Introduction: Photoshop Basics: The Interface

The photoshop interface can be quite daunting to a new comer. The most important thing about photoshop is to understand what all of its tools are for and how to work within its environment.

1.The interface

The Photoshop interface can be divided into:

• The menus
• The Palette Well
• The Options Bar
• The Toolbar
• The Document Area
• The Palettes or Docks

We will focus on those sections which hide the most features and covered them in 3 different tutorials. We will cover the Toolbar, the Menus and the Palettes.

Let's start with the toolbar.

2. The Toolbar:

The Photoshop Toolbar contains all of the common tools used in photoshop, (some of the more advanced tools can be hidden away in menus) but despite their commonality some of them require a lot of practice to master and to get expected results every time.

The Toolbar is aptly divided into sections based on the common needs of any Photoshop user as outlined below:

• Product Link:
  
  At the very top of the toolbar you will see the Photoshop CS feather. Clicking this button will take you to the Adobe Photoshop Product home page.

3. Selection Tools:



The selection tools are grouped at the top of the toolbar, and they are:

• The Marquee Tool (shortcut: M):
  

  

  The marquee tool is comprised of the following tools: Rectangular Selection Tool, Elliptical Selection Tool, Single Row and Single Column selection tools. The options for this tool are Feathering (Feathering softens the selection edges by a number of pixels specified in the dialogue box) and Style. The Style can be "Normal", where you click and drag to make a selection, Fixed Aspect Ratio, where you have a defined relationship between the height and width of your selection and lastly Fixed Size. For the Elliptical tool one more option is available: Anti alias.

• Move Tool (shortcut: V):
  
  The move tool has the following options: Auto Select Layer, and Show Bounding Box. All your align and distribute options are also available while having the move tool selected.

• Lasso Tool(shortcut: L):
  

  

  The Lasso tool has three tools: The freehand lasso tool (default), Polygonal Lasso Tool and the Magnetic Lasso Tool. All the lasso tools allow you turn on/off antialiasing, or adjust the feathering for softer edges. In addition the magnetic lasso has two more options, edge contrast, which allows you to tune the intensity of the differentiation the magnet makes between two colors, and frequency which adjusts how often the magnetic lasso places a node in the path.

• Magic Wand (shortcut W):
  
  The magic wand calculates the area of influence by analyzing the color values of adjacent pixels and grouping them based on the tolerance value. The value can be set in the Options Box and is defined in pixels. There are 2 additional modes that can be set on the Magic Wand's options: "Contiguous" and "Use All Layers". Contiguous will select adjacent pixels of the same color tolerance

  
  

• Crop Tool (shortcut: C):
  
  Used to crop and resample an image.

  
  

• Slice Tools (Shortcut: K):
  

  

  This tool has two modes, one for creating slices and another for selecting them. The Create Slice tool has the same options as the rectangular Marquee tool. The Select Slice tool has the options of arranging the slices as well as dividing existing slices and a button to show and hide the automatically generated Slices.

4. Image Editing Tools:

This set of tools are designed mostly for photo retouching and painting images. The following tools can be found in this group:

• Retouch Tools (Shortcut: J):

The tools present in this group are specifically designed to help you repair or adjust images. The Healing brush and patch tools are designed to help you blend adjacent pixels seamlessly at different settings of tolerance and radius, this is of course an over simplification of the function of these tools. The color replacement tool helps you sample colors and replace them with a color of your choosing by painting over the sampled color.

• Painting Tools (Shortcut: B):

The brush and pencil tools make your basic painting tools, they both support the use of brushes, although you may find yourself using brushes more with the paint brush for the softer edges. We cover brushes in more detail in this tutorial.

• Stamp Tools (Shortcut: S):

The Clone Stamp tool is pretty self explanatory; by pressing ALT and clicking on the image you determine your original sample point. The sample point is based on distance from the sampled point to the destination point. This means that wherever you release the ALT key and use your left button to paint, the brush will always sample in the same location relative to the initial selection. The Clone stamp tool is great for reproducing small parts of an image. The patter stamp tool works much like a brush that paints patterns that can be user defined and created. This tool also has an "Impressionist" mode which takes the patterns and turns them into a more painterly texture, this tool can be useful for painting elements that have a lot of repetition on it, like crowds, leafs, flowers, etc.

• History Tools (Shortcut: Y):

The History brush allows you to take a snapshot from your history and repaint the image using pixels from it, this can be useful when you applied an effect to the image but you only need it to appear in specific parts. The Art history brush also uses a snapshot but unlike the History Brush this one allows you to paint using the snapshot as a sample allowing you to create a more artistic and stylized look for your paintings.

• Eraser Tools (Shortcut: E):

The Eraser tool needs no explanation, it does what it says, it erases. The Background Eraser tool has the ability to use brushes for their desired shape (as well as the Eraser Tool), however, this tool will attempt to remove what it considers to be the background color based on the settings and tolerance of the tool. The Magic Eraser tool works much like the magic wand but instead of selecting it deletes the pixels that match the tolerance settings it is set to.

• Fill Tools (Shortcut: G):

The fill tools allow you use a solid color or a pattern to fill an area (Paint Bucket Tool) or use different types of gradients (Gradient Tool).

• Adjustment Tools (Shortcut: R):

These are tools designed to allow you to selectively change the state of the pixels in the image by Blurring (fading pixels of the same color outwards and blending them with adjacent pixels) Sharpening (Adjusting the pixels contrast levels) and Smudging (blending pixels over the distance of a stroke with adjacent pixels).

• Photo Adjustment Tools (Shortcut: R):

This group contains the Doge Tool, Burn Tool and Sponge Tool. The Burn Tool allows you to take the highlights, shadows, or mid tones tones of an image and adjust their level of brightness; the Burn tool allows you to do the same thing but to the dark sections of the image. These tools have their origins in traditional photography where by adjusting the amount of light the film receives you can lighten the image (Dodge) or by adjusting the exposure you can generate greater shadows (Burn). The sponge tool uses a grayscale model to increase or decrease the saturation of an area od the image.

5. Shape Tools

All the tools in this group are designed to work with vector data or paths. This group has the following tools:

• Path Tools (Shortcuts: A and P):

The Path tools are divided into two sections: The Selection tools, which have The Path Selection tool for moving entire paths or the Direct Selection Tool which allows you to move specific nodes on the path. The second group are the Path Creation tools. We will cover this in more detail here.

Text Tools (Shortcut: T):

Allows you to place text in your Photoshop document. You can control de orientation from Horizontal to Vertical and the same applies to the Type mask tools which generate a selection using the text's shape. All of these tools have a "Warp" option allowing you to bend the text to different degrees.

Vector Shape Tools (Shortcut: U):

This group allows you to create basic shapes quickly. You can choose to create them as paths or as vector shapes, which in Photoshop are solid layers with vector masks applied to them. You are also able to create and add your own shapes.

6. Assistance Tools:

All the tools in this group are designed to work with vector data or paths. This group has the following tools:

• Notes Tool (Shortcuts: A and P):

These tools allow you to leave text or audio notes for your Photoshop files. This is particularly handy if you are working on larger teams and need to give instructions with the file, or if you simply want to document anything at all about the project.

Picker and Measure Tools (Shortcut: T):

The Eyedropper tool is your basic color picker, it samples the pixel and sets that as your foreground/background color. The color sample tool allows you to take up to four readings from different sections of the image. The sampled colors will appear on your info palette for later reference and you can use the ALT key to remove previous samples.

The measure tool is also very self explanatory, it allows you to draw lines between sections of your canvas and measure the distances.

Pan Tool (Shortcut: H):

The Spacebar is your friend; this key is mapped to the Pan tool.

Zoom Tool (Shortcut: Z):

Allows you to zoom in by clicking on the image and Zooming out by holding ALT while clicking.

7. Bottom of the Toolbar :

At the bottom of the toolbar we find the remaining buttons which are more like functions rather than tools.

Swatches:

The swatches allow you to reset the foreground and background colors to Black and White by selecting the little swatches on the bottom left; it allows you to swap them by clicking the arrows on the top right and it allows you set them individually to any color by clicking on either one.

Quick Mask (Shortcut: Q):

The Quick mask section is divided into two, the standard mode on the left, the Quick Mask mode on the right. Photoshop operates on standard mode by default; when you switch to quick mask mode you can then paint any area, to later be converted to a selection, using the brush tool. To convert your strokes to a selection simply switch back to standard mode.

Display Modes (Shortcut: F):

These three buttons allow you to switch from Standard mode (default photoshop state), Full Screen with Menu Bars and Full Screen.

Photoshop to Image Ready :

Takes your current document and opens it in Image Ready for further web optimizing/editing.

And that is the Photoshop toolbar, like almost anything in photoshop it takes a lot of doing and testing to see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes it can take a long time to discover how a certain feature truly is useful, but I assure you all of them are. This concludes the first Photoshop Basics tutorial and hope it was useful for those hoping to learn PhotoShop and a good refresher for those of us who have been with it for a while. Thanks.