How To Start Photoshop
When opening Photoshop CS3 for the first time, the screen looks busy and confusing. Lots of palettes on the right, lots of icons for tools on the left and a mass of drop-down menus along the top of the screen.
Where to start? What to do first?
The official CS manual is unusable for the beginner. It's what I call a 'Desert Island Manual'. If you were stuck on a desert island for 3 years then you could probably work it out - otherwise you wouldn't want to bother.
Many of the independent manuals are not much better.
Some of them start by describing every menu function and what they do.
That's rubbish. It's far too much information for anyone to absorb and many of these functions are not going to be used for a long time, if at all.
Some manuals start by describing what every tool does and how they work.
That's just as bad. There are nearly 60 of them. Same problem - too much information too early.
The Easiest Way of Learning Photoshop in the Universe
No aliens have proved me wrong yet
This is the best way to begin:-
- Firstly, clear the decks by closing off all the palettes.
Go to the top menu bar and under Window drop down to a palette which has a check mark; release the cursor to remove the palette.
Remove all the palettes and then only open a palette when it is needed. - Open an image and choose the Brush Tool, changing the size and hardness of the Brush, just to get the feel of it.
For an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to do this Click Here. - Change the color of the Brush.
This is done with the Color Picker which is a facility used continually on various tools in Photoshop and when filling in with color. - Retouch some dirty marks with the Clone Stamp Tool.
The Clone Stamp is a long-established tool and although there are now some cleverer retouching tools in Photoshop, the Clone Stamp still has to be used a lot.
The above tutorials will lead you into the other basic tools. - Making selections has to be done all the time and there are many ways of achieving this, depending on the image and circumstances. They need to be learned gradually or there can just be complete confusion.
Start with the Lasso followed by the Magic Wand. - Photographs will need color and tone corrections. That is, they might be too light or too dark. There might not be enough contrast and a color cast will have to be corrected.
The Curves function is king here. Many people use Photoshop for a long time and are still not clear about Curves. For a simple explanation of Curves, click HERE. This series of tutorials will describe how the system works and how to do basic tone and color improvements.
The above links lead to a web site with many other tutorials designed for the newbie.
An extension of the site is Photoshop In A Day and it can lead you into 'Photoshop Heaven'.
New Link List
- Spot Healing Brush
- How to use the Spot Healing Brush Tool
- Red Eye
- How to remove 'red eye'.
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