A friend of mine is a newbie to Photoshop and has asked for a basic rundown of how to use it, so here it is... This should get you doing some awesome things where you'll be feeling pretty hot like a pro, but it's no where near what all the pro's do. I'm not a pro, like I can't take 10 years off someone without it looking obvious, but I can Photoshop out the carpet stains and drawings on the walls for purposes of my Facebook friends.
TUTORIALS
Adobe isn't really big about providing a user manual with their software. Fortunately, kind people offer tutorials on the web for it. Some are in the form of video on youtube, or for a monthly subscription,
Lynda. Some are in the form of articles like
psd tuts or
Photoshop Tutorials. You can also find books on the subject. The textbook my class used was
Photoshop Revealed (of course we used an older version), and my teacher was a good teacher with experience doing Graphic Design for major corporations, like her resume made me drool. She picked that book, so I assume for good reason. Note: I am not in any Amazon affiliation program, like I don't get paid if you click on that or buy it. I also assume
Photoshop For Dummies is just as awesome as their other books.
You can google for basic tutorials like "Photoshop Tutorials" or something specific you are looking for, like "Photoshop Bling Effect." I do totally suggest frequently searching and playing with the tutorials. I learn something new almost every time, or I see an old tool used in such a unique way that it inspires me to come up with new ways to use it. I also am a huge fan of Microsoft One Note because of its ease to copy images online or do screen shots, and I keep my favorite tutorials saved in a Notebook there. I suggest something like that because it's frustrating after doing the project once to later try to do it again and forget one tiny detail, and then you can't find the tutorial you used to figure out where you are going wrong.
BASIC OVERVIEW
Keep in mind I have an older version of Photoshop, CS4, and some of the pics I stole from Google operate on different versions as well... Some of the things you can do also requires a plug in. There was something in one of my textbooks I loved that I can't get the plugin to work on mine, but the plug ins are generally available on Adobe's website, some free of charge.
Starting a new image, you want to go RGB mode for most of your internet photos. CMYK for print. For something like a Facebook Image, I usually do 720 by 720 pixels for a good square (timeline), 150 pixels per inch (you don't need to go that high for Facebook, but I do), and set the background to transparent (transparent background is an OCD thing). If you mess up, you can change the image size, the canvas size, and the mode mid project (all options under the Image Dropdown).
Basic Tools
I keep the move tool as my default tool. It will only move what's on the layer. You don't have to "select" something to move. You can select multiple layers to move a bunch of things together (more on layers later).
Of the other tools I use the most: Text, Brush, Paint Bucket, Gradient, and Shape. See how some of the tools have a picture of a little triangle on the bottom right? If you click on that tool and hold the clicker down for a second, a drop down list of options will appear. In my Photoshop, Gradient and Paintbucket are under the same tool where you change it back and forth with the little triangle.
I sometimes use the magic wand selection. Let's say you have a picture where the background is white, and you just want the image without that background on there. You can use the magic wand to select that white background only. You can also use the Magnetic Lasso Selection tool to select just the image or a portion of it, but it takes some skill to trace what you want to select.
The zoom tool and hand tool, I'll show you a better way to handle zooming and moving around the page later on.
Your Screen
The Windows drop down menu has a lot of options as to what tools are available on your screen. I'm sure there's better terms for this, but I don't know what they are, like I'm sure I did know what they are but I don't now. Anyway, the ones I like to use the most, obviously TOOLS are a biggie. I also use Layers (bottom right), Adjustments (middle right side) Navigator (top right on the left side), Swatches (top right on the right side), and Options (the top tool's setting area). If you can see two little arrows pointing to the right at the top of the bars, you can click those to almost like maximize the window of options and then again to almost like minimize it back down. With that said, in my Navigator area, I also have History and Brushes that I use frequently. You can also click on the bar at the top of these tool windows and move them around to your preference.
Navigator
Navigator is the easiest way to zoom in and out of the page and move around. It's the thing that looks like a captain's wheel. It's got a red square that is what is on your screen. You can zoom in and out with the little dial so to speak at the bottom, and the numbers to the right of it will tell you what percentage you are at. You can also click and move the little red square to move to that portion of the image. Now you can zoom in to tweak a detail all lazy like without having to click a button 20 times and scrolling for minutes to find that area you wanted to work on....
History
You want to open up the history window because in Photoshop, the undo button (control z) only goes back once. But with the history window, you can undo back way further than that. It just lists all the actions (to some specific point I don't know) of what you've done. You can click on any action to be back at that action. You can also click on the top part to restore back to square one (blank if new, or original if opened an existing file).
Shapes and Brushes
Shapes and brushes are easy ways to put some visual content on your picture. As for drawing shapes, they have the basics. The rectangle, the ellipse, the line... They also have custom shapes. In the options at the top of a custom shape, you can choose your shape. Photoshop has some nice ones saved in there, but you can also google and download some freebies people were so kind to create (read the license for use). That sun burst graphic concept you see a lot, a lot of those are available as a shape.
Brushes operate the same way except that the way it's applied. With a shape, you click and drag to create a shape. Brushes, you can click and drag to paint (for instance some brushes are available specifically for adding makeup to a face), and some are more designed to click in one area over and over again (up until desired thickness/opacity) to get an image (such as brush in the shape of a waterfall or grunge textures). BUT, you can always take whatever brush stroke you left on a layer (and remember this for other layers and things like text and shapes included) and then you can go to Edit dropdown menu and choose Free Transform to change the size. Brushes too are available online for download. More into that later.
Importing Pics
So let's say you have a blank canvas, and you want to add a picture of the crazy chick smiling from a magazine ad in another file. I'm sure there's a more complicated way of doing this, but open the picture of the crazy chick, drag it out if you have to by clicking the name of its tab above your projects and dragging down (ah you removed it from that world and made it free to float around your screen). Then make sure you are on the chick image, the arrow move tool is selected, and click the chick and drag her into your blank canvas.
Feather Effect and Select
Another option is to use the feather effect... Let's say crazy chick is on a red background, and you want your background on your canvas to be pink, so you intend on using the magnetic lasso to trace her. There's a plug in to do this much more professional
looking, and I don't remember how to do it anymore. OR, let's say you have a photograph of your baby where you want this feather effect with soften edges to make it more babyish. Choose which selection device you are going to use (like the square or the magnetic lasso), go up to options above the picture (remember from the Windows drop down), and find where it says feather 0px, and change that 0 to a number. The higher the number, the bigger the feather/soft edge. 5 is a good option if you magnetic lasso a chick's face to switch the background color. Then you select your picture, and I generally copy and paste at this point, but I think you can do the same thing as importing a pic and just move it to a new canvas. You can also keep it on the same canvas by selecting what you want to keep, going up to the Select drop down menu and choosing inverse (to change the selection to everything else) and then pushing the delete button. With that as well, if crazy chic is on a solid red background, you can magic wand the red, and then inverse the selection to select crazy chick to copy and paste just her to somewhere. Keep in mind whatever option you have feather will be that way as you select. Like you choose that and then select, and you might find yourself lassoing an image for a good hour to find out the hard way you had your feather set to a number you didn't want, and you can't just change the number and then copy and paste. You'll have to re-select what you are doing.
Also under the select drop down is the option to deselect. That's important because it won't deselect otherwise and can drive you crazy CRAZY figuring out how.
Text
Click the text tool, click on the canvas and start typing. You can go back an edit by choosing the type tool and clicking the text again just right. Basically your text tool will look like the Text bar surrounded by a box of broken lines when you are creating a new text box, but it will just be the text bar when it's lined up with existing text to edit that text. As you are typing, in the options area toward the top, you can choose your font, size, color, and so forth. You can also re-size text by choosing edit in the drop down and free transform or any of the transform options. If you click the text tool and hold down the clicker, you can also have a vertical type tool. I'm not sure how to make your text shape. I go to Illustrator for that, but if it's possible in photoshop, someone probably has a tutorial on it somewhere.
Transforming
The edit dropdown has your transform options. Free transform lets you use the drag and click options on the pic itself. Transform gives you a list of options for you to transform with a window of information (where you enter values and stuff like that for more precision like a 90 degree rotation). You can flip, rotate, resize, etc. in these options. Now in edit, the transform happens to the active layer (more on that later). If you want all the layers to rotate, you can do that under Image and then rotate.
Cropping
There is a crop tool. I don't use it. I select what I want to keep and then go to Image in the drop down and hit the crop option. I'm sure there are other ways to crop and that tool might be really cool, but this is how I do it.
Understanding layers
Photoshop Layers operate like layers of tracing paper on top of each other. Some of my own artwork, I tend to use tracing paper to continuously revise one draft to the next... With Photoshop, you build layers of work. Like you can put the face of a woman as one layer, the background color as another layer, and the text as another layer. You can decide the order these items are going to go, how they overlap each other. You can change the opacity of one layer (make it somewhat see through). You can turn off a layer where it doesn't show up in the picture so you can work without some image in your way but not having to delete the image itself just yet. You can also delete a layer and all the crap that's on it. The hard part with layers is getting into the habit of creating new layers as you work (some things Photoshop does automatically like text), and keeping them organized (it helps to name it something if you are working with like 30 layers or more, and some people have over 100 layers within the same image).
To create a new layer, go to the Layers tool area/tab, and click on the little square with a square in it (to the left of the trash can), and that just instantly creates a new layer. To copy a layer, getting the exact same thing you have on the layer to show up twice, just drag the layer you want to copy into the new layer option. Dragging a layer to the trash can deletes it.
If you look at the image here,there are 4 layers. Each text is a layer, and layer 1 includes my little print screen of Photoshop.To work on a specific layer, just click the layer to highlight it, and that's the layer you are on. With mine, with text, you can have the text tool on and click any text and if you hit it right, photoshop automatically moves to that layer. But pay attention because it gets really confusing quick if you start editing the wrong layer, especially if you are new to Photoshop and layers.
You can link layers by selecting more than one (like you would pictures, hitting control button as you click to choose multiple layers, or shift to get the series) and then hitting that little chain link pictures at the bottom left. You can also group them using that folder to create a new group. I tend to link things where like if I make a logo that has 5 circles on top of each other each edited slightly different with different opacity, I'll link those so every time I move that thing, all of it moves together. I tend to group layers when I'm working with a bunch of layers on a project, and I just want them organized.
The eyeball to the right makes it visible on the page. If you click the eyeball to turn that off, then you can't see that layer in your graphic. You can click it again to turn it back on. It's a way to not have to use something or to get something out of the way without having to actually throw it away.
If you hit that little lock button, it will lock your layer so you can't mess up that layer. A lot of times, if you open a picture you downloaded from Google's images, it's going to be one layer, and that layer often is locked as background. Just double click it and name it (layer 0 counts), and that will unlock it so you can do stuff like select something or erase something. Make sure you are in RGB mode, like if it was saved in CMYK mode, sometimes you can't edit it. If it's not in RGB mode, go to the Image dropdown, select mode, and change it to RGB. Just remember to pay attention to copyright rules.
The Opacity and Fill are in the top right. The opacity changes how see-through your layer is, the entire layer. If I put a layer on the top of that list and filled it with the color black, you won't see any of the other layers. No text, nothing. But if I change the opacity to 50%, it grays out the black a little where the text peeks through. The Fill kind of does the same thing except it doesn't touch the layer's styles...
Which brings me to styles... Double click a layer and you get a really awesome cool box (my favorite toy in Photoshop).
This is where you can play for hours on something. If you have text on a layer, this will change how the text looks. If you draw a shape, have a photograph, did a brush stroke, whatever, it will change only what is on the layer. Keep in mind, every time you click anything on the left, the options on the right change, but if you just click the check mark, it won't move you to that section but just add the style to your stuff. You have to click the text to highlight it to tweak those options as well.
The Styles above the highlighted area show a list of saved styles you have. Photoshop comes with some default styles, and you can make some (click new style). Keep in mind the styles will change what it does to your image based on the size. Some styles are designed for larger images and others for smaller. Some are designed for text and others for boxes. You can use any style on anything, but you won't always get the desired effect. I notice this the most with the metal styles. But if you click the "Preview" option on the right like I did, every time you click a style, you can look over at your work and see how it changes. If you don't like it, click the next one... You can always hit cancel and no change will happen to your work.
You can get styles from the web as well. Some are for sale, and many are free. Some are not free for commercial use. Like any form of art, you will have to read the license agreement. Just search "Photoshop Syles" or a specific one like metal or glow styles. Even once you choose a style (which you don't have to in order to use the rest of the options), you can tweak the details in the rest of the options.
So, let's say you didn't add a style. You can add a drop shadow, an outer glow, whatever... I suggest playing with the options. In each, you can change some of the settings too like make your drop shadow go deeper or your glow bigger. You can change the color of the glow. I don't even usually use the foreground color for my text anymore. I give it a color overlay. Just know that with the overlays, if you have a color overlay and a gradient chosen, you will have to change the opacity to the color in order to see the gradient. It layers those options, so you can do one or the other at 100% opacity, or you can lighten the opacity to a color or gradient so the pattern appears. You can also change the opacity of the pattern if you want the text color to show through that pattern overlay. If you are into scrapbooking, pattern overlay and the Bevel Emboss Texture are going to be two of your favorites I'm sure.
There's so much more you can do with layers like a layer mask that I'm not going to get into now, but just know they exist and it's something you will want to learn down the road.
Also know that you can flatten your layers which combines all the VISIBLE ones into one layer (knocking out all the ones you removed visibility from). Your best bet for right now is to save the image as a photoshop file with all your layers (do not flatten them). That way, if you want to come back and tweak a layer or something, you have those layers in tact. Then you go back and SAVE AS a png or jpg, and that will flatten it for that image, but you still have your photoshop version of the image with your layers available. This is important because let's say you are working on your blog's logo masthead thing, and you don't save the layers and later you want just one portion of that masthead to be your logo for something else, or you want to change the background of your masthead, or you join some group where you want to tweak portions of your blog's masthead into the profile pic of a different specified size... Without the layers in tact, it's all flat. You'll have to lasso each element (which is no where near the awesome quality you had before flattening) or start over.
Last but not least...
BRUSHES, PATTERNS, SHAPES, STYLES
How do you get them?
One, you can google them. Lots of sites and people offer free downloads no different than fonts. Like fonts, make sure to read their license agreement. They usually download as a zip file. You'll have to go in and extract the data by finding where it downloaded. Right click the file, and choose the option to extract data. Remember where you extracted that data.
Then in Photoshop, you will have to "load" the data.
BRUSHES
Click the brush on the tools option. Go look under the options (again make sure it's selected under the Windows dropdown), and you will see a drop down arrow for brush selection, click that. Then you will see the option to choose your brush and change it's size, and in the top right, there's a little arrow with a circle around it. Click that. Now you have a list of options like in the picture here. Choose Load Brushes option. A window should pop up where you find the brush you downloaded. Go to where you extracted files. You will probably have to enter the folder and get to the exact brush file, click that and you should be set. Just note, if you load too many brushes at once, your Photoshop Brush will run slower. Also note, if you close out of photoshop regular like, it generally saves what you loaded. At some point, you may have to re-load, so it helps to keep the files somewhere easy to find in the future. You may decide to move the brushes to one specific folder where you archive all the brushes you have. In addition, photoshop has some other brush options saved in here. See, Assorted Brushes, Basic Brushes, Calligraphic Brushes...
PATTERNS
I go to where you can put a pattern overlay in styles (from the Layers area), and you drop down to select your pattern, and there's another little arrow with a circle around it. Click that. Choose to Load Patterns. Then find where you extracted any of your patterns or textures.
Same situation with loading styles. Go to your layer styles, select styles, click that little arrow with the circle around it, and then choose Load Styles...
Same with shapes...
Choose the custom shape tool on the left, under options (remember to have that selected under the Windows drop down), go to the area where you can select your shape, hit that drop arrow, and see the little arrow with the circle around it on the right? You know what to do by now. Click it and choose Load Shapes.
Two, you can make them yourself.
For a brush, you take an image on your photoshop, such as a photograph or a drawing you scanned in and cleaned up... and you choose Edit on the drop down, and choose Define Brush Preset. It should automatically be added to your brushes. Make sure to crop your image to exactly what you want. Hint, photographs of walls and floors make for some interesting grunge overlays or patterns...
For a pattern, same thing. Get it opened in photoshop, and then choose Edit from the drop down list, and choose Define Pattern.
For a style, go to your layer, double click it to get your layer styles up. Make your style with a combination of the effects you can do. Once you have it to a style you want to have pre-set in your styles, click "New Style" and save it.
For a shape, it's a similar deal to a pattern or brush, but you are dealing with black and white, no gray or other colors. You also have to use the Pen Tool to create a path. Brushes and patterns can be created with the IMAGE that's there, but the shapes, they need a PATH. You can choose the pen tool and just draw a shape. It's not like freehand. You click and create an anchor point, and then another one, and then another one. If you hold down the clicker as you create an anchor point, you can also create curves and adjust the curves. It takes some work getting used to it, but the better shapes all have some curve to them. You can also edit the path with the options of the pen tool by clicking the pen tool and holding in the clicker for a second to get the other tools like delete a point. With this in mind, you can use a regular photoshop shape and adjust it with that pen tool turning an ellipse into a tear drop by removing some anchors. You can also take a black and white image, create a new layer, and trace the image with the pen tool. For more detailed information on how to work with creating paths for purposes of making shapes, read
this tutorial. Either way, once you get your path created, then go to the Edit drop down menu and choose Define Custom Shape.
I think that's the basic rundown of Photoshop. I deeply hope it makes sense to other people besides myself, and I hope it's useful. Again, check out the many MANY tutorials on the web and the more you use it, the more creative you are going to get with the tools. Practice makes perfect.
