When you open Photoshop, the Photoshop desktop appears.
Components of the Photoshop desktop include the menu bar, image window, toolbox, status bar, and palettes.
The Menu Bar
The menu bar, at the top of the Photoshop desktop, includes several dropdown menus for choosing commands. Right below the menu bar, options for the currently-selected tool are displayed (see Toolbox tools, below).
Image Window
The image window displays the current image. The name of the image file appears at the top edge of the image window. If rulers are turned on, they appear at the top and left edges of the image window. To display or hide rulers, choose Ctrl-R or View>Rulers.
About Rulers: Rulers show the size of your image. To change the unit of measurement (such as from pixels to inches), double click on the ruler, or go to Preferences (Edit>Preferences>Units & Rulers). If you are creating an image for the Web, use pixels as the unit of measurement.
The Toolbox
The toolbox contains tools for working with images in Photoshop. Only one tool is selected at any given time. To select a tool, click on its icon in the toolbox.
Some important tools are briefly described below. Toolbox tools are used for most Photoshop tasks and we'll spend a lot of time in other classes going over how to use particular tools.
The Status Bar
The status bar at the bottom of the Photoshop desktop provides information about your current view and other information that you can specify by choosing from a dropdown menu (in this example, the view is now 33.33% and the document dimensions are 8.371" x 8.371").
Palettes
Palettes enable you to perform a wide variety of tasks in Photoshop. To display or hide particular palettes, go to the Window menu and choose a palette name.
Palettes are usually organized into groups. In the above example, Layers, Channels, and Paths are a group. You can easily move a palette group by dragging its blue bar (at the top of the group). To shrink a palette group, double-click on its blue bar. To hide a palette group, click its close box (the "X" on the right side of the blue bar).
You can drag the tabs of palettes to move them around, or to combine them into other groups.
To reset palette locations to the default, choose Window>Workspace>Reset Palette Locations.
When you first launch Photoshop, the Photoshop desktop (described above) appears. But in order to do anything, you need to have an image. There are four main ways you can bring an image into Photoshop:
- You can open an existing image file by choosing File > Open or File>Browse. This would include images you have downloaded to your computer from a digital camera or from the internet. Photoshop can open most image file types.
- If your computer is connected to a scanner with a Photoshop plug-in that has been properly installed, you can scan an image into Photoshop by Choosing File > Import.
- You can create a new Photoshop file from scratch.
When editing images, you can do many tasks more effectively if you zoom in and move around the image. Zoom in close to make adjustments to small areas, then zoom back out to see how your edits have affected the overall image.
The main tools for zooming and moving around an image are the zoom tool, the hand tool, and the navigator palette.
- To zoom in, choose the Zoom tool (
) and then click or click and drag in the image.
When you zoom in, the zoom percentage (or view size) increases. The current zoom percentage is shown in the status bar and at the top of the image window. The zoom percentage shows the magnification at which you are viewing the image (not the actual size of the image).
- A quick way to go to 100% view size is to double-click on the zoom tool icon in the toolbox.
- To zoom out, press the ALT key while you click with the zoom tool.
- Use the Hand tool (
) to move around the image in the window when you are zoomed-in.
Displaying and hiding palettes and the toolbox
- Press Tab to hide palettes and toolbox.
- Press Shift-Tab to hide palettes.
