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⦁ Introduction

⦁1. Getting Started

⦁ Lesson 2
Airbrushing a B&W photo

⦁ Lesson 3
Selection tools

⦁ Lesson 4
Intro to Masking

⦁ Lesson 5
More with Masking

Getting Started
Before we dive into the first lesson, lets look at how to find your way around in Photoshop. For most of you this is pretty basic stuff but it never fails, when I don't go over this with my students assuming everyone already knows this, someone will be lost.

So... lets look at how palettes or windows work and where to find them.


Menu Bar and Tool settings
The image here shows the uppermost part of your screen when Photoshop is running. Where you see "FILE EDIT" and so forth, that is called the "menu bar." Most computer programs have one so you are probably familiar with how it works. Hold your mouse button down over an item and a pull down menu appears below. Scroll down to a given command and release the mouse. That command blinks for a second then carries out that function.

Some commands may have several sub menus so don't be too quick to release the mouse. For example, in Photoshop go to EDIT/TRANSFORM and take a look. Notice there is a small black arrow by TRANSFORM. It means there will be more menus to choose from.

Also notice by many of the menu commands, there may be a set of key commands off to the right. These are keyboard shortcuts.
(Mac and PC shortcuts will be different as explained in the previous page.) Photoshop has many shortcuts. They can speed up your task immensely since it takes time to get your mouse, move it up to EDIT, hold that down and scroll down to UNDO and release. Clicking COMMAND/Z (or control/Z for PCs) is much faster especially if you do this over and over. If you switch between a few tools frequently there is also a shortcut to do that. I will only use a few of the most commonly used shortcuts in my lessons but any time you find yourself doing the same things over and over it is definitely worth the time to learn and memorize the keyboard shortcut.
Most of them are displayed either next to the MENU command, or by just letting your cursor sit over a tool or window for a second. It's name and shortcut appears briefly.

Directly below the menu bar, and only in versions before 6, is the tool settings bar. In this particular example I have my airbrush tool selected so the bar automatically shows me how the airbrush is set.
(NOTE; to bring up tool settings in versions before 6, simply double click on any given tool. A separate window will appear.)


Windows or Paletts and where to find them.
Below is a screen shot of several different palettes, or windows
(either term is acceptable) open at once.

Photoshop has many different palettes probably more than you will need open at any given time. To locate one, go to your menu bar under WINDOWS. All of them can be found there.

(Here is a little tip. If you have so many palettes open that you can't locate one, say, layers. Go to WINDOWS/HIDE LAYERS and then go back to WINDOWS/SHOW LAYERS and it will pop up on top where you can see it.)


Windows or Paletts moving and sizing them.
Pull out any window. Use the diagram here to locate the features of a window.


1. To move the entire window around on your desktop, click and drag anywhere along the top bar.
2. There is a small square icon, with a smaller square inside. This is a window reducer. It will shrink the space the window is taking.
3. Another small square icon, with a pair of horizontal bars inside will fold your window up like a window shade. The bar and title stays on your desktop but not the contents. Click it again to "unfold" it. This is a handy space saver when you need multiple windows available and don't want to keep digging them out.
4. There is a small open square icon, (on a mac this is off to the left but on a PC this will be on the right) and this one hides the window completely. Again, to bring it back out, you would have to go to the menu bar, under WINDOWS/SHOW whichever one you want.
5. In the lower right hand corner of any window, is a double box icon. Click on that and drag it to make your window larger, longer or whatever.


Windows or Paletts more than one in a package.
Finally, because Photoshop uses so many different palettes, to save space several may be bunched together at a time. In this example, I have only two together. LAYERS, and SWATCHES. Note the two tabs in the upper portion of the window. I can choose to leave them together and simply click on the tab I want to use to bring that one forward.

However, sometimes I may want both palettes visible at the same time. To do this, simply click on one of the tabs and drag it out to the side. You can put it back the same way. Just drag it back in. Look at these two examples. One shows the palettes together, and the other shows them separated.

When you go to your menu bar under WINDOWS and look in there, you can tell which palettes are grouped together. Groups will be separated with a thin line. You can regroup these any way you like. If you open three separate palettes and drag the tabs into one, that will show up as a group.

Become familiar with how to move your windows, or palettes around. You'll be doing a lot of that with Photoshop.

OK enough of the basics of windows here.
I'll go into more detail of each windows functions as they come up.

Lets go have some fun now. Onto the first lesson.