PHOTOSHOP BASICS INTRO TO THE BASIC PHOTOSHOP TOOL

PHOTOSHOP BASICS INTRO TO THE BASIC PHOTOSHOP TOOL BAR

PHOTOSHOP TOOL BAR • To the left of your computer screen is the photoshop tool bar. Here, are all the different tools you can use that give you different effects. • All tools groups have shortcuts assigned to them. The shortcut is the letter on the right of the tool name. To access the last used tool in the tool group press the respective key. If you hold Shift while pressing the key you will cycle through all the tools in that group. For example the Spot Healing Brush Tool is selected. If I select another tool and then I press J the Spot Healing Brush Tool will be selected again. If I hold Shift and press J the next tool will be selected (the Healing Brush Tool)

MOVE TOOL • It is used for moving pixels on the screen. You can move text, layer masks, normal layers, selected areas. • The shortcut for this tool is V but to temporarily access it while having another tool selected simply hold Ctrl and do the moving. Once you’re done moving release Ctrl and you will have the control of your previous tool (the tool you had before pressing Ctrl).

MARQUEE TOOL • The Rectangular Marquee Tool is used for making rectangular selections and the Elliptical Marquee tool is used for making elliptical selections. If you want to create perfect circles or squares hold Shift while dragging with the respective tool. • To add to an existing selection press and hold Shift BEFORE using the tool – you’ll see a little + sign next to the tool cursor. If after you see the + sign next to the cursor you release and press Shift key you will create perfect circles or squares. • Holding Alt before dragging will subtract from an existing selection and holding Alt and Shift will intersect with an existing selection. If you’re subtracting from a selection a little minus sign will appear at the right of the tool’s icon and a little X for intersecting • You won’t be usingle row/column marquee tool ever.

LASSO TOOL, POLYGONAL LASSO TOOL AND MAGNETIC LASSO TOOL • The Lasso Tool is used for making freehand selections. Not a very precise tool. • The Polygonal Lasso tool is a bit more precise, allowing you to create a selections formed by straight lines. It has limited uses for selecting rectangular objects like benches or fences. If you are using the Lasso Tool you can temporarily access the Polygonal Lasso Tool by holding Alt. • The Magnetic Lasso Tool has the most precision of all the tools in the group. It works by snapping to the edges of the objects. You simply click once on the edge of the object you want to select and release the mouse button. Then carefully drag around the object and notice how the Magnetic Lasso Tool “snaps” to the edges.

QUICK SELECTION TOOL AND MAGIC WAND TOOL Magic wand tool Tolerance 20 • Quick selection tool looks like a brush and if you start painting with this brush inside of an object you will quickly select it. It helps a lot if the object has strong edges but even if it has soft edges (like a face against a reddish sky) Not recommended for precise selections. • The Magic Wand Tool is a nice little tool that has its uses from time to time. If you click somewhere in the image it will select all pixels in that area that have a luminosity level close to the luminosity level of the level you clicked. You can set this by entering a value in the Tolerance box (the Tolerance is situated in the tool option bar along the top of the screen). Great for getting ride of white backgrounds.

MAGIC WAND TOOL • Also in the tool option bar is a checkbox that allows you to select noncontiguous areas (areas that are not connected) so if I click again on the same spot on the wall after removing the check from the Contiguous check box I would select both the wall on the left and right and generally every pixel with a close luminosity to the clicked area.

CROP TOOL, SLICE TOOL AND SLICE SELECT TOOL • The Crop Tool allows you to crop your images to the desired size. Click, drag, press Enter and you just cropped your image. The cropping is best done at the end of the editing process. • The Slice Tool and Slice Select Tool are mainly for Web Designers and have very few uses for regular uses. How it works? Well, you drag with the Slice Tool and create rectangles (usually web pages layouts). After you’re done you select Save for Web & Devices from the File menu and select a folder. This process will save each sliced portion as a separate image thus allowing you to quickly use these images for website creation. We won’t be using this tool in class.

EYEDROPPER TOOL, COLOR SAMPLER TOOL, RULER TOOL • • If you’re doing color correction in an image then the Eyedropper Tool is your best friend. Hover the Eyedropper tool over the image and notice how the R G B values change. If you click with this tool anywhere on the image you will set the Foreground color to the color below the Eyedropper Cursor. A quick way to access the Eyedropper tool while having the Brush Tool selected it is to press the Alt key. We will be using this a lot. Hold Shift and left click while using the Eyedropper tool to access the Color Sampler Tool and create a new color sampler (you can have a maximum of 4 color samplers). We won’t really use this too much. • • The Ruler Tool is for measuring the actual dimensions on the screen. Not a lot of uses for this tool (maybe if you’re a web designer) but it has one nice feature. In the options bar there’s a button called Straighten. Here’s how to use it. Notice that in the picture below, the level of the ground is not horizontal. It looks like the house is falling to the left side. Press Straighten and voila, we’ve straighten the horizon line. A bit of cropping occurs at the edges but that’s a good trade off for a straight image.

NOTE TOOL, 123 COUNT TOOL • I never use the Note Tool but you may find it helpful if you’re passing documents to other people and you want to indicate something. In the image below I added several notes and each could indicate a specific problem you want someone to address or maybe if you’re extremely forgetful write notes to yourself, like “Don’t forget to reduce the saturation here” or “Remove this ugly spot here”. • Finally, the 123 Count tool is for counting objects. It probably has its uses for certain people but I haven’t ever felt the need to count objects in an image with a tool.

SPOT HEALING BRUSH TOOL, HEALING BRUSH TOOL • The Spot Healing Brush Tool is the easiest to use. You simply find the skin imperfection you want to remove and click on it. It’s not the most advanced technique for making clean skin but it is a basic and very fast tool. • The Healing Brush Tool is the same as the Spot Healing Brush Tool with the difference that it requires you to set a sample point so that Photoshop will base its healing algorithm on the area of the picture set as the sample point. To put it more simply: you will heal all your next spots based on the area you Alt clicked on.

PATCH TOOL, RED EYE TOOL • The Patch Tool is a different beast from the first two and it’s very useful for seamless blending of skin or other uniform surfaces. Let us say I want to remove the dark bags under the girl’s eyes. I could use the Spot healing Brush Tool but the Patch Tool offers an easier way. In the image below I selected the Patch Tool and created a selection as shown below. Now simply drag the selection a bit lower three times and release. This will create skin in the selected area based on the area from which we drag the selection. The whole process is easier done than said so it’s best that you try it and see for yourself. • Finally, the Red Eye Tool requires you to select an iris with a red eye problem and it attempts to remove the redness in the pupil. Although there are more advanced ways to do that (with Curves or Channels) this tool does a pretty good job.

BRUSH TOOL The Brush tool is probably the most used tool in the Toolbar panel. You can use it to paint with pixels over your image. The round brush tool is the one selected by default when you first open Photoshop. This brush has two important settings you will want to play with: size and hardness. Hardness represents how defined the edges of the brush are (or how blurry). Set the hardness setting to maximum (100%) and you will paint with ugly hard strokes. Set it to minimum and you will have some nice blurry strokes that blend well with the background.

BRUSH TOOL In the brush option panel (usually you can find the option panel in the upper area, just below the menu bar) you can also change the blending mode of the brush. Combined with the layer’s blending mode this option offers you some wildly creative options. A useful keyboard shortcut for the brush tool are the bracket keys ([ / ]). Clicking the left bracket key decreases the size of the brush while the right bracket key increases the size. Holding Shift while pressing the bracket keys allows you to increase/decrease the hardness of the brush. The round brush tool is not the only tool available: Photoshop offers you a wide range of different shaped brush for your needs.

OPACITY AND FLOW Opacity: Opacity in a brush context is that it will only apply the selected amount of paint (Opacity) over whatever area you paint on, regardless of the number times you go over that area. Once you lift your pen (if using a tablet) or your mouse button (if using a mouse) and paint over the area again, it will apply additional paint. Flow: Flow, every time you paint over an area – regardless of whether you lift your mouse or not – the amount of paint will continue to increase. You will also find that Flow tends to apply more paint than the same amount of Opacity would.

MAKE YOUR OWN BRUSH You can create your own brushes. Create a new layer, draw something with a black brush then choose Edit > Define Brush Preset. Give it a name and you have a new brush

BRUSH PRESETS Choose Window > Brush to open the brush panel and enjoy the multitude of settings for your newly created brush. We can add texture over our brush, make it rotate randomly, make it scatter, add another brush on top of it and many other things. Go ahead, open the brush panel and play with the settings. You can create some pretty cool brushes with it.

PENCIL TOOL • The Pencil Tool is basically a downgraded version of the Brush tool. You don’t have a hardness option (in fact you do have a hardness slider but dragging it doesn’t change a thing) but you have almost all of the features of the Brush Tool. You will probably be interested in the Pencil Tool if you do pixel art. • The Color Replacement Tool allows you to replace one color with another. It has a bunch of settings in the Options panel and it offers some interesting results but to be honest I almost never use it. • Mixer Brush Tool is Photoshop’s attempt to mimic traditional painting behavior. Again, I don’t use this tool at all

CLONE STAMP TOOL, PATTERN STAMP TOOL • The Clone Stamp Tool has a lot of uses and if you’re doing photo manipulations then this a tool to be on good terms with. It is not complicated at all. To use it first Alt click somewhere to set the sample point. Then start painting. You will notice that you will paint with the pixels underneath the sampled area. That’s all this tool does. It clones areas from one part of the image in other parts. It is very useful for creating new content based on an existing one and removing skin imperfections or undesired objects. • The Pattern Stamp Tool allows you to paint with desired patterns over an image. Never had a use for it!

HISTORY BRUSH TOOL, ART • The History Brush Tool is an interesting HISTORY BRUSH TOOL little thing that holds a lot of power. It allows you to paint on a new layer from a previous state of your image. Let’s say that you heavily modified a photo but you still want some of the original look in certain areas. To do this first select a previous state. Open Window > History and click on one of the little squares next to the name of the desired state. In the image below notice that I clicked on the little box next to the most upper state of the image – the original. Now if I create a new layer and paint with the history Brush Tool I can restore certain areas of my picture to their original state. • The Art History Brush Tool is a strange tool that allows you to paint from previous states of the images but in crazy, dynamically changing shapes. A quite useless little tool, if you ask me.

ERASER TOOL, BACKGROUND ERASER TOOL, MAGIC ERASER TOOL • The Eraser Tool allows you to delete (erase) pixels from a pixel layer (or a layer mask). It is as simple as that. You don’t like the way your new painted layer looks, you select the Eraser Tool and send pixels into oblivion • The Background Eraser Tool is like the Color Replacement Tool , but instead of replacing the color you erase it. It is a decent tool for getting rid of certain parts of the image but not precise enough. There are much better selection tools and techniques (like Channels and Color Range) that I do not use this tool very often. • The Magic Eraser Tool looks and acts a lot like the Magic Wand Tool but instead of selecting pixels it deletes them. Useful tool only if you are in a great hurry and do not care much about the results.

GRADIENT TOOL • It allows you to create a gradient from the background and foreground colors. The shortcut key is G. While you can achieve some artistic effects by dragging the gradient tool directly on a layer and then choosing layer effects like overlay to get different looks in a photo. • You can choose to have a gradient go to color opacity or have it go to color by messing with the gradient editor. At the top of the bar, you can also choose linear or circle gradients.

PAINT BUCKET TOOL Paint bucket Tool works when you click on a picture it will fill the area with the foreground color. It has a Tolerance setting in the options panel which works the same way as the Tolerance setting for the Magic Wand Tool. You can choose to paint a pure color and you also have the option of choosing a pattern.

BLUR TOOL, SHARPEN TOOL, SMUDGE TOOL The Smudge Tool allows you to “smudge” pixels. It can be used to create hair. Let’s say I cut and copy in a document a wolf (or a human head) but I don’t select the hairs very well so it looks fake. Then I use the smudge tool at the edge of the fur to emulate hair. The Sharpen Tool tightens up pixels that you select. The tool The Blur. Tool can be a little crude so it is unfocuses image worth playing with the options. areas Again how much you sharpen can be controlled with the strength dropdown.

DODGE TOOL , BURN TOOL , SPONGE TOOL • Dodge Tool lightens and Burn Tool darkens while in the same time increasing contrast. In the Options Panel there are 2 setting you should be aware of: Exposure setting and Protect Tones checkbox. You will want to have the Protect Tones checkbox checked all the time unless you are aiming for very strong effects. The Exposure setting affects the power of the tool. I recommend using lower settings and gradually paint until you achieve the desired effect. A quick tip: If you are using the Dodge Tool hold Alt to temporarily switch to Burn Tool and vice versa • The Sponge Tool desaturates the image (absorbs color). For a more contrasty effect be sure to check the Vibrance checkbox in the Options Panel.

PEN TOOL, FREEFORM PEN TOOL, ADD ANCHOR POINT TOOL, DELETE ANCHOR POINT TOOL, CONVERT POINT TOOL • This tool allows you to create vector shapes and the additional tools in the category allow you to modify and tweak that shape. • Photoshop provides multiple Pen tools. The standard Pen tool draws with the greatest precision; the Freeform Pen tool draws paths as if you were drawing with pencil on paper, and the magnetic pen option lets you draw a path that snaps to the edges of defined areas in your image. You can use the pen tools in conjunction with the shape tools to create complex shapes. When you use the standard Pen tool, the following options are available in the options bar: • Auto Add/Delete, which lets you add an anchor point when you click a line segment or delete an anchor point when you click it. • Also don’t worry we will defiantly go over this tool in class so it makes more sense.

HORIZONTAL TYPE TOOL, VERTICAL TYPE TOOL, HORIZONTAL TYPE MASK TOOL, VERTICAL TYPE MASK TOOL Horizontal and Vertical Type tools allow you to add text to your images. Simply click anywhere in your document with one of these two tools and start typing. You can change the font, size and other settings in the Options Panel. When you are done typing simply press Ctrl + Enter to close the paragraph and stop typing. If you click and drag with one of these two tools you will create a box which will allow you to type only inside that box. If you want to type on a path for a special effect simply create a path with the Pen Tool and with Vertical or Horizontal Type Tool click somewhere on the path (you will notice that the icon will change ). Horizontal and Vertical Type Mask tools allow you to create a selection from type. That is if you type something with one of these tools and press Ctrl + Enter you will have a selection of your typed text.

RECTANGLE TOOL, ROUNDED RECTANGLE TOOL, ELLIPSE TOOL, POLYGON TOOL, LINE TOOL, CUSTOM SHAPE TOOL These tools allow us to create different shapes. There are three options in the Options Panel which are very important. If you select the first option you will create Shape Layers (that is basically a Solid Color Adjustment layer with a Vector Mask), the second option allows you to create simple Paths and the third option allows you to create pixel shapes.

HAND TOOL, ROTATE VIEW TOOL If you are zoomed into a document the Hand Tool allows you to drag the document. You can temporarily access the Hand Tool from almost any other tool by simply holding the Space button. The Zoom Tool allows you to zoom into a document. Drag to the left to zoom out or drag to the right to zoom in. Click to zoom in, Alt click to zoom out. You can temporarily access the Zoom Tool from almost any tool by holing Alt + Space.

ADDITIONAL BUTTONS There are some additional buttons on the Toolbar Panel which are not Tools. Default Foreground And Background Color (Shortcut D) allows you to set black as foreground color and white as background. By clicking the arrow you can switch between these two colors Finally the Quick Mask (or Edit In Quick Mask Mode) (Shortcut Q) allows you to quickly select parts of your document. Simply click Q to enter Quick Mask mode and use the Gradient Tool or the Brush Tool to draw with red color. When you press Q again to exit the Quick Mask mode the red color becomes a selection. Note that the default behavior in Photoshop is that red is the non selected area and the rest of the image is selected. If you want the red to be the selection (I find it much easier to work this way) simply double click the Quick Mask icon and select Selected Areas in the window that pops up. In that window you can also change the color and the opacity of your Quick Mask.

INCREASE HISTORY Go to Edit Preferences Performance History State and increase history from 20 to the max number. This way if you change your mind about something or mess up you can go back easy.

LAYERS • Photoshop layers are like sheets of stacked acetate. You can see through transparent areas of a layer to the layers below. You move a layer to position the content on the layer, like sliding a sheet of acetate in a stack. You can also change the opacity of a layer to make content partially transparent. • You use layers to perform tasks such as compositing multiple images, adding text to an image, or adding vector graphic shapes. You can apply a layer style to add a special effect such as a drop shadow or a glow.

LAYER MODES Under layer mode, you can make a layer give an effect that you want. (like filters in Intagram)

COLOR PALETTE In order to delete color swatches currently in the Swatches palette, hold down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and hover your mouse over the color swatch in the top left corner (the "RGB Red" swatch). You'll see your mouse cursor change into a scissors icon, then click to delete. To add a color, with the Eyedropper Tool selected, move your mouse cursor over an area of color you want to sample, then click to sample it. You can see exactly which color you've sampled by looking at the Foreground color swatch in the Tools palette. Once you've sampled your first color, move your mouse cursor into the empty area inside the Swatches palette. You'll see your mouse cursor change into a paint bucket icon. Click anywhere inside the empty area to convert your sampled color into a color swatch. Photoshop will pop up a dialog box asking you to enter a name for your color swatch. When you're done adding colors to the Swatches palette and you're ready to save them as a new swatch set, click on the small right pointing arrow in the top right corner of the Swatches palette to access the palette menu. You will have to name your new set of swatches, then you can append them to the default whenever you please.

HOW TO CREATE A NEW FILE Creating new files in Photoshop is easy: click File and then New. Set the height, width, and resolution of the new file in the dialogue box. Resolution is the fineness of detail in a bitmap image and is measured in pixels per inch (ppi). The more pixels per inch, the greater the resolution. Generally, an image with a higher resolution produces a better printed image quality. Have a 300 resolution for good images.

• Opening files in Photoshop is just as easy: the command File>Open can be used to open most graphics files. • Once you've created or opened a file and edited it, you can save your file in a number of different formats. To save the file in its current format, use File>Save. If you want to save it as a different type, you can use File>Save As • Besides PSD (photoshop document files) we will be saving as JPEG for most of this class! JPEGs are for photographs and realistic images. There will be times we save as PNG files. PNGs are for line art, text heavy images, and images with few colors. • Make sure you save the file using your LAST NAME, FIRST NAME, Assignment title, HOW TO OPEN/SAVE

GOOD LUCK! These are just the basic tools to photoshop! By knowing these things, you can do a lot with the program! We will be focusing on certain tools with different assignments, so there is no need to be overwhelmed, we will learn them all.