The Basics of Photoshop
My nephew made the leap and finally bought Photoshop. He had been saving up for a while now, and believed it would make his life a lot easier. He saw a future where he would make top quality images by merely thinking about it. Just close your eyes hard enough and ‘poof’, it was done. Then he sat down to use Photoshop, and realized he had no idea what to do!
Just as with any piece of software or tool, you will need to explore what exactly is at your finger tips. We sometimes call this “playing” … so my advice is to play with your Photoshop extensively. Check out the ‘preferences’ in Photoshop. Your goal is to increase the performance of your Photoshop. So open up your “Preferences” window. The color picker chooses the algorithm that will be used. Most users will choose between Windows and Adobe. The ‘Image Interpolation’ is used to decide which algorithm Photoshop will use when resizing an image. The ‘Bicubic Interpolation’ is generally a good choice for most people.
Here is some advice to get you started. Search for the ‘History Log’ on the screen. This is where you can save your progress while you edit your image. The are a number of options to personalize your session. For example select ‘Sessions Only’ to make the log remember the time and date that you start each session. Choose ‘Concise’ to recall more information about your work. And you can pick ‘Detailed’ for the most information, recording details about every edit you do to the image.
Next you will notice the “History Log”. This allows you to save all the steps you used in the creation of an image. Here you have some choices … you can either record the start time and date of every editing session with the “Sessions Only” selection. The “Concise” selection records details on every editing session on the file. The other option is the “Detailed”, which records the same information as in the ‘Concise’ selection … plus information such as the path of the file and an account of every edit made to the file.
The best way to learn about your new Photoshop tool is to explore! Read what you can find about the use of Photoshop and use tutorials. Play and practice … you will soon learn the basics and eventually you will master the creation of amazing graphics and photos!
Filed under: Computers & Technology