A lot of people had come to me and ask "How do I use Photoshop"? Well there's a lot of answers to that question and I think you have to start from the basics before you can even answer that.
First of all, what is Photoshop? In my own words, it's a powerful tool used to enhance, manipulate and transform all sorts of images and basically turn them into art. I've been using Photoshop for over 8 years now and like every other Photoshop enthusiasts out there, I had to start learning from the beginning. Learning Photoshop is really as easy as A, B, C.
Let's start learning!
Let's begin with the basic workspace.
My workspace has 4 basic palletes, the Tool Pallete, Navigator Pallete, Color Pallete and Layers Pallete. Let's study them one by one.
The Tool Pallete
This pallete has all the tools that you need to manipulate your images. The image on the left shows the basic tools that I use most of the time which you will mainly use.
See the little inverted triangle below some of the tools? It means that you can right click on them to see more tools to use. For example, if you right click on the Brush tool, it will show you the Pencil Tool (pretty neat huh?)
I use the Pen tool to make an outline of the images I want to select instead of using the Lasso tool since it is more accurate and easy to use. We will dwell more on to this tool as we go along the tutorials on this blog.
The Navigation Pallete
This pallete let's you move around your image with ease, you can magnify or zoom out of the image by using the scroll bar below the window. This tool really helps me in navigating through large images.
The Colors/Swatches Pallete
The pallete's name explains what this tool is for. Need I say more? :)
The Layers Pallete
This pallete let's you switch from one Layer to another which is a very important feature of Photoshop. You can also set the opacity of each layer and also set the blending mode by clicking on the drop down menu where it says "Normal" on the image on the left.
You will see this pallete over and over again as we go along some of the tutorials.
So now you know where to start. You can open your Photoshop software right now and play around the palletes that are discussed above. One trick to see all of these palletes (plus one more called the History pallete) is to click on the Window menu > Workspace > then click on Default Workspace, this will automatically show all the palletes that you need.
