10 Steps to Mastering the Photoshop Workspace

1. Step 1 - Introduction: for beginners. I especially want to get you oriented. Tube the photo shop workspace and also navigating around images, had a pan and zoom and self worth, as well as the shortcuts that are associated with that that will help speed up. Your workflow will also explore the major features that I'll be using in demonstrating the techniques that will be applying throughout this course. So let's get started. And first I'd like to introduce you to Adobe Bridge. The Dhobi Bridges, a wonderful companion program to Photoshopped Adobe Bridge comes with photo shop, and if you have any version prior to Creative Cloud and installed with Photoshopped, if you have Photoshopped Creative Cloud, then you want to download it. If he haven't already, it's free included with Creative Cloud and in Adobe Bridge, you can browse files now. Adobe Bridge does much more than just browsing files, but for our purposes will be previewing and browsing files and opening them into Photoshopped from Bridge 2. Step 2 - Workspace Color: So here I'm in bridges, light table workspace, and I've got two images that I have already opened up in Photoshop. And here is the photo shop work space. This is the default photo shop workspace when you first install Photoshopped, the photo shop workspace is a dark user interface, but it doesn't have to be now. Personally, I love the dark user interface. When it was first introduced in CS six, it was like a drink of water. From my eyes. I went, Ah, this is so nice and I tend to work with this workspace. But I found when I teach that it's difficult for students to see the little icons and also read the text fields and so forth. So what I'm going to do is switched to the lighter user interface. And I could do that from my Photoshopped preferences going to the edit menu in Windows. Or you would go to your photo shop application menu on the Mac and go down to photo shops, preferences and choose interface preferences. And there I'm going to choose the lightest flavor of the way that we can view our workspace and click OK 3. Step 3 - Zooming and Panning: I'd like to explain a little bit about navigating in photo shop, and when you're navigating in your images in Photoshop, you can use the zoom tool at the bottom of the toolbar or the hand tool Teoh. Zoom in our route or your view images and then a hand tool to browse around your images. But I want to teach you the shortcuts because we'll be generally using other tools, and you don't want to go back and forth switching between the two Iran to the zoom tool every time you want to zoom in or the hand tool every time you want to browse around your images. So far better than that is to use the command or control key command key on the Mac control K windows and the plus or minus keys at the top of your keyboard. So the top right of your keyboard. You'll see that plus and the minus keys and also the zero key. Next to that. All three of those are very important. So again, that's Commander Control Plus to zoom in command or control minus to zoom out and commander control zero to resize to fit screen 4. Step 4 - 2-Up Views: way also have the ability to viewer images in a two up mode. We could do that by going to the window menu, the arrange sub menu, and I'm going to choose my favorite two up mode to up vertical. And then I could go to each of these images and zoom out until I can see that entire image in that window. And this will be very useful when we start comparing images back and forth when we want to view the colors of one image as their compared to another were doing color matching. We're also be pulling color palettes from one image and recreating that color palette in another image. So this is a great view mode, very easy to get out of this view mode. All you need to do is go back to your window menu to the arrange sub menu and choose consolidate all two tabs. That brings you back to the single image view. And again, I'll press Commander Control zero to resize my image to fit on screen 5. Step 5 - The Power of Undo: some handy shortcuts they can use are the undue shortcut and step backward and step forward . You'll find undo in the edit menu. Edit Undo. Get used to the shortcut. For that, it's Command Z on the Mac or control Z on windows. So Commander Control and Z Key is going to be your best friend and Photoshopped when you do something that was a mistake, or you want to take back, just quickly, press Command Z or Control Z, and that will undo what you just did in photo shop. Now, unless you change the preference Command Z does undo and redo so you can toggle where you've done back and forth, which is useful before, before, and afters of what you've done in Photoshopped by using command or control Z over and over and over. 6. Step 6 - Working with History: you also have step backward and step forward. Step forward is command shift Z on the Mac and Control Shift Z on Windows. Step backward is command options E. On the Mac and control all Z on Windows. You can use those shortcuts if you want to step backward and forward, but probably easier than that would be to go to the history panel. The history panel is this top most icon in your iconic panel views, and if you can't find it, you can always go to the window menu with the top of your screen. The window menu is simply a list of all the available panels and Photoshopped and I'm using the word panels, not pallets. That's old terminology for many versions. Now Adobe is referred to these as panel. So when I refer to a panel, I'm talking about these sections of photo shops workspace like the Wares panel, the channels panel, the adjustments panel and so forth. So all your panels are listed in the Windows menu, and we see her panels on the side here of the workspace, as well as some panels as icons. And as you open up new panels, they'll open up in this iconic strip, and you need to click the icon to open up the panel and access it. So again, this is the history panel, which will simply show you every little move that you make in Photoshopped that affects your image. And you can simply click on different history states, or you're originally open snapshot to back up in histories and Photoshopped to get back to where you were. So we'll be using the history panel later on for some very creative purposes. The history panels A truly useful feature of Photoshopped that gives you tremendous creative control, is well over your images. 7. Step 7 - The Eyedropper Tool: in our toolbar will be accessing the eyedropper tool, and we'll be using that to sample colors in our images. And when you sample a color with the eyedropper tool that color becomes your foreground, color that foreground color swatch in photo shop. And when you're using the eyedropper tool, you're going to be well served by using a sample size that isn't a point. Sample. Use a three by three or five by five average because I'm just going to quickly zoom into this image quite a bit all the way. At the most I consume, which is 3200% and you'll see that some pixels next to each other or lighter or darker. Well, when you click with the eyedropper tool, how do you know that you're clicking on the lighter pixel or the darker pixel? Just press Commander Control zero to zoom back out, and the answer is, you don't so we want is a three by three or five by five average. I generally set this at five by five average for just general purpose work and color sampling weaken. Go to some of the larger samples we may. We'll do that later on when we're sampling broad areas of the picture, we want to pick up the colors that cover a large area to get a general coloration of that for our sample that we're using. But again in general, recommended used to five by five average for your color sampler, so abusing the eyedropper tool to sample colors that will be using in some of our tenting and toning. 8. Step 8 - Quick Selection: and also will use from time to time one of our selection tools, probably the quick selection tool. The quick selection to was a very useful tool that acts like a brush tool so we can come up here in the options bar and choose the brush size and then make a selection. And when we make a selection, weaken do things to it. Now we're not going to be made doing a lot of masking, but I will want to get you oriented to masking, so we'll come back to masking down the road. But for now, I'm going up to the select menu and choosing de select or a shortcut commander Control D to get rid of that selection or what are also known as marching ants. 9. Step 9 - The Brush Tool: we'll also from time to time and for our purposes, mostly for masking used the brush tool. The brush tool also has a brush size attributes up in the options bar. You'll see a slightly different brush palette up here, then, where we saw with the quick selection tool and in the brush palette. We have a size slider, and you can drag the size slider to the right or the left to make your brush bigger, smaller. The better way to access the brush palette is to simply right mouse quick inside your image to bring up the brush palette. And if you're a Mac user, please go to your mouse preferences and assign the right side of your mouths to be a right click. Some Mac users that I have his students aren't aware they have the ability to right quick and right. Clicking is huge and photo shop. It opens up all kinds of opportunities, especially these contextual menus like right clicking in your image to bring up the brush palette. So from here again, you can choose the brush size, and by far more often than not, we're going to use this first brush preset the soft round brush that it would be a hardness set of zero for your brush, and that gives you very soft brush strokes when you're working with your brushes. And I'm just going to make a brushstroke in this image to show you. And that is, let's pick our default colors. Which else? Quick, in this little ridge it right here to chooser, to fall colors and you could see there is a brushstroke. We have a nice soft brush. Now I'll do what I told you a minute ago. I'll go to my history panel and I'll just back up in histories. And in fact, I'll just go to this originally open history state, and that brings me back backs up in time and what I'm doing in photo shop, and I can go ahead and collapse that panel. Now that I've backed up in history's, I don't need to view the history panel, and again you can view it or hide it by clicking on the little icon for the history panel or hide it by clicking on the little double arrows at the top of the history panel 10. Step 10 - Menus Everywhere: So for our menus, as they said, you can right click in your image to bring up on menu bacon. Also right click all over Photoshopped, right? Clicking on your tools gives you other tools in that tool compartment. It unfurls the little tool list, and you can also right click and panels. For example, you can right click on a layer to bring out menu. You also will find menus in each of the panels. So what? The top rate of each panel is what's called a contextual menu a menu in the context of that panel. So every panel again has a contextual menu, which you can use to access certain features, or sometimes to change the view of that panel or reset the panel. If it's panel that contains presets, like your swatches panel, that is a basic orientation to our photo shop workspace, and we'll be talking more about the photo shop workspaces we go as we get into the little nooks and crannies of the photo shop workspace. But let's just review where we've been. We looked at our photo shop workspace, and I showed you that I did not. When I teach, like to use the dark user interface. And then I showed you how to change that to the light user interface and how I did it. And then I showed you how to navigate in your images with some handy shortcuts, particularly Commander control plus commander controlled, minus and Commander control. Zero to zoom in, zoom out and re size your image to fit on screen. And also I showed you where will be finding our tools, the tools in the tool bar, the menu items that will be using in photo shop and the panels that will be using the major features that will help us in our work.