Chapter 3
Taking the Chef’s Tour of Your Photoshop Kitchen
IN THIS CHAPTER
I know you’re hungry to dive right in and start mixing up some masterpieces, but before you fire up the stove, look around the Photoshop kitchen. Get to know your spoons from your ladles, your pots from your pans. Figure out how to turn on the blender … that sort of thing.
In this chapter, rather than go through all the Photoshop menus, panels, and tools (which would take several hundred very boring pages), I show you some basic operational concepts. (But don’t worry — you can read about how to use specific commands and tools throughout the book, in the chapters most appropriate for them.) Here you discover such things as how to spot which menu commands have dialog boxes, what the little symbol in the upper-right corner of a panel does, and which tools don’t use the Options bar. You also read about customizing your Photoshop environment for faster and more efficient work. Next I show you how to set up Photoshop’s Preferences and Color Settings. And to wrap up the chapter — perhaps the most important section in this entire book — I explain what to do when Photoshop doesn’t seem to be working properly.
Food for Thought: How Things Work
A good understanding of certain fundamental operations and features in Photoshop provides you with the background that you need to follow the recipes or get creative and whip up some delicious artwork.
Photoshop now makes it easier to learn Photoshop as you work. In addition to Tool Tips and Rich Tool Tips (those very short videos you see when pausing the cursor over a tool), you’ll find a Learn button in the upper-left of the home screen. It offers both “in-app” tutorials and links to web-based tutorials. You can open the home screen at any time by clicking the little house button at the far left end of the Options bar.
FIGURE 3-1: Some commands have submenus, and some have dialog boxes.
You access the Search, Learn and Help panel not through Photoshop’s Window menu (the way you open most panels), but rather through the Help menu. Choose Photoshop Help, Hands-on Tutorials, or What’s New in Photoshop to open the panel. (Each menu command opens the panel to the appropriate content.) The keyboard shortcut to open Photoshop Search is ⌘ +F/Ctrl+F. The content available through the Photoshop Search panel is regularly updated, so in that oh-so-uncommon free time you have, you might want to simply browse.
Ordering from the menus
When you’re working in Photoshop, you see a horizontal list of menus spread across the very top (Mac) or near the top (Windows) of the application window: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Type, Select, Filter, 3D, View, Window, and Help. On the Mac, the program also has a menu named Photoshop, just to the left of the File menu.
As with most programs, you click the name of a menu to reveal its commands. For both Mac and Windows, you can click and hold down the mouse button until you’re over the command you want; or you can click and release, move the cursor, and then click again. Some commands, such as Crop and Reveal All, are executed immediately after you choose them. When a command name in the menu is followed by an ellipsis (…) — the Image Size command shown in Figure 3-2, for example — you know that a dialog box will open so that you can input variables and make decisions. A triangle to the right of a command name, such as that which you see next to Image Rotation, indicates a submenu. If you click the command name, another menu appears to the right. The cryptic set of symbols to the right of some commands (for example, Image Size) is the keyboard shortcut for opening the command’s dialog box. (I show you how to assign keyboard shortcuts later, in the section “Sugar and spice, shortcuts are nice.”)
FIGURE 3-2: Some commands have submenus, and some have dialog boxes.
As you read in the upcoming section “Clearing the table: Custom workspaces,” Photoshop menus are customizable — you don’t have to see commands that you never use. You can also color-code your menu commands, making it easier to spot those that you use regularly.
When a specific command appears grayed out in the menu (in gray type rather than black), that command isn’t available. Some commands, such as Reveal All in Figure 3-2, are available only under specific circumstances, such as when part of the image is being hidden with the Crop tool. When working with Photoshop’s creative filters, you’ll find that many aren’t available unless you’re working with an 8-bit RGB (red/green/blue) image. (I cover color modes and bit depth in Chapter 5, and you can explore filters in Chapter 14.)
Your platter full of panels
Photoshop, like the other programs of the Adobe Creative Cloud, uses floating panels. The panels, many of which you see along the right edge of your screen, usually appear on top of (float over) your image window. (As you drag panels around to customize your workspace, as described later in this section, you’ll find that panels can hide other panels.) The Options bar across the top of the work area and the Toolbox (technically, it’s called the Tools panel) along the
