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[Harmony Havoc]

Photoshop Basics

Photoshop is powerful graphics editing software developed by Adobe. It is widely used by professionals in a variety of disciplines, from motion graphics to web design to photography enhancement and beyond.

Adobe Photoshop is the leading image manipulation software for professional and advanced digital image makers. Photoshop has long been considered the standard of professional level graphics editing, and is popular for its number of tools, filters and visual effects.

This thread is based on tutorials that are found to be easy to read and understand, that provide illustraions and pictures to help the new user understand the basics of Photoshop.

To get started here are some sites that give a basic overview of Photoshop:

The Adobe Photoshop Main Site

A very comprehensive overview

Photoshop Reference Guides

A quick look at Photoshop CS

An overview of Photoshop 7 (for those who havent upgraded to CS)

[Harmony Havoc]

Getting Around Photoshop CS2

This Getting Around Photoshop CS2 tutorial is a very simple and easy to read. Once you are through you will be familiar with the following basic Photoshop Features:

• The Photoshop CS2 Default Workspace - The default workspace used to create photoshop projects. The main counterparts of the Photoshop workspace include TheMenu Bar, Tool options bar, Adobe Bridge shortcut button, Palette Well, Toolbox and Floating palettes.
• The Photoshop Menu Bar - The menu bar consists of nine menus: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, and Help.
• The Photoshop Tools Options Bar - Located under the menu bar, the Tool Opton Bar is used to adjust settings for the currently active tool.
• The Photoshop Toolbox Part 1 and Part 2 - The toolbox contains many of the tools you will be working with in Photoshop.
• The Photoshop Pallete Well - This is a space where you can keep palettes that you don't use as frequently or don't want occupying your workspace. These include the Brushes, Tool Presets, and Layer Comps palettes.
• Photoshop Floating Palettes - The Floating Paletes contain palette groups can be moved around in the workspace by clicking on the title bar and dragging. The first group contains the Navigator, Info, and Histogram palettes. Next is the Color, Swatches, and Styles palettes. Below that are the History and Actions Palettes. Finally, you have the Layers, Channels, and Paths Palettes.
• The Photoshop Document Window - The document or page to create your project.
• The Photoshop Document Window's Status Bar - The status bar allows easy acess to options to alter and adjust the Document window.

For a more comprehensive look at these Photoshop features, read the tutorials found: Here. These tutorials are for Photoshop 7, but the basics are relevant to CS2.

Photoshop Hints and Shortcuts

Using Keyboard short cuts saves lots of time and energy when creating art with Photoshop. Here are some links to lists of the Keyboard Shortucts:

Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard Shortcuts Defined
Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts

[Harmony Havoc]

The Tool Bar and the Tool Menu

The Tool Bar
Here is a close up look at the Tool Bar and all the tools it contains:
The CS2 Tool Bar or The Tool Bar (contains indivicual links for each of the tools on the Too Bar Pallet.)

Here is a very complete and animated Photoshop toolbox reference. Very useful in getting to know the function of all the tools and how to use them.

Basic Tools Tutorials

The Tool Menu

Under Construction

[Harmony Havoc]

The Pallet Windows

The Photoshop Pallets are the hold the tools, controls, and functions needed to create Photoshop documents. There are two types of pallets found in the Photoshop workspace, docked and floating Pallets:

The Photoshop Palette Well - This is a space where you can keep palettes that you don't use as frequently or don't want occupying your workspace. These include the Brushes, Tool Presets, and Layer Comps palettes.
Photoshop Floating Palettes - The Floating Paletes contain palette groups can be moved around in the workspace by clicking on the title bar and dragging. The first group contains the Navigator, Info, and Histogram palettes. Next is the Color, Swatches, and Styles palettes. Below that are the History and Actions Palettes. Finally, you have the Layers, Channels, and Paths Palettes.

Here are some hand features that make working with the floating pallets simple and easy:

Grouping and Ungrouping Pallets
Joining Multiple Pallets
Pallet Windows
Customizing a Palette and Using the Palette Well
Creating One Large Pallet Group

Take a closer look at some of the Individual Pallets....

[Harmony Havoc]

Layers, Channels, and Paths Palettes

The Layer Pallet

There is a lot to layers and they will take some time to master. But they are not that difficult once you understand how they work. A layer is simply one image stacked on top of another. To get a basic understanding of what this means, imagine a piece of paper and that is painted red. Then a piece of clear cellophane and is painted with a yellow circle, and laid over the paper. Now another piece of cellophane is painted with some blue type and laid on top of the yellow circle. The results are a background (red) and 2 layers (yellow and blue). This is only the beginning because there are things such as because clipping groups, and layer masks will make parts of layers opaque to selected portions of some layers only. But these concepts will be described in the more advanced tutorial.

The power of layers is that almost any kind of painting and editing on one layer without affecting any of the other layers. Effects and image adjustments can even be applied to a duplicate image on its own layer, and therefore, can also be deleted without disturbing the underlying image, if you don’t like the effect.

The layer pallet holds all the layers used to create a Photoshop document. The Layer pallet status bar holds tools that can be used to easily alter and adjust specific layers. These tutorials give a good over view of the layer pallet and it's features:

The Layer Pallet and it's Features
The Layer Pallet
The Layer Pallet Defined
New Layer Pallet Features found in CS2

Because this is an ABC's thread, the more complex features of layering are described in other threads in the BCA Photoshop Tutorial Forum such as Layer Masks, Blending Images and Advanced Layer Pallet Techniques

[Harmony Havoc]

The Color, Swatches, and Styles Palettes

Under Construction.

[Harmony Havoc]

Navigator, Info, and Histogram palettes

The History Pallet

Photoshop tracks all the changes from the time you opened your image to the time you close it. The History Pallet allows you to go back in time to any particular state of the edited image. The History Pallet is a versatile tool. It can be used to revert to a previous state of an image, to delete an image's states, and in Photoshop, to create a document from a state or snapshot.


Here are some good tutorials that expalin the use of the History Pallet

The History Pallet Explained
Deleting Images with the History Pallet
Create a History Log in CS2

Exercise to get to know the History Pallet:

History Pallet Exercise One

[Harmony Havoc]

Brushes, Tool Presets, and Layer Comps Palettes

Under Construction

[Harmony Havoc]

Navigator, Info, and Histogram palettes

The History Pallet

Photoshop tracks all the changes from the time you opened your image to the time you close it. The History Pallet allows you to go back in time to any particular state of the edited image. The History Pallet is a versatile tool. It can be used to revert to a previous state of an image, to delete an image's states, and in Photoshop, to create a document from a state or snapshot.


Here are some good tutorials that expalin the use of the History Pallet

The History Pallet Explained
Deleting Images with the History Pallet
Create a History Log in CS2

Exercise to get to know the History Pallet:

History Pallet Exercise One