Introduction to Photoshop

Welcome to Photoshop

Photoshop is a software developed by Adobe Systems Inc., and is used to digitally create, edit and manipulate images. It is known to be one of the most controversial editing software on the market. It is especially popular among professional photographers and graphic designers, and works well with programmes such as InDesign and Lightroom. Even though it is a powerful editing programme, unless the user is familiar with it, their work cannot exceed a certain level unless they work hard to gain the skills needed to operate the programme properly.

Basic Layout of Photoshop CS3

Currently, I own Photoshop CS3, an outdated version of photoshop. The newer version (Photoshop CC) has more functions, options and fonts, however the basis of the porgramme stayed the same.

Toolsbar

The toolbar, located on the right hand side of the screen, includes many important tools such as the "Move", "Select", "Lasso", "Crop", "Paint Brush", "Stamp/Cloning", "Eraser", "Fill", "Text" and the "Eyedrop" tool. All of them are important, however some are used more than others to create specific pieces of work. 

The "Move", "Select", and "Lasso" tools all help to cut things out of images and move them. Using the "Transform" tool (activated by "T") helps to resize and distort items.

Layers Panel

The layers panel helps the user to seperate items within an image and to be able to edit one thing at a time without destroying another component of the image. By creating a new layer it allows the user to create new content within the image and can either delete or alter it at all times.

History Panel

The history panel is quite useful, as it allows the user to go back to a certain edit in time and undo or redo an action. This is particularily useful because CTRL+Z only works once (unless the combination CTRL+ALT+Z is pressed) and can undo as much as is wanted. 

Basically, I feel that Photoshop is useful when used correctly. If not used correctly, the result created from Photoshop can be ugly (literally). It is often recommended to sketch out what you want to make at first, so that the result in Photoshop can be the best possible.

The first thing I recommend to new Photoshop users is to use layers - I don't really suggest anything else, because it is quite straight forward.