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Photoshop Quick Start Tutorial.
This tutorial will get you up and
running with Photoshop and basics like cropping, resizing
for a variety of purposes, preparing images for printing and
the web and much, much more. For the serious/want to be serious
photoshoper the two books Restoration
& Retouching and Masking
& Compositing by Photoshop Diva Katrin Eismann
are a must read.
Photoshop can be daunting to first
time users, the name "Photoshop" may make you think
this is just a photographic image manipulation application,
that could not be further from the truth. Take a look at the
Photoshop
Cafe web site, the guitar illustration featured
on the home page looks like an excellent product photograph,
it's not, it was built entirely
from scratch in Photoshop.
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One : Setting up your workspace. |
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When
you first open Photoshop the palettes are arranged
as they are in the left hand picture.
What you want is to have the palettes arranged as they are
shown in the right hand picture.
This
is considered a "professional" arrangement since
it maximizes the screen space for the most important (most
frequently used) palettes while still keeping instant
access to all the others, thanks to the "Docking Well".
Notice the space at the top of each picture, directly above
the palette groups, is empty in the left hand picture and
shows 4 tabs in the right hand picture, This space is the
"Docking Well" and each tab in the Well is a palette
with a specific set of resources, as are the tabs in the palettes
that remain on the main screen. Moving tabs (palettes) to
the Docking Well is just a matter of left clicking with your
mouse on each tab and dragging and dropping each palette into
the Well. When you drag all the tabs out of a "box"
that box automatically disappears.
If
you have already been playing in Photoshop and don't have
the "Default" palette arrangement : in Windows click
"Window" from the menu at the top of your screen
and from the drop down menu click "Reset palette locations".
On Macs it is in "Window-Workspace" |
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Here
are close ups
of the right hand image from above showing the way you want
your "on screen" palettes arranged |
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This
is the top set. It holds the History, Actions and Info
palette tabs.
From the default set the Info tab was dragged and dropped in
beside the History and Actions tabs. |
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This
is the bottom set, no changes were made in this collection
from the default set.
All
the tabs not seen in the pictures on the left were dragged
into the Docking Well. |
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Now
arrange each of the two boxes in a similar way to
the top right hand image.
To size the boxes click and drag on the bottom right hand
corner, you will see the cursor change to diagonal double
arrows if you are using Windows, on Macs the cursor remains
as an arrow.
To move the sized box around click and drag on the top bar
of the box.
Note:
If the Info tab is selected in the top box there will be nothing
to grab to resize, the History or Actions tab has to be selected
first. |
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The
great thing about the Docking Well is that when you
click on any tab in the Docking Well it opens for you to select
what you want and then closes again as soon as you click anywhere
else within the application. This is a great saver of valuable
screen real estate.
Also you can expand each tab by clicking and dragging on the
same bottom right hand corner as you did on the "on screen"
palettes.
On the left the Styles tab is at the default opening size. On
the right it has been expanded, and will continue to open at
this size until I drag it back to a smaller size and will still
conveniently disappear when I click anywhere else within the
application. |
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We
are almost ready to play, just two more quick and
simple settings to change.
Press Shift-Control-K (Windows) or Shift-Command-K (Mac) to
bring up the Color Settings Dialog Box then
change your settings to those shown in the picture on the
right. It's just a case of clicking the little arrows on the
right of each box and selecting exactly the
same setting as you see in the picture.
When you are done close the dialog box.
You
have just set up the "Color Space".
This is a vital setting to get the best results if you are
planning on printing your pictures (and for everything else
for that matter).
This
is part of "Color Management", one of the biggest
subjects in Photoshop, so we won't go into it any further
right now. |
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