Again, this menu is one that you will find on most programs, and you find the common elements as well (Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, etc.). But there are of course some other ones that I want to point out:

• Step Forward - This feature is not useful or available until you first step backward. This is probably because the programmers of Photoshop have yet to find out a way of divining what you will do next until you do it. Anyway, this feature returns you (forward) to edits you have down to the image after you have stepped backward by using the next feature. It can be thought of as the "Redo" feature.


• Step Backward - This is like"Undo" on many programs. In Photoshop the Undo feature will only go back one step. If you hit Undo the second time using the keyboard shortcut (ctrl-z) it wll in fact Redo the edit. So the Undo just takes you back and forth with your last edit. Step Backward/ Forward will allow you to go much farther back and then forward again. It does have a limit, however, Photoshop will only remember the last 20 edits. That sounds like a lot, but if you are for example retouching and using the stamp tool to make many minute changes, then it adds up fast. Another word of caution, if you step backward to a certain point, then you do a new edit to the image, you lose everything you just stepped backward from. You can’t go "forward" anymore because you are now on a new "road."


• Fade... - Fade is a powerful tool that will allow you to tone-down whatever edit you just did. It also allows you to change how it is applied in terms of the blending mode, but that is a pretty advanced use. For our purposes, it allows you to pull back on the last edit by using a percentage scale. For example, if you just sharpened the image, but decided that you sharpened it way too much, use the Fade option and see what happens when you pull down that edit to 55% of what it was.


• Fill... - This option is used when you have made a selection. It fills the selection with a color or pattern at whatever density you choose.


• Stroke... - This is also used with selections. You are stroking the inside, outside, or middle of a selection with a color at a certain thickness and density.


• Free Transform - If you are using layers and you want to move, resize, rotate, etc. a layer, then this does it all! Hold down the shift key when resizing if you don’t want to distort the image.


• Transform - More transformation options, many of which are only available if (again) you are going to transform a layer and not the background. Most of the time when you open a file, the image is the background. It is like it is mounted to the wall, you can’t move it around, rotate it, etc. If you make it a layer (see the section on the Layer Menu) then you have "pulled it off the wall" and can freely transform it.


• Color Settings... - (For Mac OS X users you’d find this in the "Photoshop" menu along with the Preferences Menu) Color settings is an advanced menu option and is closely associated with color management.


• Assign/Convert to Profile... - Again, these are color management menus that will help you when you are printing. You can use color profiles to ensure the printing device (or other display media) is in sync with what you want color-wise.


• Keyboard Shortcuts/ Menus... - These menu options allows you to edit and manipulate shortcuts and to decide which menu options to show. You can hide the ones you don’t use.


• Preferences - This is a useful menu that we will jump into at times. It is always good to explore this menu in programs. Other programs have the same type of menu and they call it "Options...,’ but in anycase the Preferences Menu is always one you should familiarize yourself with.

File Menu

The file menu holds the basic functions of most File Menus in most programs (Open, Save, Close, etc.) But there are a few common options that are unique to Photoshop that you should become familiar with. I won’t go over all the extra File Menu options because most of them are advanced and I rarely have to use them, but here are some you might want to get to know:

• Open Recent - This is a nice feature that Photoshop shares with other programs. It lists the last ten files you have opened and it allows you to quickly find a recent file.


• Save As... - This is pretty straight forward, but it is a nice one to know. It allows you to save the changes you have made to the file, but to save them as a new file (and in a new place if you want) without saving over the original file you opened. An even better technique than this, however, is to make a copy or duplicate of the original file and open up and work on that copy instead. That way you don’t have the ability to accidentally save changes over the original.


• Save For Web... - If you want to put an image up on a website, you will want to make it pretty small in comparison to the size images need to be for printing. You will also want to save it in a format that websites use as well as make its size as efficient as possible so it loads fast, but is still a quality image. Save For Web helps you do that more easily.


• Revert - If you have messed up so badly that you need to start over, the Revert option will (in essence) close the file without saving it and open the orignal again.


• Automate - This opens up a sub menu with a bunch of options. The automate options are varied, but a few of them come in really handy. You can play around with the Contact Sheet, Web Gallery, and Picture Package for presenting groups of photos. The Batch and Fit Image options are what I like to use often and they will come up more in my tutorials


• File Info... - This one is fun, you can open up any image and if the meta tags (the hidden file information) is stil there, you can see such things as when it was taken, by what camera, what settings were used, etc. You can also add copyright information, a title, and other keywording.


• Printing - You will notice there are actually a lot of printing options. Printing is actually a very advanced skill set if you want to get exactly (or as close as possible) what you want the first print. We’ll be doing a whole group of tutorials that involve printing and color management (which is getting your various digital devices and software to agree on color and density so what you get out of a printer is what you saw on your monitor and what you saw through your camera).

I haven’t discussed a number of the File Menu options, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or important, it is just that these ones will probably come most in handy for normal use. For the other menus I will also not be covering half or more of the menu options. I will note again that the various Printing options are very useful, but those will come later in basic and advanced printing tutorials.

The Photoshop Layout

Here you see the default appearance of Photoshop CS2.

This is what you get when you open it the first time (aside from an annoying pop-up that asks you if you want to see some tutorials).  If you are using Photoshop Elements, an earlier version of Photoshop, and/or you are viewing it on a Mac then the appearance might be a bit different, but the following information about the layout and tools of Photoshop still apply.

If you are using the New CS3 (which is still in Beta at the time of this article), then you will have some differences in how you can view and dock your tools and palettes, but generally the following information also applies.

The layout can be broken up into five main areas: Menus and their pop-up control windows, the Workspace, Palettes, Tools and their options, and the Image Window. 


Menus

The Photoshop Menus

The menus in Photoshop are like any other program They run the top of the program window and if you click on them they will reveal many options and sub options.  And, like any other program, if you click on a menu option that is followed by a “. . .” then a pop-up control window will appear with more options.


The Workspace

Your workspace is all of the gray blank space in the photo at the top of this tutorial.  It is where you work on photos.  For Mac users the workspace is optional, but on a PC it is always there.

It can be made pure black, very light gray, or this gray.  One way you can do this change by using the shortcut command (shortcuts are discussed in the last section).  It is the “F” key.  If you hit the “F” key you’ll see the workspace fill your entire screen and go a lighter gray.  Hit it again and it goes black.  Hit it once more and you are back to how you were.

In another tutorial you will see how to customize the position of various elements on the workspace, but first let’s learn about those elements.


Palettes

A group of Photoshop palettes

One of these elements that can go on the workspace (and even outside the workspace for that matter, if you drag them off) is palette’s. 

The word is obviously derived from the palette that artists use to hold their paints.  Just as an artist has their palette of paint always at the ready with the paints they are currently using, the Photoshop palettes hold valuable tools and options.

And just as it is silly for an artist to put paint on their palettes that they are not currently using, it is often a waste of screen space to leave the default palettes up.  Close the palettes you are not using, you can easily open them again because they can be called up in the Window menu.

Palettes can also be docked together.  You will notice that in the palette to the right that it is not only the Color Palette, but also the Swatches and Styles Palettes as well.  You can mix and match docked palettes like this.  That way useful palettes that are less used can be readily available and still take up less space.  Palettes can also be minimized.

Tools & Tool Options

The Toolbar

To the left you see the Toolbar which holds your tools.  The tools in Photoshop are especially for “hands-on” manipulation of photos.  Some manipulations of your photos are “global” in that they happen to the entire image.  Much of those type of manipulation settings can be found in the menus and in the palettes.

But for detailed manipulations, you will need to know how to use the tools.  When you select a tool your cursor will become that tool.  In this way you are “handling” the tool.

You can directly select a tool by clicking on it, or you can use a shortcut to get the tool on the fly.  Again, shortcuts are explained at the end of the tutorial.

Each tool has options associated with that tool and those options can be found in the Options Bar which is located above the tools.

Below you see the options bar for your tools.  On the far left is the icon of the tool you are using.  In this instance it is the zoom tool.  To the immediate right of the tool icon is a small triangle that is pointing downward like an arrow.  This is where you can save and recall presets for a tool.

Presets allow you to save settings that you often use.  For example, this tool is currently set to have the zoom tool zoom in when you click on an area.  You can tell this because to the right of the tool icon are two smaller icons that look like it except one has a positive (+) symbol on it and the other has negative (-).  The positive (or zoom in) tool is currently selected.  You can change that to default to zoom out and then save that as a preset if you want.

More practical preset applications, however, include preset cropping dimensions in the cropping tool (i.e. 5x7, 16x20, etc.), font and type size presets in the type tool, etc.  Those are instances where a preset are more useful because you are changing multiple options at once.

On the options bar, beyond the presets are specific options relating to the tool you are using.  I won’t go over these in this Photoshop tutorial because each tool and its options deserves its own tutorial.

The Tool Optons Bar

However, I will say that if you ever find that your tool is not doing what it was doing the last time you used it, chances are that you have (perhaps inadvertently) changed an option for that tool in its options bar.  Check the options bar before you begin to panic.  Also, see if your caps lock is on, that will make tools act differently as well.

Keyboard Short Cuts

Note if you are familiar with common program keyboard shortcuts, skip this section.

Shortcuts are wonderful!  You are probably familiar with using them in other programs, for example in most programs you can pull up the Edit menu and you will see that many of the options like Undo, Paste, Cut, etc. have a keyboard shortcut.  For Mac users these shortcuts involve the command key (also know as open apple or just apple key), but for PC users it is the Ctrl (control key).  For my tutorials I will usually just use the “ctrl- (insert key here)” notation, just to keep it simple. 

Ctrl-v, for example, means to hold down the ctrl key (located in the bottom corners of the main key section) and then hit the letter “v”.  So Mac users, just substitute your Command key for every time I mention the “ctrl” key.

So, like most programs, Photoshop will respond to those common shortcuts.  If you hit ctrl-v on the keyboard, it will paste and be just as though you had selected Paste in the Edit Menu.

Additional Shortcuts

For most readers, the above section was probably a bore and you might have skipped it.  But i you are new to Photoshop, the following might not be familiar to you.

Key Shortcut Revealed

Letter Shortcuts - Just hitting a letter key will often change things, even without holding down the ctrl key.  Because Photoshop is not a word processing program but instead a graphics program, the programmers made it so keys just by themselves will make changes when they are hit. 

Most of these key shortcuts will select tools.  For example, in the image to the right, my cursor was left sitting over the Zoom tool.  When you do that, eventually a description of the tool will appear.  In the yellow box that appears we read “Zoom Tool (Z),” this shows us that this is indeed the Zoom Tool, and the letter in the parenthesis is the Key Shortcut to get you to the Zoom Tool.

In other words, unless you are actually using the Type Tool and typing in a text box, then if you ever hit the “Z” key, then you will immediately be using the Zoom Tool.  You can hover your cursor over each tool if you want to learn the shortcuts for each.

Other Keyboard Shortcuts. There are many more shortcuts out there, and some that I probably haven’t learned yet.  I have learned Photoshop mostly by trial and error, but I have used it so much that I have stumbled on to many gems.

I won’t give you an exhaustive list of shortcuts here, but here are some ideas of what additional ones are out there:

• The Tab key hides and reveals the Tool Bar
• The Spacebar turns on and off previews when you are in a pop-up control window
• The Alt key (Option for you Mac users) modifies a tool on the fly, for example holding it down switches the Zoom Tool from zoom in to zoom out, letting go restores the original use of the tool
• Numbers can effect the opacity of tools and layers
• The Brackets keys ([) can make brushes grow larger and smaller

Shortcuts are great.  They allow you to cut your editing time into a fraction of what it would be.  They take a while to learn, but they can be worth it.

Image Window

An Image Window

When you open up a photo in Photoshop, the photo appears in an image window.

It is like any other window in any other program.  You can maximize it, close it, minimize it, etc.  You can rearrange windows putting them beside each other, move one to the top of the stack, etc.

If you ever can’t find the window, check in the Window Menu at the top and all open files are listed at the bottom of that menu.

You can expand the window so it is larger than or smaller than the photo.  Often when you zoom in, the window can only go so large, and eventually you will zoom in enough so that the window is no longer showing the whole image.

If you zoom out a lot, or if the image is small to begin with, you can make the Image Window larger than the image itself.  In my nondescript sample here, the image file is the white space with the words inside.

As you can see, when I expand the window I get extra space around the image.  This is sometimes nice to have - like when you are selecting portions of the image and you want to start right at the edge.  If you start the selection in the area outside the image bounds, but within the image window, then the selection will automatically start at the edge.

That brings up another issue, you cannot work in that extra space.  On a few special tasks you can work there, but generally speaking, that extra space is not editable.  But it does help you see the image better without the rulers and other window elements right up against the sides of the image.

Speaking of those elements, some ones that are interesting to note are the rulers (which can be changed to show centimeters, pixels, percentages, etc.), the information at the top (Untitled-1 @ 100% [Layer 1,RGB/8]), and the info at the bottom (Doc: 81.4K/232.0K).  All of those elements give you information and some of them can be modified. 

For now, these default settings are just fine

Well that is the basics of the Photoshop program layout and interface.  To use a cliché: we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Visit the forum topic on this article to discuss it.

One issue that comes with using any online video hosting is their native resolution.  It is only 320 x 240 (even TV resolution is 640 x 480 pixels).  Your smallest tube monitors (the big and heavy ones, not the flat ones) are at least 800 x 600 pixels.

This means that it would be difficult to read and make out exactly what I am doing if I don’t zoom in.  So that is what I plan on doing.  The professional video tutorial places (the ones who charge a lot for their content and want to make a profit) usually do at least 800 x 600 pixels.  Because they are charging a lot for each tutorial, they can afford the extra size and bandwidth.

So I hope the tutorials will be benefited by this additional tool.

Most of the help I have received has been about equipment issues.  This site, however, is based strongly on Photoshop and Printing.  I know enough about equipment and technique to help there too, but I have always excelled in Photoshop and Digital Printing, so I feel that I can more easily come off as a pseudo-expert at least.

So that is why I am doing this.  I am sure that I will end up investing a ton of time throughout the ensuing years.  If I get enough compensation to take my wife out to dinner a little more often, then it might just balance out - seeing as how I will probably be too busy to take her out at times because I’ll be writing on here or on the forums.

In any case, I am still optimistic and I am looking forward to it.

I leave tomorrow, but I’ll be sure to make an entry before I go to the frozen north - for tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my epiphany that I could probably be a professional photographer if I wanted to learn it.

Looking Forward

I am excited to go forward!  It will probably take a while to get enough content on here so that people find it a place worth visiting.  Hopefully by then I will also have some traffic visiting this site.

As of yet I have not linked any page to this site.  I want to finish setting it up a little more, included making sure the security preferences are all good.  Because of that, I think about 6 people beside myself have seen this site. 

Frankly, that doesn’t bother me.  As I said, it has been on purpose, but even so I feel that I will enjoy writing despite how quickly people come to read and participate on this site.

In my experience with building websites (I have built around 25 so far - from the mundane and insignificant to ones that I am really proud of), I have found that it takes about a year and a half for my sites to mature.

By “mature” I mean not only the content is finally tweaked to where I am almost, kind of, comfortable with it - but also it matures in how many people visit it.  It takes a while to build your “street credit” on the web, or what experts like to call page ranking and referring links.

I am sure that when a year and a half passes, the site won’t look quite like it does today, and it will hopefully be full of rich, juicy content.

Maybe then I’ll link to this post and discuss it.

Until then . . .

The master plan, of course is to have many forums under a variety of digital photography categories.  It isn’t meant to be the definitive source of knowledge out there, just as this site as a whole isn’t meant for that.  The idea of this site is to just add a bit more to the pool of knowledge out there.  I am happy to allow others to add to the knowledge base on this site, but at the very least it will be a medium for me to share my thoughts, opinions, and what I hope is knowledge as well.

I was born the last of 5 children to an excellent commercial photographer, Royce Bair.  None of us kids really enjoyed photography.  In fact photography meant work!  If dad was going to go out and shoot something and we were “invited” to tag along, it meant we would have to lug around lighting gear, hold reflectors, and be absolutely bored stiff.

Luckily (or so I thought back then), I wasn’t called upon to help too often.  I usually helped out when someone needed a portrait done, but by the time I was old enough to help, Royce was focusing most of his efforts into his stock photo agency, The Stock Solution.  Even so, I did get a healthy exposure to professional photography.

Fast-forward to Feb. 15, 2003.  I was 22 and had recently found myself without a college major when I decided that I no longer was interested in working toward medical school.  I can’t say exactly what had put me off from continuing pre-med.  I was pretty adept at my course work, but I was no longer enjoying myself as I learned.

The night before Feb. 15th I had “broken up” with a girl.  I qualify that in quotes because we never really were “together,” but that night she finally decided that it would indeed stay that way.  As I slowly woke up that Saturday morning I remembered a dream that I had just had:

In the dream I was in a meadow and I was taking a portrait of a girl, probably a senior portrait.  She was obviously into medieval period things because she was dressed like a maiden from that era, but with a modern. sassy look.  I was shooting her back-lit (with the sun providing that light) and with a golden reflector providing the main fill.

When I awoke I thought of the dream and audibly said “I can do that!” I realized that over the years I had basically been taught lighting, posing, and composition as I watched and helped my father.  What I did lack was knowledge of the mechanics and techniques of professional photography.  I’ve always been good with mechanical and technical stuff, so I decided that would be easy.  The only question remained:

Would I like professional photography?

Well in an effort to make this entry shorter than it could be, I’ll answer that with a “yes!” I went to my father and happily surprised him with my request to be his first, last, and only child to seriously want to be trained in photography.  He helped me and provided me with an Olympus E-10 to borrow.  Eventually I got to use the Fuji S2 Pro (especially when he decided to give Canon a try with their new 1Ds [not mark II]).

Consequently I have never shot film professionally.  The only film I have ever shot has been in point-and-shoot cameras and the results were developed at 1-hour photo labs!

I guess the old die-hard film lovers might think that gives me less of a perspective.  I don’t care what they think . . . this site will be about what I know!