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 the core 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). (Of course, many images never make it to paper — they are only shared on social media.)

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. (I explore pixels and the nature of digital imaging 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 button. 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 (both discussed in Chapter 9); and compositing images (see Chapter 10).

Photoshop works with actual vector shapes, such as those created in Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop also has a very capable brush engine, including erodible brush tips (they wear down and need to be resharpened) and airbrush and watercolor brush tips, further extending the fine art painting capabilities of the program. Figure 1-3 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. (Creating vector artwork is presented in Chapter 11, and you can read about painting with Photoshop in Chapter 14.)

Photoshop also includes some basic features for creating web graphics, including slicing and animations (see Chapter 17 for info on video and animation). (Web work is best done in a true web development program, such as Dreamweaver. If you want to learn about creating websites, pick up a copy of Dreamweaver For Dummies.).

Other things you can do with Photoshop

Admittedly, Photoshop 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 designed that 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. If you don’t have Dreamweaver, you can use Photoshop to create a website, one page at a time, sliced and optimized and even with animated GIFs. And while you’re probably not going to create the next blockbuster on your laptop with Photoshop, the video editing capabilities can certainly get you through the family reunion or that school project.

Reviewing basic computer operations

Chapter 3 looks at Photoshop-specific aspects of working with floating panels, menus and submenus, and tools from the Options bar, but I want to take just a little time to review some fundamental computer concepts.

Saving your files

You must use the Save or Save As command to preserve changes to your images. And after you save and close an image, some of those changes may be irreversible. When working with an important image, consider these tips:

• Work on a copy of the image file. Unless you’re working with a digital photo in the Raw format (discussed in Chapter 7), make a copy of your image file as a backup before changing it in Photoshop. The backup ensures that should something go horribly wrong, you can start over. (You never actually change a Raw photo — Photoshop can’t rewrite the original file — so you’re always, in effect, working on a copy.)
• Activate auto recovery. In Photoshop’s Preferences ⇒ File Handling pane, make sure that the Automatically Save Recovery Information Every: option is selected and set to an appropriate time interval. If Photoshop crashes while you’re working, when you re-open the program, it will (hopefully) be able to present you with your artwork at the stage when last saved for auto recovery.
• Save your work as PSD file, too. Especially if your image has layers, save it in Photoshop’s PSD file format (complete with all the layers) before using Save As to create a final copy in another format. If you don’t save a copy with layers, going back to make one little change can cost hours of work.

Rather than choosing File ⇒ Open, consider making it a habit to choose File ⇒ Open As Smart Object. When working with Smart Objects, you can scale or transform multiple times without continually degrading the image quality, and you can work with Smart Filters, too! (You can read about Smart Filters in Chapter 15.)

If you attempt to close an image or quit Photoshop without saving your work first, you get a gentle reminder asking whether you want to save, close without saving, or cancel the close/quit (as shown in Figure 1-4).

Photoshop’s incredible selective Undo

Here’s one major difference between Photoshop and other programs. Almost all programs have some form of Undo, enabling you to reverse the most recent command or action (or mistake). Photoshop also has, however, a great feature that lets you partially undo. The History Brush tool can partially undo just about any filter, adjustment, or tool — by painting. You select the History Brush, choose a history state (a stage in the image development) to which you want to revert, and then paint over areas of the image that you want to change back to the earlier state.

You can undo as far back in the editing process as you want, with a couple of limitations: The History panel (where you select the state to which you want to revert) holds only a limited number of history states. In the Photoshop Preferences ⇒ Performance pane, you can specify how many states you want Photoshop to remember (to a maximum of 1,000). Keep in mind that storing lots of history states takes up computer memory that you might need for processing filters and adjustments. That can slow things down. The default of 20 history states is good for most projects, but when using painting tools or other procedures that involve lots of repetitive steps (such as touching up with the Dodge, Burn, or Clone Stamp tools), a larger number (perhaps as high as 60) is generally a better idea.

The second limitation is pixel dimensions. If you make changes to the image’s actual size (in pixels) with the Crop tool, the Image ⇒ Crop command, or the Image Size or Canvas Size commands (both in the Image menu), you cannot revert to prior steps with the History Brush tool. You can choose as a source any history state that comes after the image’s pixel dimensions change but none that come before.

Here’s one example of using the History Brush as a creative tool. You open a copy of a photograph in Photoshop. You edit as necessary. You use the Black & White adjustment on the image to make it appear to be grayscale. In the History panel, you click in the left column next to a snapshot (a saved history state) or the step prior to Black & White to designate that as the source state, the appearance of the image to which you want to revert. You select the History Brush tool and paint over specific areas of the image to return them to the original (color) appearance (see Figure 1-5). There you have it — a grayscale image with areas of color, compliments of the History Brush tool!

Photoshop has another very powerful partial Undo in the Fade command. Found in the Edit menu, Fade can be used immediately after just about any tool or adjustment or filter or, well, almost anything that changes the appearance of the image. (You can even fade the History Brush tool.) The Fade command enables you to change the opacity and/or the blending mode of whatever alteration you most recently made to the appearance of your artwork with tools or commands. You might, for example, use a Sharpen filter and then use the Fade command to change the filter’s blending mode to Luminosity. That’s the functional equivalent of sharpening the L channel in Lab color mode without having to switch color modes at all. Keep in mind that when I use the word “immediately,” I really mean it — you can’t even use the Save command between applying a filter and using the Fade command.

Installing Photoshop: Need to know

If you haven’t yet installed Photoshop here are a few points to keep in mind:

• Install only into the default location. Photoshop is a resource-intensive program. Installing it into the default location (harddrive ⇒ Applications on a Mac and C:Program Files for Windows) ensures that it has access to the operating system and hardware as necessary. Installing into any other location or attempting to run Photoshop across a network can lead to frustrating problems and loss of work in progress.
• Disable all spyware and antivirus software before installing. Antivirus software can intercept certain installation procedures, deeming them to be hazardous to your computer’s health. That can lead to malfunctions, crashes, lost work, frustration, and what I like to call Computer Flying Across the Room Syndrome. If you use antivirus software (and if you use Windows, you’d better!), turn it off before installing any program, especially one as complex as Photoshop. You might find the antivirus program’s icon in the Windows taskbar; or you might need to go to the Start menu, choose All Programs to locate the antivirus software, and disable it. On Mac, check the Dock. And don’t forget to restart your antivirus software afterward! If you already installed Photoshop and antivirus software was running at the time, I urge you to uninstall and reinstall.
• If you use auto-backup software, shut it down, too. It’s best not to run auto-backup software when installing software. Like antivirus software, it can also lead to problems by interfering with the installer.
• Connect to the Internet and activate right away. It’s also best to run the Photoshop installer while your computer is connected to the Internet. That enables Photoshop’s activation and registration process to happen right away, making sure that you can get started as soon as the installer finishes.
• If you have third-party plug-ins, install them elsewhere. Third-party plug-ins — those filters and other Photoshop add-ons that you buy from companies other than Adobe — can be installed into a folder outside the Photoshop folder. You can then make an alias (Mac) or shortcut (Windows) to that folder and drag the alias/shortcut to Photoshop’s Plug-Ins folder. Why install outside the Photoshop folder? Should you ever need to (gasp!) reinstall Photoshop, you won’t need to reinstall all your third-party plug-ins. Just create a new alias/shortcut and move it into Photoshop’s new Plug-Ins folder. And don’t forget to go to the plug-ins’ websites to see whether the manufacturers offer updates!
• If you have lots of plug-ins, create sets. Plug-ins require random–access memory (RAM) (computer memory that Photoshop uses to process your editing commands). If you have lots of plug-ins, consider dividing them into groups according to how and when you use them. Sort (or install) them into separate folders. (Hint: Plug-ins that you use in many situations can be installed into multiple folders.) When you need to load a specific set, swap out the alias or shortcut in the Plug-Ins folder and restart Photoshop.
• If you love fonts, use a font management utility. If you have hundreds of fonts (over the years, I’ve somehow managed to collect upward of 12,000 fonts), use a font-management utility to create sets of fonts according to style and activate only those sets that you need at any given time. Too many active fonts can choke the Photoshop type engine, slowing performance. The Mac OS has Font Book built right in, or you can use the excellent Suitcase Fusion (Mac and Windows) from Extensis (www.extensis.com).