the tool. Not everybody uses presets, but that's where you get a preset for whatever tool you use. Sometimes it's nice if you have the crop tool, for instance, and you always want to crop images to be used in a certain size frame like standard size frames. Why not create presets for the crop tool for all the different size frames? you so you don't have to remember him. Instead, they're in a preset. But then there's something special that can really help when it comes to troubleshooting, and it's not something that's easily discoverable. You just don't know it's there. And that is, if you move your mouse on top of this icon, the icon on the left side of your options bar, and you press the right mouse button when you're on it, there's a choice to reset that tool, and what that means is take all the options that are in this bar and change them to their defaults. So if you ever find a tool is not working the way you expect it to, you can reset that tool, snap it back to its default settings, or if somebody else has been on your machine, it seems to have messed with every tool that exists. You could reset the settings for all the tools. How did I get to that? I move my mouse under this icon and I press the right mouse button if I have a two button mouse or if you don't have a two button mouse. If anybody ever mentions right mouse button it's control clicking for people with one must but control click. So anything that would reset that particular tool, then on the right side of my screen, Usually I'll have my layers panel. My layers panel is actually what my picture is made out of. At minimum, there'll be at least one layer, although there is one thing in here that shows up that's not truly considered a layer. And it's called the background because it can't do the same thing, is what all the other kinds of layers could do. And it's what you'll get. If you just open a picture that's never had layers before, it'll be called background. If you change the name of it from background, anything else, it's no longer special. It's a normal layer, but, um, it will get into that when we start work with pictures and you'll get used to the concept of the background. But this is layers. This is what your images made out of. If your images made out of one piece, there'll be one layer. If your image has something has been retouched on it, you might be on its own layer, so it's something could be removed without removed and get back to the normal image or anything else. In this particular case, these are what's called adjustment layers, and they cause visual changes to happen in the image. But there's retouching in here and some other things as well. So whenever you choose a tool and then you choose the options for your tool when you click on your picture toe actually affect your image with most tools, you're gonna affect whatever layer is active over here. So if I grab the paint brush tool right now in paint, it needs to know where to put the pain, and it's gonna put it on Whatever layer is currently active, so you need to be able to look at that. But you will understand that more. Once we talk about layers, we haven't touched him then a couple other things. Whatever you paint on your image, it's got to decide what color you're gonna paint with. And if you go to the bottom left of my screen, you will find two colors. This is your foreground color. That's usually the color you're painting with. This is your background color, and that is a color that is used for some things like if you have a tool that needs to use more than one color. For instance, the Grady Int Tool makes a smooth Grady Inter transition between one color and another. While it needs two colors to figure out what color is, start with an end with it would go between these two, but that's known as your foreground color that's known as your background color. If you click on either one of those, you get a color picker. I'm assuming most people listening clicked on that at some point. You know that just in case you haven't since it's a one on one class, got to cover some of that. Then let's go open more pictures. I'll go to bridge, and I'm just gonna open a couple more images. I don't care which ones. When you open more than one image in newer versions of photo shop, you'll find that those images open as tabs, just like you can have different websites open in tabs in a Web browser. So let's talk a little bit about how to deal with those tabs. If you want to switch between various tabs, all you have to do is click on the names of the other tabs and you'll switch to them to see what's there. If you have too many tabs, open where you can't see the little tabs because there's like 40 images opens. There's not enough space to see all of those. You're gonna find a list of all of the documents that are currently open at the bottom of the window menu. So you click on window, and right now I have three images open. Here are their names, and I could switch between them by choosing from here. So if you had 40 images open might be easier to go here to figure out the one you want to switch to because the taps will be so small that will be hard to navigate. You don't have to have your images of tabs. The problem with taps is I can't compare to images. Maybe I'm supposed to adjust the color of one person's face to match somebody else's. How can I tell if that's happening if I have to click on them, switch like this between them. So if you want to not have something as a tab, click on the name of the tab and dragged down away from the what's called the Tab Bar. And once it feels like it's floating and it's no longer kind of up there, let go and it will be its own little window. Then you can click on another tab, dragged down that we become its own window as well. And you do that to all of them if you want. When they don't look like tabs, then you click on the title bar, where it has the name of the file up here. That's what it's called the title bar and click there, and that's how you move. It would be careful if you move one by clicking its title bar in your mouse ends up near another. Watch what happens to the other. Do you see a blue border? Go around it. That means we're about to combine these two together and in two different tabs within that window. So you gotta be careful if you move, one really goes to another. We might now be thinking about look for blue feedback. If I get this near here, do you see the blue feedback meaning of about to combine it in there or if I move it over here, you see the blue box for moving out here. There is no boom box, which means why let go? It's independent. All right now, some people get annoyed by that because they constantly accidentally get these things to combine together like that drives nuts. If that's the case, there's a preference that can prevent it from happening. To prevent it from happening, you go to your preferences, which is find underneath the photo shop menu on a Macintosh under the Edit menu in Windows. Just so you know, if your Windows user on the Mac, the very first menu that's made out of text, is always the name of the program you're running. That's not the case and Windows. That's usually where they put the preferences on a Mac on Windows. They throw em under the edit menu, just different convention. But if I come in here, there is a choice in my preferences. My preferences have various categories on the left, and if I got to the interface category, there's a choice right here called. I think it's so elegantly named enable floating document window docking. It's just a long enough wording. It should just said, Don't Taba five my documents. But that means if I turn that off, if I drag one document near another, I won't see that blue feedback because it would never combine those windows together by me, dragging them close together. There's also another one here called open documents as tabs. If I turn that off, then when I open my documents that show up a separate windows, they don't show up his one window, as in separate tabs. I got used to tabs, though, but this one does bug me a bit. You know where it combines them together, and I don't really want him to. If you have a bunch of images and they're sitting, there is floating windows, let's say and you want to get them is tabs or anything like that. You can go over here and there is a choice. Um, actually look, cause I never use it. But there is a choice for combining them. Is tabs right here? Consolidate all two tabs. That means take all the floating windows and pop them together as tabs. I just did it and there's one called Ah, somewhere float all windows. That means make them all independent, but that's only gonna do it once it's it's not gonna do it. New documents you open and everything. We just so you know there is a command, So it's up to you if you like tabs or not. Most people primarily don't like them because they don't know how to view two images at the same time. Or they don't have a move something between one tab and another and we'll be showing you how to do that stuff.