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©2008 Mike Gobbi

Photoshop First Steps

• Date: June 24, 2006
• Topic: Photoshop
• Level: Basic

Articles > Photoshop > Photoshop First Steps

So you've got this 'Photoshop' program on your computer and you've heard that it's good. But, really, it just looks kind of scary — more buttons and controls than the cockpit of the space shuttle.

Relax: you don't need to know what they all do. In fact, if you learn just three things you will be using Photoshop in no time!

You use Photoshop to do basically three things: you paint & draw, you make collages of images, and you adjust the colour of your images. In other words, it's a sketchbook, a scrapbook, and a photographic darkroom. The 'photographic darkroom' aspect gets rather complicated, and so we aren't going to address that in this article: we'll stick to painting, cutting, and pasting.

Painting

The paintbrush tool does what you expect: it paints on your image using the foreground colour (red in this case). If you press the left and right bracket keys ( [ and ] ) your paintbrush gets bigger and smaller. The eraser erases your picture. For any layer other than the background (see below for an explanation of layers) this means making the pixels transparent. On the background layer 'erasing' is the same as painting with the background colour (green). And the paint bucket dumps paint that spreads out until it hits the edges of the area you've dumped it into.

Selecting

The three selectors represent different ways of selecting parts of your image. The rectangle (also called marquee) tool lets you select rectangular areas of the screen. The lasso lets you select things that aren't square. And the magic wand lets you select an object by clicking on it. Specifically, when you click with the magic wand, all pixels that are the same colour (or nearly so) as the point you clicked on will be selected. (In fact, the magic wand is just a paint bucket for selection).

Holding down the shift key while you click or drag adds to the existing selection, while holding down the option key (the alternate key if you're using Windows) subtracts from the existing selection.

And why would we be selecting things? Any operation that you perform (like painting) only affects the selected areas. And you can use the mover tool to move the selected part of the image around. Holding down the option (or alternate) key while you move makes a copy; otherwise you leave a hole behind.

Layers

The real power of Photoshop comes from layers. Imagine that your picture is painted on several layers of glass. Where the glass is transparent (where you haven't painted on it yet) you can see through to the layer beneath. The layer that is active (blue) is the layer that will be affected by any operations you perform (like painting or moving). For many pictures the bottom layer is called the Background and can't be transparent — underneath all your sheets of glass is a piece of paper.

There are also special types of layers: text layers that you can edit, layer masks that show or hide parts of the layer they are masking, adjustment layers that change the brightness or colours of the layers beneath them, and vector layers for drawing lines and curves. And there are even layer effects — like drop shadows — that can change the way a layer looks. But that's all a lesson for another day.