Learn Adobe PhotoShop in 25 Minutes

Photoshop is an incredibly powerful but also intimidating application. If you've wanted to start using Photoshop but didn't know where to start, we'll be teaching you the basics all week long.
Wait! I don't have
Photoshop!
Are you not currently a Photoshop user?
Adobe offers a Photoshop 30-day trial
that you can download right now and it
will provide you with plenty of time to
learn how it works. If you don't want to
eventually purchase Photoshop because it's too expensive, much of what we're going to discuss in these lessons will apply to not just to Photoshop but pretty much most of the standard photo-editing and design tools you'll find (Pixelmator is a great $30 alternative on the Mac, and GIMP is a free, open-source cross- platform option). We've chosen Photoshop because it's the most commonly used, but you're welcome to follow along using other software as well. Today's lesson is pretty Photoshop-
specific, but as we move along you
should be able to use other software to do most of what we discuss.
-Ready? Let's get started.

The Toolbar
We're not going to take a look at every single tool but we are going to look at almost every one of them. While this overview will give you an idea of what each tool does, go find yourself a photo and start playing around with them.

»Move Tool (Keyboard: V)
The move tool simply lets you move
objects in a given layer around the
Photoshop canvas. To use it, click
anywhere on the canvas and drag. As you drag, the Photoshop layer will move with your mouse.

»Marquee (Keyboard: M)
The marquee lets you select part of the canvas in a specific shape. By default you get a rectangular (or perfect square if you hold down shift while selecting), but you can also select in the shape of
an ellipse (or a perfect circle if you hold down shift while selecting).

»Lasso (Keyboard: L)
The lasso is a free-form selection tool
that lets you drag around the canvas and
select anything the lasso'd area covers.
Within this tool you also have access to
the polygonal lasso, which lets you
create a selection by clicking around on
the canvas and creating points, and the
magnetic lasso, which works the same as
the regular lasso but attempts to detect
edges for you and automatically snap to
them.

»Magic Wand (Keyboard: W)
Clicking an area with the magic wand
will tell Photoshop to select the spot you
clicked on and anything around it that's
similar. This tool can be used as a crude
way to remove backgrounds from
photos.

»Crop Tool (Keyboard: C)
The crop tool is used to (surprise!) crop
your pictures. You can specify the exact
size and constrain the crop tool to those
proportions, or you can just crop to any
size you please.

»Eyedropper (Keyboard: I)
The eyedropper tool lets you click on
any part of the canvas and sample the
color at that exact point. The eyedropper
will change your foreground color to
whatever color it sampled from the
canvas.

»Healing Brush (Keyboard: J)
The healing brush lets you sample part
of the photograph and use it to paint
over another part. Once you're finished,
Photoshop will examine surrounding
areas and try to blend what you painted
in with the rest of the picture.

»Paintbrush and Pencil(Keyboard: B)
The paintbrush is a tool that emulates a
paintbrush and the pencil is a tool that
emulates a pencil. The paintbrush,
however, can be set to many different
kinds of brushes. You can paint with
standard paintbrush and airbrush styles,
or even paint with leaves and other
shapes as well.

»Clone Stamp (Keyboard: S)
Like the healing brush, the clone stamp
lets you sample part of the photograph
and use it to paint over another part.
With the clone stamp, however, that's it.
Photoshop doesn't do anything beyond
painting one area over a new area.

»History Brush (Keyboard: Y)
The history brush lets you paint back in
time. Photoshop keeps track of all the
moves you make (well, 50 by default)
and the history brush lets you paint the
past back into the current photo. Say
you brightened up the entire photo but
you wanted to make a certain area look
like it did before you brightened it, you
can take the history brush and paint
that area to bring back the previous
darkness.

»Eraser Tool (Keyboard: E)
The erase tool is almost identical to the
paintbrush, except it erases instead of
paints.

»Paint Can and Gradient
Tools (Keyboard: G)
The paint can tool lets you fill in a
specific area with the current
foreground color. The gradient tool will,
by default, create a gradient that blends
the foreground and background tool
(though you can load and create preset
gradients as well, some of which use
than two colors).

»Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge Tools (Keyboard: None)
All three of these tools act like
paintbrushes, but each has a different
impact on your picture. The blur tool
will blur the area where you paint, the
sharpen tool will sharpen it, and the
smudge tool will smudge the area all
around the canvas. The smudge tool is
very useful in drawing for creating
nicely blended colors or for creating
wisps and smoke that you can add to
your photos.

»Burn, Dodge, and Sponge Tools (Keyboard: O)
The burn, dodge, and sponge tools are
paintbrush-like tools that manipulate
light and color intensity. The burn tool
can make areas in your photo darker.
The dodge tool can make them lighter.
The sponge tool can saturate or
desaturate color in the area you paint
with it. These are all very useful tools
for photo touch ups.

»Pen Tool (Keyboard: P)
The pen tool is used for drawing vector
graphics . It can also be used to create
paths that can be used for various things
that we'll discuss in a later lesson
(although if you watch the video you
can see a type path being created).

»Type Tool (Keyboard: T)
The type tool lets you type horizontally.
Tools hidden beneath the horizontal type
tool will let you type vertically and also
create horizontal and vertical text
masks .

»Path Tool (Keyboard: A)
The path tool lets you move any created
paths around. It's like the move tool, but
for paths.

»Shape Tool (Keyboard: U)
The shape tool lets you create vector
rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles,
polygons, lines, and custom shapes.
These tools are very useful when
designing or when creating shape masks
for photos.
3D Tools
These are the 3D tools. We're not going
to be dealing with 3D stuff in these
lessons so all you really need to know is
that these exist. If you're curious, this
video will give you an idea of what these
tools can do.

»Hand Tool (Keyboard: H)
The hand tool allows you to click and
drag around the Photoshop canvas. If
the entire canvas currently fits on the
screen, this tool won't do anything. This
tool is for easily navigating around
when you're zoomed in, or a picture is
simple too big to fit on the screen at
100%.

»Zoom Tool (Keyboard: Z)
The zoom tool lets you zoom in and out
of the Photoshop canvas by clicking on a
given area. By default, the zoom tool
only zooms in. To zoom out, hold down
the option key and use the zoom tool as
you normally would.

»Color Selection Tools (Keyboard:D for defaults, X to switch foreground and background colors)
These tools let you manage the colors
you're using. The color on top is the
foreground color and the color in back
is the background color. The foreground
color is what your brushes will use. The
background color is what will be used if
you delete something from the
background or extend it (although now, Photoshop CS5 will give you the option for using your foreground color instead in some circumstances). The two smaller
icons up top are shortcut functions. The
left one, showing a black square on a
white square, will set your foreground
and background colors to the defaults
(Keyboard: D). The double-headed
curved arrow will swap your
foreground and background color
(Keyboard: X). Clicking on either the
foreground or background color will
bring up a color picker so you can set
them to precisely the color you want.

»Palettes
Palettes are the things that you see
sitting over on the right side of your
screen. They make it easy for you to
navigate through your document, add
adjustments, switch modes, and other
things.

»Layers
The layers palette lets you see all the
layers in your document. As you start
getting to know Photoshop, you'll find
yourself in this palette more than any
other. It'll let you organize and arrange
your layers, set blending modes , set
visibility and opacity of layers, group
and merge layers, and a bunch of other
neat things we'll learn about in future
lessons.

»Adjustments
Your adjustments panel is where you can
easily create and edit adjustment layers.
Adjustment layers are non-destructive
image alterations that affect all the
layers below them and can easily be
turned on and off. Their most common
use is for color correction (namely the
Levels and Curves adjustments, but there
are many different kinds of adjustments
you can perform that can dramatically
alter the look of your image.

»Color Channels
The color channels palette will let you
look at the specific colors that make up
your picture. If you're in RGB mode
you'll get red, green, and blue. These
color channels will differ if you're in a
different color space (such as CMYK or
LAB ). When you choose a specific color,
you'll notice you'll be shown your image
in different versions of black and white.
This is because each color channel is
simply a monochromatic images
representing the light in each channel
(e.g. the red channel is just a look at the
red light in your photo). Switching
between these different channels is
useful for making color channel-specific
touch ups, overall contrast
enhancements, and also for converting
your photo to black and white in a
compelling way. This will be discussed
in greater detail in a later lesson about
color correction and photo
enhancements.

»Color Picker
This palette will let you easily alter your
foreground and background colors using
sliders.

»Color Swatches
The color swatches palette is a set of pre-
defined colors you can quickly choose
from. You can load in several other pre-
made swatch collections or create your
own, too.

»History
The history palette lets you go back in
time to undo any previous alterations.
The standard undo command (in the edit
menu) will simply toggle between
undoing and redoing the latest action
performed on your image. The history
panel is where you can go back much
further (50 actions by default).
Text
The text palette, and the paragraph
palette below it, let you make all sorts of
adjustments to any text you create with
the type tool. These options are very
similar to what you'll find in a word
processing, but you can also specify
things like character width and spacing
which are more useful in design.
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Menus
Most of what you'll find in Photoshop's
menus can be found using the previously
discussed tools. Nonetheless, we're going
to take a quick look at some notable
items in each of the menus.
File
File, as usual, handles opening, saving,
and closing operations. Towards the end
of these lessons we'll be taking a look at
your different saving options (namely
Save for Web ).
Edit
Edit, as usual, brings you copy, cut, and
paste. In Photoshop, it's also where you
transform layers and set your color
spaces.
Image
Image brings you canvas and image
adjustments, including destructive effects
that you'll also find in your adjustments
palette. Options in this menu are
designed to affect the image as a whole,
although many adjustments are applied
to only a single layer.
Layer
Layer lets you do all of the things you
can do in the layer palette with a few
more options. This menu also lets you
create adjustment layers and smart
objects (a group of layers treated as a
single object).
Select
While the marquee and lasso tools will
be your main means of selecting things,
the select menu can help you refine that
selection or create entirely new
selections based on certain criteria (such
as color range and luminosity).
Filter
Filter brings you a wealth of built-in
(and, if installed, third-party) Photoshop
filters that can blur, sharpen, distort,
and alter your image (or layers of the
image) in many different and unique
ways. The best way to get acquainted
with these filters is to try them all. That
can take a little time, but it's fun to play
around with them and see what they do.
We'll be getting into the specifics in
subsequent lessons, but only looking at a
few commonly useful filters.
Analysis
Analysis provides you with measurement
tools. There will be times when you need
them to make accurate alterations to
your images. We will not be covering
anything in this menu in these basic lessons.
3D
As previously noted, we're not covering
3D. If you decide to learn more about
3D later, you may want to explore this
menu on your own at some point.
View
View provides you with various view
options, lets you hide and show line
guides you've created (see video for an
example), and make Photoshop snap (or
not snap) to corners, edges, and to the
grid on the canvas. Viewing of this
invisible grid can also be turned on and
off in the View menu.
Window
Window lets you hide and show certain
windows and palettes. You can also
arrange your Photoshop windows and
palettes however you want and save
them as a window preset.
That's all for today! In the next lesson we'll
be learning about color correction, touch-
ups, and photo enhancement.

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