Digital Photography Community

Photoshop Tutorial - Welcome & Basic Overview

For intermediate to advanced users, this tutorial won’t hold much (if anything) new.  More exciting stuff is coming soon, don’t worry.  And meanwhile you can read it just to criticize my gramer (pun intended) and you might learn something you didn’t know.

In this Photoshop tutorial, the following will be covered:

• Program Layout - where & what everything is
• Program Menus
• Work Space
• Palettes
• Tools & Their Options
• Short Cuts
• Image Window

Let’s take a look at the basic ins and outs of this great program: Adobe Photoshop.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.