Photoshop

An Introduction:

Adobe Photoshop is software that allows you to edit images in creatively varied ways. This means that we can use tools such as pen, paintbrush etc. to create images and then manipulate them, or download images from the World Wide web, or use our own pictures to play with and change in several ways. It is a powerful software used all over the world by professionals and students alike to create images for brochures, presentations and web sites (hint! hint! We are going to be working on our own web pages pretty soon!).

Photoshop provides us with a number of tools to create and change images. The image on the left is that of the toolbar you will see when you open up Photoshop.

Some things to remember about these tools:

Whenever a button on a tool bar has a tiny little arrow in it’s bottom right hand corner, right clicking on that button will open up more options.

When you click on a button to use a particular tool, a bar with several options pertaining to that tool is displayed on the top of the screen. This bar helps you specify exactly how you want to use that tool. For example, if you click on the paintbrush tool, the options bar will allow you to select the width of the brush strokes that you would like to paint with. Or, if you are coloring in a shape, it lets you control the opacity of the color.

Opacity: You can control how opaque or transparent your image is by changing the opacity. Decreasing the opacity will make an image more transparent.

Some of these tools are:

The marquee tools make rectangular, elliptical, single row, and single column selections.

The move tool moves your selections.

The lasso tools make freehand and polygonal (straight-edged) selections

The magic wand tool selects similarly colored areas. If you click on a particular color in an image, it will select all the areas of that color.

The crop tool trims images so that you can cut out whichever part of the image you want to use.

The airbrush tool paints soft-edged strokes.

The pencil tool paints hard-edged strokes, like a regular pencil would.

The paintbrush tool paints brush strokes

The eraser tool erases parts of an image to a previously saved state.

The background eraser tool erases areas to transparency by dragging.

The gradient tool colors in your shapes by blending colors. You can make these colors as transparent or opaque as you like.

The paint bucket tool fills similarly colored areas with the foreground color

The blur tool blurs hard edges in an image.

The sharpen tool sharpens soft edges in an image.

The smudge tool smudges the image, just like rubbing a finger on a colored picture would do.

The type tool creates type on an image. The text font, size and even shape can be changed using the options on top.

The eyedropper tool selects colors in an image.

The shape tool lets you draw shapes from a shape list.

The pen tools let you draw smooth-edged paths, which means that you can draw or outline any shape using this tool.

Filters: These have varied effects on your image. For example, wave will create waves in your image. Experiment with the filters and see which ones you like.

Some cool things you can try to do:

1. Write your name inside a shape (circle, rectangle, etc.). Try to get your name to be shaped like a flag. Color in the shape with a bright color. Now try to change the opacity of the color so that you can just see your name behind it.

2.Make a shape of one solid color. Try to introduce new colors and textures in your shape using only filters. Try to figure out which filter can be used to give your image the texture of a brick wall.

3.Use the Centipede picture from the Ropes course field trip. Change this picture so that you have a new picture of ONLY the heads of the people in the picture. Label the heads of all the people that you can see (for example, Tracy would have a label next to her head that said ‘Tracy’).

Saving your work:

After working so hard to create extraordinary images. You will want to use them again. Go to File, and then Save as to save your work as a psd (Photoshop document). You can come back this document at any time to edit or add to your image.

In addition to simply saving your work as a Photoshop document, you can also save it so that so that it is optimized for use on the Web. When you feel like an image is onne that you would like to put up on a website then go to File, click on ‘save for web’ and save your image as a .jpg or .gif, which are two ways in which you can save images.