Welcome to Photoshop!

Welcome to Photoshop!

In This Chapter
▶ What Photoshop does very well, kind of well, and just sort of, well . . .
▶ What you need to know to work with Photoshop
▶ What you need to know about installing Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is, without question, the leading image-editing program in the world. Photoshop has even become somewhat of a cultural icon. It’s not uncommon to hear Photoshop used as a verb (“That picture is obviously Photoshopped!”), and you’ll even see references to Photoshop in the daily comics and cartoon strips. And now you’re part of this whole gigantic phenomenon called Photoshop.
Before I take you on this journey through the intricacies of Photoshop, I want to introduce you to Photoshop in a more general way. In this chapter, I tell you what Photoshop is designed to do, what it can do (although not as capably as job-specific software), and what you can get it to do if you try really, really hard. I also review some basic computer operation concepts and point out a couple of places where Photoshop is a little different than most other programs. At the end of the chapter, I have a few tips for you on installing Photoshop to ensure that it runs properly.

Exploring Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is used for an incredible range of projects, from editing and correcting digital photos to preparing images for magazines and newspapers to creating graphics for the Web. You can also find Photoshop in the forensics departments of law-enforcement agencies, scientific labs and research facilities, and dental and medicaloffices, as well as in classrooms, offices, studios, and homes around the
world. As the Help Desk Director for the National Association of Photoshop
Professionals (NAPP), my team and I solve problems and provide solutions for Photoshop users from every corner of the computer graphics field and from every corner of the world. People are doing some pretty amazing things with Photoshop, many of which are so far from the program’s original rootsthat it boggles the mind!

What Photoshop is designed to do

Adobe Photoshop is an image-editing program. It’s designed to help you edit images — digital or digitized images, photographs, and otherwise. This is thecore purpose of Photoshop. Over the years, Photoshop has grown and developed,
adding features that supplement its basic operations. But at its heart,
Photoshop is an image editor. At its most basic, Photoshop’s workflow goes
something like this: You take a picture, you edit the picture, and you print
the picture (as illustrated in Figure 1-1).


Figure 1-1: Basic Photoshop: Take photo, edit photo, print photo. Drink coffee (optional).

Whether captured with a digital camera, scanned into the computer, or created from scratch in Photoshop, your artwork consists of tiny squares of color, which are picture elements called pixels. (Pixels and the nature of digital imaging are explored in depth in Chapter 2.) Photoshop is all about changing and adjusting the colors of those pixels — collectively, in groups, or one at a time — to make your artwork look precisely how you want it to look.
(Photoshop, by the way, has no Good Taste or Quality Art filter. It’s up to you to
decide what suits your artistic or personal vision and what meets your professional
requirements.) Some very common Photoshop image-editing tasks are shown in Figure

1-2: namely, correcting red-eye and minimizing wrinkles (bothdiscussed in Chapter 9); and compositing images (see Chapter 10).
It seems that every time a new version of Photoshop is released, it has at least one new feature that I just can’t wait to tell you about. Of all the great improvements in Photoshop CS5 (including 64-bit cross platform performance — more on that in a bit), perhaps the biggest Wow! factor is
Content-Aware Fill. When you’re retouching and compositing, Content-Aware Fill can really help make your result look more natural and seamless. When you make a selection and press the Delete/Backspace key, the Fill dialog box pops up, offering you the opportunity to simply delete the content of the selection, fill with color, or use the Content-Aware option. Content-Aware Fill looks at the pixels surrounding the selection and tries (very successfully, in most cases) to match the colors, textures, and patterns. In Figure 1-3, compare the original to the left, zoomed, and the full image, to the same views on the right, after content-aware filling of the selection. The Spot Healing Brush offers Content-Aware in the Options bar now, too!

Figure 1-3: Content-Aware Fill matches color, texture, and pattern to the surrounding area.

Over the past few updates, Photoshop has developed some rather powerful illustration capabilities to go with its digital-imaging power. Although Photoshop is still no substitute for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop certainly can serve you well for smaller illustration projects. (Keep in mind that Photoshop is a raster art program — it works with pixels — and vector artwork is only simulated in Photoshop.) Photoshop also has a very capable brush engine, including the new Mixer Brush tool, which makes it feasible to paint efficiently on your digital canvas. Figure 1-4 shows a comparison of raster artwork (the digital photo, left), vector artwork (the illustration center), and digital painting (right). The three types of artwork can appear in a single image, too. (Simulating vector artwork with Photoshop’s shape layers is presented in Chapter 11, and you can read about painting with Photoshop in Chapter 14.)
Photoshop CS5 includes some basic features for creating Web graphics, including slicing and animations (but Web work is best done in a true Web development program, such as Dreamweaver). Photoshop’s companion program Adobe Bridge even includes the Output panel to help you create entire Web sites to display your artwork online and PDF presentations for on-screen display, complete with transition effects between slides. (Read about Bridge’s Output panel’s capabilities in Chapter 16.)


Figure 1-4: You can use Photoshop with raster images, vector artwork, and even to paint.

Other things you can do with Photoshop:

Although Photoshop isn’t a page layout or illustration program, you certainly can produce simple brochures, posters, greeting cards, and the like using only Photoshop. One of the features that sets Photoshop apart from basic image editors is its powerful type engine, which can add, edit, format, and stylize text as capably as many word-processing programs. Photoshop even has a spell check feature — not bad for a program that’s designed to work with photos, eh?

Even if you don’t have the high-end video features found in Photoshop CS5 Extended, you can certainly supplement your video-editing program with Photoshop CS5 (even if Photoshop can’t open and play movies you capture with your video camera). From Adobe Premiere (or other professional video programs), you can export a series of frames in the FilmStrip format, which you can open and edit in Photoshop.
If you don’t have specialized software Admittedly, Photoshop CS5 just plain can’t do some things. It won’t make you a good cup of coffee. It can’t press your trousers. It doesn’t vacuum under the couch. It isn’t even a substitute for iTunes, Microsoft Excel, or TurboTax — it just doesn’t do those things.
However, there are a number of things for which Photoshop isn’t designedthat you can do in a pinch. If you don’t have InDesign, you can still lay out the pages of a newsletter, magazine, or even a book, one page at a time. (With Bridge’s Output panel, you can even generate a multipage PDF document from your individual pages.) If you don’t have Dreamweaver or GoLive, you can use Photoshop to create a Web site, one page at a time, sliced and optimized and even with animated GIFs. You also have tools that you can use to simulate 3D in Photoshop, such as Vanishing Point .

Page layout in Photoshop isn’t particularly difficult for a one-page piece or even a trifold brochure. Photoshop has a very capable type engine, considering the program is designed to push pixels rather than play with paragraphs.
Photoshop can even show you a sample of each typeface in the Font menu.
Choose from five sizes of preview in Photoshop’s Preferences➪Type menu.
However, you can’t link Photoshop’s type containers, so a substantial addition or subtraction at the top of the first column requires manually recomposing all of the following columns. After all, among the biggest advantages of a dedicated page layout program are the continuity (using a master page or layout) and flow from page to page. If you work with layout regularly, use InDesign.
Dreamweaver is a state-of-the-art Web design tool, with good interoperability
with Photoshop. However, if you don’t have Dreamweaver and you desperately
need to create a Web page, Photoshop comes to your rescue. After laying out your page and creating your slices, use the Save for Web & Devices command to generate an HTML document (your Web page) and a folder filled
with the images that form the page (see Figure 1-5). One of the advantages to
creating a Web page in Dreamweaver rather than Photoshop is HTML text.
(Using Photoshop, all the text on your Web pages is saved as graphic files.
HTML text not only produces smaller Web pages for faster download, but it’s
resizable in the Web browser.)

Figure 1-5: You can create an entire Web page in Photoshop.Viewing Photoshop’s Parts and 
 Processes In many respects, Photoshop is just another computer program — you launch the program, open files, save files, and quit the program quite normally.
Many common functions have common keyboard shortcuts. You enlarge, shrink, minimize, and close windows as you do in other programs.