1-2.
FIGURE 1-8: Turn panels into icons.
TABLE 1-2 Zooming and Navigation Keyboard Shortcuts
| Command | Windows Shortcut | Mac Shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| Actual size | Ctrl+1 | ⌘ +1 |
| Fit in window | Ctrl+0 (zero) | ⌘ +0 (zero) |
| Zoom in | Ctrl++ (plus sign) or Ctrl+spacebar | ⌘ ++ (plus sign) or ⌘ +spacebar |
| Zoom out | Ctrl+– (minus) or Alt+spacebar | ⌘ +– (minus) or Option+spacebar |
| Hand tool | Spacebar | Spacebar |
This list describes a few advantages of working with the Zoom tool to get a better look at your work:
100 percent view: Double-clicking the Zoom tool in the Tools panel gives you a 100 percent view. Do it before using filters to see a more realistic result of making changes.
Zoom marquee: While the Zoom marquee tool is selected, uncheck Scrubby Zoom from the options at the top to add additional control to the Zoom marquee tool. Drag from the upper-left corner to the lower-right corner of the area you want to zoom to. While you drag, a marquee appears; when you release the mouse button, the marqueed area zooms to fill the image window. The Zoom marquee gives you much more control than just clicking the image with the Zoom tool. Zoom out again to see the entire image by pressing Ctrl+0 (Windows) or ⌘ +0 (Mac). Doing so fits the entire image in the viewing area.
Keyboard shortcuts: If a dialog box is open and you need to reposition or zoom to a new location on an image, you can use the keyboard commands without closing the dialog box.
A new window for a different look: Choose Window ⇒ Arrange ⇒ New Window to create an additional window for the frontmost image. This technique is helpful when you want to view the entire image (say, at actual size) to see the results as a whole yet zoom in to focus on a small area of the image to do some fine-tuning. The new window is linked dynamically to the original window so that when you make changes, the original and any other new windows created from the original are immediately updated.
Cycle through images: Press Ctrl+Tab (Windows) or ⌘ +~ (tilde) (Mac) to cycle through open images.
Choosing Your Screen Mode
You have a choice of three screen modes in which to work. Most users start and stay in the default (standard screen) mode until they inadvertently end up in another. The following modes are accessible by clicking and holding Screen Mode, located at the bottom of the Tools panel, as shown in Figure 1-9:
Standard Screen Mode: In this typical view, an image window is open, but you can see your desktop and other images open behind it.
Full Screen Mode with Menu Bar: In this view, the image is surrounded to the edge of the work area with neutral gray. Working in this mode prevents you not only from accidentally clicking out of an image and leaving Photoshop, but also from seeing other images behind the working image.
Full Screen Mode: A maximized document window fills all available space between docks and resizes when dock widths change.
FIGURE 1-9: Change your screen mode.
Getting Started with Basic Tasks in Photoshop CC
Unless you use Photoshop as a blank canvas for painting, you may rarely create a new file in Photoshop. This is because you typically have a source image you start with that may have been generated by a digital camera, stock image library, or scanner.
The following sections show you how to open an existing image file in Photoshop, create a new image (if you want to use Photoshop to paint, for example), crop an image, and save an edited image.
Cropping an image
A simple but essential task is to crop an image. Cropping means to eliminate all parts of the image that aren’t relevant to create a dynamic composition.
DISCOVER CAMERA RAW
If you haven’t discovered the Camera Raw capabilities in Adobe Photoshop, you’ll want to give them a try. The Camera Raw format is available for image capture in many cameras. Simply choose the format in your camera’s settings as Raw instead of JPEG or TIFF. These Raw files are a bit larger than standard JPEG files, but you capture an enormous amount of data with the image that you can retrieve after opening. (See www.adobe.com for a complete list of cameras that support Camera Raw.)
A Camera Raw file contains unprocessed picture data from a digital camera’s image sensor, along with information about how the image was captured, such as camera and lens type, exposure settings, and white balance setting. When you open the file in Adobe Photoshop CC, the built-in Camera Raw plug-in interprets the Raw file on your computer, making adjustments for image color and tonal scale.
When you shoot JPEG images with your camera, you’re locked into the processing done by your camera, but working with Camera Raw files gives you maximum control over images, such as controlling their white balance, tonal range, contrast, color saturation, and image sharpening. Cameras that can shoot in Raw format have a setting on the camera that changes its capture mode to Raw. Rather than write a final JPEG file, a Raw data file is written, which consists of black-and-white brightness levels from each of the several million pixel sites on the imaging sensor. The actual image hasn’t yet been produced, and unless you have specific software, such as the plug-in built in to Adobe Photoshop, opening the file can be difficult, if not impossible.
To open a Camera Raw file, simply choose File ⇒ Browse in Bridge. Adobe Bridge opens, and you see several panels, including the Folders, Content, Preview, and Metadata panels. In the Folders panel, navigate to the location on your computer where you’ve saved Camera Raw images; thumbnail previews appear in the Content panel. Think of Camera Raw files as photo negatives. You can reprocess them at any time to achieve the results you want.
Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac) a JPEG or TIFF file and choose Open in Camera Raw from the contextual menu. This is a great way to experiment with all the cool features available with this plug-in, but your results aren’t as good as if you used an actual
