Starting to work in Adobe Photoshop
The Adobe Photoshop CS5 work area includes menus, toolbars, and panels that give you quick access to a variety of tools and options for editing and adding elements to your image. You can also add commands and filters to the menus by installing third-party software known as plug-ins.
Photoshop works with bitmapped, digitized images (that is, continuous-tone images that have been converted into a series of small squares, or picture elements, called pixels). You can also work with vector graphics, which are drawings made of smooth lines that retain their crispness when scaled. You can create original artwork in Photoshop, or you can import images from many sources, such as:
- Photographs from a digital camera
- Commercial CDs of digital images
- Scans of photographs, transparencies, negatives, graphics, or other documents
- Captured video images
- Artwork created in drawing programs
Starting Photoshop and opening a file
To begin, you’ll start Adobe Photoshop and reset the default preferences.
1. On the desktop, double-click the Adobe Photoshop icon to start Adobe Photoshop, and then immediately hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS) to reset the default settings. If you don’t see the Photoshop icon on your desktop, choose Start > All Programs > Adobe Photoshop CS5 (Windows) or look in either the Applications folder or the Dock (Mac OS).
2. When prompted, click Yes to confirm that you want to delete the Adobe Photoshop Settings file.
The Photoshop work area appears as shown in the following illustration
The default workspace in
Adobe Photoshop consists of the Application bar, menu bar, and options bar at the top of the screen, the Tools panel on the left, and several open panels in the panel dock on the right. When you have documents open, one or more image windows also appear, and you can display them at the same time using the tabbed interface. The Photoshop user interface is very similar to the one in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Flash—so learning how to use the tools and panels in one application means that you’ll know how to use them in the others.
There are a few differences between the Photoshop work area on Windows and that
on Mac OS:
- On Windows, the menu bar is combined with the Application bar, if your screen resolution makes it possible to fit them on the same line.
- On Mac OS, you can work with an application frame, which contains the Photoshop application’s windows and panels within a frame that is distinct from other applications you may have open; only the menu bar is outside the application frame. The application frame is disabled by default; to enable the application frame, choose Window > Application Frame. Additionally, you can enable and disable the Application bar. This book assumes you are using the Application bar, which is enabled by default.
On Mac OS, the application frame keeps the image, panels, and Application bar together
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