Introduction 1 to Photoshop CS5 – Basics
Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool and also the industry-standard in creating and modifying graphics. With all its power and features, Photoshop can seem very daunting, yet Photoshop does an excellent job of putting you in control and making it easy to have all these tools at your fingertips and keep you feeling you’re in control. Eventually, once you know what Photoshop can do, and how to achieve certain results, you can feel like you can do anything.
Other times, you may get results that were entirely not what you imagined, but better. Photoshop is a tool that you can play around with and create amazing results, without even meaning to. This introduction will get you familiar with the basics of Photoshop and the more commonly used tools.
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This tutorial is aimed toward Adobe Photoshop CS5, but most Photoshop versions will largely be the same with regard to this article.
LESSON ONE:
The first thing we will do is load up Photoshop CS5. You will see something like the following:
LESSON TWO:
On the left you will see the toolbox. This holds the most commonly-used Tools in Photoshop. At the bottom-right of some of the icons, you will see a small black arrow. This means that there are more tools grouped together. If we click and hold the left mouse button on one these icons, we will expand the group:
Notice that the grouped tools are similar, which makes it easier to locate. Once you get more familiar with Photoshop, you will learn where each tool is and maybe even the keyboard shortcuts.
LESSON THREE:
At the bottom of the toolbar you will notice a black square and a white square, overlapping. The black (or foreground square) is the current foreground color, and the white our background color is the currently-selected background color. We can easily change these by simply left-clicking on one of them. Click the foreground square, and you will see the following:
We can choose a different color either by entering values into the textboxes (if we want a specific color), or simply using the slider in the middle or the clicking on the large square gradient on the left. If we check the Only Web Colors box, our choice will be narrowed to the colors that are ‘safe’ for the web.
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LESSON FOUR:
Once we have chosen a new color, we can click OK and then we should see our color palette has changed (foreground square is now the color of our newly-selected color). We can also do the same with our background color. You will also notice the smaller black and white square at the top-left of our foreground and background colors. If we click on this little icon, it will return our colors to the default – Black and White. We can also press the D key to do this. You may also notice the little arrow icon to the top-right of our colors palette. This little icon will swap our colors around. So if we click it, the foreground color will be moved to the back and the background to the front.
LESSON FIVE:
On the other side of the screen, to the right, you will see different panels. The one at the bottom-right is the LAYERS panel. This is what is used to re-arrange different elements in our document. We can have as many layers as we want, and we can paint, work on or apply effects to separate layers independently. The Layers panel has a drop-down list, which will allow you to change the blending mode of the currently selected layer. This is extremely useful if you want to create blending effects between different layers, and there are many options to choose from. There is also an opacity attribute, which allows you to adjust the opacity of the currently selected layer. To look at the other features, we will open a new document. Go to File > New (or press Ctrl + N) and choose a document around 400px wide by 300px tall. Resolution should usually be 72 dpi, especially if creating graphics for the web. If you’re working with photographs, you will need a higher resolution.
LESSON SIX:
Now that we have a document open, you will notice that the LAYERS panel and the HISTORY panel have become active. The History panel practically records everything that you do – every brush stroke and every effect you apply. So if you make a mistake, you can undo it – up to many levels. You can undo something you did twenty minutes ago, theoretically. You can change the number of states History will record in the Performance section of Edit > Preferences.
Note: The more History states you set, the more system resources Photoshop will use.
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LESSON SEVEN:
Notice on the LAYERS panel that we now have one layer – “Background”. Its name is italicized because it is currently locked. The background layer is always locked. We can unlock this by double-clicking on a blank area of the layer tab (not on the thumbnail, and not on the name. This will prompt us to name the layer. We’ll rename it “BG”, then click Ok. The layer should now no longer have the padlock nor the name in italics. This means that we can now do whatever we want to this layer. We will select the Brush Tool (B) from the toolbox, simply by left-clicking it. Now notice at the top we have more options, based upon the currently selected tool:
These options are for the Brush Tool (B). The first option, which looks like a drop-down menu (with the little black arrow), is the brush size and shape. Photoshop has many default brush shapes, but you can also download custom ones or even create your own. For right now, we will click on the little black arrow and we’ll have access to more brushes. The most common of the default ones are the circular hard-edged brushes and the circular soft-edged ones.
The top slider on this menu is used for the overall size of the brush. We can make this smaller or larger, either using the slider or by typing in a value. The other slider (Hardness), is used to alter how hard or soft the edge of the brush is. You will also see toward the top-right of this pop-up menu, there is another small black arrow, with a circle around it, and also a little blank page icon with its corner turned:
The arrow icon will give you even more options, such as the ability to load new brushes from a file, or create a new brush, or change the way the brushes are displayed, etc.
The blank page icon is to create a new brush preset from the currently selected brush, so that you can save your size and hardness into a preset.
LESSON EIGHT:
Next, we will paint on the canvas. Go ahead and left-click and drag your mouse on the blank canvas to paint something. Once you have painted something, as soon as you let go of the mouse button, the entry will be entered into the HISTORY panel. You can click on any state in the HISTORY panel to go back to that state – try it now. Go back to the state before you painted, and then back to the recent state. That’s how easy it is to undo and redo in Photoshop.
LESSON NINE:
Next, choose the Eraser Tool (or press E). 
With this tool, we can erase certain parts of the currently-selected layer. So make sure our “BG” layer is selected and then erase parts of the image, by using your mouse and left button. You should notice that the background white is also being erased. This is because the white is on the same layer as what we painted. They cannot easily be removed from each other. The white and gray checkered pattern that emerges as we erase is the transparency layer. If we see that, it means that it is transparent.
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LESSON TEN:
A way to get around this is to create separate layers. We can do this by clicking on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the LAYERS panel: (
) and then delete the old layer by selecting it first and then clicking the Delete Layer button right next to the New Layer button you just clicked: (
). We should now be left with one blank layer. If we choose the Paint Bucket Tool (G), and fill in the layer with a color of our choice, we can then create another layer and (making sure it is selected) paint on it with another color. We should now have two layers in our LAYERS Panel – one with a solid color fill, and the other with whatever we painted on it. Our layers panel should look something like this:
LESSON ELEVEN:
Now that we have multiple layers, we can click on the eyeballs next to each one to hide/show them. We can also set the transparency of each layer using the opacity attribute, and also modify the blending option of selected the layer using the drop-down menu here. Have a play about with these settings to familiarize yourself with them and to get a better idea of what these are doing.
That is pretty much it for this first introduction into Photoshop basics. As you probably already know, Photoshop has a lot to it – far too much to cover in one tutorial. Look out for other tutorials to get you started with Photoshop.
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