Transcripts
1. Class introduction: Hello and welcome to the first class in the photo shop basics Siri's. There are a total of five classes in the photo shop Basic Siri's, each one covering different features. In Photoshopped, there are very few programs as widely used as photo shop. After all, it is its own verb. Everyone knows what it means to photo shop something, and for good reason. It's one of the most powerful photo editing tools out there. So when we're tackling the very daunting task of learning how to use such a powerful program with so many possibilities, the best place to start is by getting familiar with how to move around the user interface and work with digital images and documents. And that is exactly what we're gonna do in this class. We'll start with an overall look at the interface to see what's located, where and how we can customize it to fit our needs. From there will pick up some production proven tips and tricks for how we can work faster with Photoshopped documents after we're familiar with the interface and Photoshopped will wrap up this class by taking a step out of it and learning more about some key terminology . What it means. Things like rast, arised images and vector graphics, all the different color modes, common file formats and the differences between all those things. And when you want to use them in your own projects, by the end of this class, you'll know how to move around in the photo shop interface. You also have an understanding of a wide range of technical terms and concepts that you'll come across in photo shop. Are you ready to get started? Let's get to in the next video, where we'll dive headfirst into photo shop and get an overview of the user interface.
2. UI overview: in this video, we'll get an overview of photo shops interface. Now, when you opened up Photoshopped for the first time, you're going to see a screen like this and this is called the home screen in photo shop is going to rely heavily on opening up a recent document or creating a new document. But this is not a photo shops main interface. We're gonna cover creating an opening documents in more depth later on in this course. So for the sake of this video, let's just create a new document by clicking on the create new button so we can see photo shops main interface. Now, the size of the document that we create doesn't really matter. And again, we're going to go through what this window looks like. The new document window, all of these different options later on this course. So I'm just gonna leave this at a default photo shop size, click on create, and we can see that this is photo shops main interface, and again, we're gonna go through all of this in more depth throughout this course. That's kind of the whole point of this entire course, but let's get started by getting familiar with what we see here. So up at the very top. If we start from the top left, we have the menu bar, and this is fairly straightforward menu that you would expect to see in any computer program. We're gonna be going through the menu a lot in this course and be getting familiar with that. Over here on the left side, we have the tools panel. So this is where all of our tools live. Things like our paintbrush or our marquee selection or the move tool. Now, when we change a tool, this bar right here, this is the options bar or the Tools Options bar. This is going to change, so watch what happens. I'm on the move tool right now. If I switch to the paintbrush, you can see the options that we have for that tool will change. Same if I go to a selection, go back to the move tool. You can see that the Options bar is updating to show the options for whatever tool we have selected. Now, this big part right here, this is the document window, and this is really our main workspace where we're going to be working on our images. Over here. On the right side of the document window, we have our panels, so there's the color of panel. You can double click on this to collapse it. Double click to open it back up. We also have panel tabs. So if you see swatches back here, this is another panel that's kind of hiding back there. We're going to go through how to rearrange these panels how to work with these panels later on in this course. But just get familiar with the panels on the right hand side and one panel I really want to point out here is this Layers panel layers are, ah, huge part of the power inside of photo shop. So of course, we're gonna look at working with layers a lot throughout this course, but just for now, know that this is where the layers panel is located. We also have more panel tabs kind of hidden back beneath that weaken left click on in order to cycle through now, I also want to point out that not all of the pain ALS are inside of panel tabs. We can also have icons. So up here we have. This is the history panel, but it's actually an icon. If we click on this, it's gonna pull the panel out, and then we can click on it again in order to collapse it. If you notice when I click on this, you can see the actions panel right here. And that's what this icon is here. So I can just click on the icon collapse or I can just click on the icon in order to open that up right away. Now you only notice that there are two here. There's more down here. If you notice this little separator here, that's what's separating those. And again, we're gonna look at Ah, lot of these panels and a lot more depth. But you can see eso. We have brushes and brush settings are the two here, and then we have our character and our paragraph panels that are down here now, as you can probably guess. Ah, big part of being effective in Photoshop has to do with being able to access the panels that you need to get things done when you need to do them. So with that in mind, let's move on to our next video where we're gonna take a look at how we can turn on and off panels as what was organized them in the interface here inside of photo shop.
3. Panels: in this video, we'll learn how to organize the panels that we have inside of photo shop. All right, so the fastest way to see all of the panels that we have available to us in photo shop is by coming up to the menu to window. These are all of the different panels. And if you'll notice the check box next to some of them, those are the panels that we currently have open, so you can see color over here. I come back over here, you can see color. I have the layers panel open over on the right hand side as well as the properties panel. Now, if our to click on one of these, it will open up that panel. So let's click on actions. You can see it's gonna open that up. Now if you recall from our previous video when we were looking at this, we already have actions open here. But what happens if we try to open a panel that we do not already have in any of these groups? So let's maybe come into libraries. We don't have that open. You can see the interface is going to adjust in order to bring in that new panel. And now that we have this new panel open, we can click and drag it around the interface in order to rearrange this, however we want. So to do that, we're going to come into the panel tab up here at the top. Just hold down the left mouse button, click and drag, and then watch what happens. As I get close to one of these other panel groups, you can see the little blue line, so if I come in here, you can see the Blue line up above or inside. So if I were to drop it right here, it's gonna add it to this group. So now we have color swatches and libraries in this group. But if I left, click and drag and move it up top, it's gonna create its own group and these air called tab groups. And, of course, if you wanted to pull it out and have it be kind of on its own, like we saw before, we can left, click and drag and then come over here, you'll notice the big blue highlighted line it there in order to pull that in. Um, actually might be a little bit difficult to see in the video. Let me move it over here. You can see that big blue line. Just notice as you're doing this, that's really where it's going to drop. You can even drop it into one of these little tab groups here if we wanted to. Now, in my experience, almost as important as having the right panels open to get stuff done. And Photoshopped is really to turn off the panels that you that you don't need. So how do we close out of a panel that we don't want? All we need to do is to right click on that panel. So let's say the actions here we can right click on it. We can just tell Photoshopped to close that, and that closes it. And if he ever need to get it back, we can come in the window, open that back up, and that's gonna pull it right back. Now we can do this a little bit faster if we want to and say, You know, I'm not going to really work with color or swatches that much in a particular project that I'm working on. So what if I just right click and closed the entire tab group, that's going to get rid of all of the, uh, the panels inside of that tab group. And again, if we wanted to pull these back, all we would have to do is to come in the window color, pull that back and you'll notice it brought back swatches to because it was in the same Tabb group. Okay, so in this video, we learned how to add new panels from the window menu. We learned how to customise our interface by dragging the panels around. We also learned how to close panels and tab groups. Now, in between lessons, I'd recommend taking some time to play with this ad in some panels and take some away. And as you're going along, don't worry about getting things back to exactly how they were, because when you're ready, I'll meet you in the next video, where we can learn how to reset all of the panels and photo shop by learning about workspaces
4. Workspaces: and this video will learn about workspaces in photo shop. Now, if you're following along with this course in order than at the end of the last video, I recommended playing around for a little bit. Add ings and removing panels. So if you've done that and your screens all messed up with now let's start off this video by resetting everything back to photo shops default. So to do that, we're gonna come upto window workspace and you can see the workspace we currently have set is essentials, and that is the default workspace inside of Photoshopped. Now, if you want to get this reset back to the defaults, all we need to do is to reset essentials and then Photoshopped is gonna go in and reset this back to its default. Now that we have everything set back to the default, let's learn how we can build our own workspaces and save them so we can river back to them just like we did with this default one. So to start, we're gonna need to do some customization to our work space. We need to fund. We need to figure out where we want everything position to basically set everything up like we want before we save it off. So I'm going to do a little bit of cleaning up. Let's get rid of this learned panel. Men, right click close that panel. We can also right click. Or we can come into the options here and just close this. It's the same thing. I'm gonna come in and let's close the entire tab group close out of this one, and I'm also going to close out of this as well. So all we're left with is the layers panel. Let's give this a little bit more space so that we can see the layers panel really nicely now. If we wanted to save this off as a work space, we can get back to it very, very quickly. All we need to do is to come up the window workspace and let's create a new workspace. Now we can give this a name so called this my custom workspace, and I want to point out that you can also save keyboard shortcuts. The menus, if you do custom, is ations to that. The toolbar as well You can save all of that inside of a workspace. Now We haven't really focused on customizing keyboard shortcuts and things like that yet, but I do want to point that out. So if you follow along with that video where we customise keyboard shortcuts, you can always come back and update your workspace to include those customization. But for now, I'm gonna leave this at the default click on Save, and we have our new workspace safe. Now, let's see this in action. So to see it in action, we really need to change our workspace around because we just saved exactly what it looks like here. So, of course, nothing's going to change has come in tow window workspace and let's go back to our essential ah workspace here. And that's reset that if it doesn't automatically switch, reset. And there we go. Now, if you want to get back to that workspace we just saved, it's a simple is coming in and finding that custom workspace, you'll notice all of the custom ones are gonna be above this little line here and we can switch back to that, and photo shop is automatically going to update our workspace. So this is a willing good, but what if we wanted to update our workspace. We don't really want to create a new one. We just want to update this existing one. Well, all we need to do is to walk through the exact same steps that we just did. Except we just want to give it the same name. So let's see this in action. Ah has come in and added a new panel here. So let's add in our color panel back and say, you know what? I do need colors in this workspace. Now, if we come in and save this, we're going to come in and save a new workspace, and I'm gonna call it my custom work space. So I'm calling it the exact same name as one that we already have. And when I save this photo shop is going to say, Wait a minute. This already exists. Do you want to replace it? Yes. And now we have that workspace updated. So again, we see this in action. We can switch back two essentials. You can see it automatically switch there. I didn't have to reset it. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't have noticed. That's kind of a little bug there with Ah, workspaces. Ah. But now if we want to switch back, we can switch back to a custom work space, and we should see that color pale included in that workspace. Since we've made that update. Now, the last thing I want to point out in this video is something that you've probably already noticed. If you looked at the menus is how to actually get rid of a workspace if we don't want it anymore. So to do that, all we need to do is to come into work space and delete the workspace. But I want to point something out here because you'll notice I currently have my custom workspace active. That little check mark there. So when I try to delete this, you'll notice it's active. It's great out. I can't actually delete that workspace. So before I delete before I need to delete this workspace, I need to actually swap over to a different workspace. So I'm gonna go back to essentials. And now if I come in delete workspace now, I can select my custom workspace. Delete that yes, Confirmation. I want it gone. And now it's no longer in my list of workspaces. Okay? So to recap in this video, we learned how to reset Photoshopped to it's default workspace. We learned how to create a custom workspace. How toe update that workspace and how to delete a workspace. Knowing our next video, we're gonna change up gears a little bit by learning about something that we haven't looked at yet called art boards.
5. Artboards: in this video will learn about art boards in photo shop. No in Photoshop with this white area here, this is called the Canvas, and an art board and photo shop is basically a special type of canvas. It's a set size, so anything that you have in the are poor is going to be cropped by the size of that canvas . So let's see this in action this by creating a new art port Now. To do that, we're gonna have to create a new document because art boards are created at the moment of creating a document. So let's come into file new. And in this dialogue here you'll notice we have a check box, four art boards, and that's going to enable art boards in our document. So I'm gonna check on that click create, and now I know we haven't really looked too much layers yet, but over here in the Layers panel, you'll notice that we have a special art board group, which really cool about this is, let's say that we're designing something for the iPhone. All we need to do is to select our art board, come into the properties panel, which again if you don't have that open, you go window properties, and we can set this to they say, the iPhone X preset. There we go. As you can see, this is actually in landscape mode. The reason why is because when we created the document and file new Ah, you'll notice the orientation was in landscape mode. If you wanted to do a portrait mode, you could do that as well. Um, remember it close out of this and let's continue going down this and and use another example. Let's say that Ah, we have a client and we're designing something, and we want to give them a multiple page PDF Art boards are a great way to work with multiple pages inside of Photoshopped. And again, I know we haven't really worked with layers very much. We're just going to dive right in and get our feet wet and really start to get used to this . So, in order to create another art board, let's come in and just right click on this guy here and select duplicate Art Board. So right clicking on the actual art board group and we can give this a name if we want to. I'm just gonna click on OK, And we can see now we have to our ports. So in order to pan around, I'm holding down space and then we can pan around. You can also use the hand tool over here if you want to, so we can see these two different art ports. But of course not all art boards have to be the same size. So we could come into this one that we created. Change the preset to maybe be android. And you can see now we have two different presets and this could be a great way to maybe show the client what the iPhone version is going to look like. And the android version side by side. Now, earlier, I mentioned that anything on the art board is going to be cropped or clipped to the size of the our port. What I meant by that was anything that we put inside of this art board. So let's actually rename this. That's just double click on this Rename it Android and this is iPhone, so we know which is which. It's always a good idea to name your layers and groups. And again we're gonna look at organizing layers and all of that later on in this course, but we're getting our feet. What here? So if we wanted to start adding to our design just for the sake of this example, let's come into our paintbrush here. And if I were to just add something, you'll notice that it gets cropped off when it goes outside the bounding box of that art board. But not only that, it won't. Actually, I can't actually add anything to this Android art board over here, either. If I left Click, you'll notice it won't add anything over here. The reason for that is because it's not inside of this Android art board. If I were to left, click and drag this and add it to that, you'll notice that that hops over to the new art board. So some really, really cool stuff that we can do with our art boards. And we can really just customize this however we want. And of course, when we're all happy with our wonderful, wonderful design that you can see here, we can come out to file exports and we can export the art boards to ah, PdF and then that could be something that we save off and share with our clients. We just need to give it our destination, give it a foul name and run that. And then photo shop is going to export this as a multi page pdf that we can share with our clients. So, to recap, I know we looked at a lot of new concepts in this video. We learned that the concept of art boards and photo shop is a built in way to organize our layers into an overall canvas size. And of course, that makes it easier for export to, for example, if you wanted to see our iPhone and Android designs back to back in a pdf. Now that we've seen art boards in action, hopefully you're starting to see how they can help in your own projects. Now let's head on to our next video, where we're gonna look at where to find and how to customise keyboard shortcuts in photo shop
6. Keyboard shortcuts: In this video, we'll learn where to find the default keyboard shortcuts and Photoshopped, as well as how to customize them to help speed up our work flow. So let's get started by looking at where to go find the keyboard shortcuts in photo shop, and the easiest place to see them is in the menu itself. So any time we're working in the menu, if we come up to file, you'll notice the short cuts in the menu. So control, end or command. And if you're on a Mac, is to create a new document. Control O is to open a document and you can see all of the keyboard shortcuts here. And I want to point that out because as you're working in Photoshopped throughout this course, and really as you're getting started in photo shop on your own, I'd really recommend trying to get accustomed to using as many shortcuts as you can Now. With that said, I will try to mention them as I use them. Throughout this course, I probably used the menu mawr than I normally do, because you can visually see the menu and get familiar with where things are on the menu. better than keyboard shortcuts, but as I use them, I will mention them. But I would encourage you to start to get used to using them on your own. Now I can tell you from experience that all the keyboard shortcuts won't stick. You won't be able to memorize all of them. Realistically, you won't need to use all of them all the time. But the more that you can get used to using as many as you can, the faster you'll get at moving around in Photoshopped Now. With that said, Photoshopped does have a list of all the keyboard shortcuts. If you're curious where to find them so we can come in to edit and keyboard shortcuts, there's even a keyboard shortcut to get two keyboard shortcuts. That, of course, is Ault Shift Control cake or on a Mac, that would be option shift command cape. We can open that up, and that's going to pop open our keyboard shortcuts screen Now in here. We're going to see all of the keyboard shortcuts in photo shop, and the way that these are organized is by this drop down here. So these air all the short cuts for the application menus. So like, ah, file edit image all of these up here that we just saw. That's what the's shortcuts air for. And then we also have keyboard shortcuts for panel menus, which would be all the menus in the panel's over here who wanted to update those. We also have tools. So if we want to update the shortcuts for any of the tools, we can do that. We also have things that are called task spaces. Some operations and photo shop will pop open a new window where you can do something. For example, later on. In this course, we're gonna look at content aware, fill in selected mask. That new window is what Photoshopped calls a task base. So these shortcuts are for when that window is open and updating a keyboard shortcut is very easy in this window. So here's how we do that. All we need to do is to find the operation that we want to change. So in this case, let's pick on file new because that's right at the top and easy to see. Let's change that shortcut. We just click over here and hold down the new keyboard shortcut that we want this to beat, so I'm gonna choose Control V. Now, when we do this control V, you'll notice that photo shop is giving us a warning. This little icon here and then down here, it's giving us a warning saying, Hey, Control V is already in use and it's going to be removed from what it's currently using, which is edit paste, as you can see here, if you're accepting that now, we can just accept these. But one thing I like to do is if we really do want to override this. So we're going to get rid of Control. V is pasting, and I know that's a universal thing. We're all used to control seeing Control V or Command C and Command V in order to copy and paste. But just for the sake of this video, we're gonna override that. And when we do, we can accept and go to the conflict. So what that's going to do is it's going to accept this shortcut, this new shortcut, and then it's gonna pop us over to edit paste because that is where it's currently being used. So we can come over here and say for edit paste. I want this to be control end and you'll notice there is no conflict anymore because control end is no longer the file. New shortcut. There is no shortcut using control. And so we can use this now. And now if we come in except this click on. OK, And now if we come up here, we can see the new keyboard Shortcut is control the Now what's really cool about this is after we made these edits regarding their and really customized R keyboard shortcuts weaken , Save that off to a file that we can save ourselves or just move to another computer or whatever you want to do. So over the years, you can really start to customize Photoshopped to your needs, pull it up wherever you're at and just pick right back up. So to do that, we're gonna hop back into keyboard shortcuts. And now that we have our photo, are shortcuts changed? You'll notice that this has been changed. Our current set is the Photoshopped defaults. But then we've modified it so you can see this has been modified. Now, if we click on this little icon right here, that's going to allow photo shop to save this set this year is actually save as if you wanted to give it a new name without overriding what we already have. But because we already have, we haven't saved this yet. Either. One of these will pretty much do the same thing right now. Now, when we do this, this is going to save off a file so we can call this my custom shortcuts and you can see where this is going to save by default. It's going to save in the folder for the keyboard shortcuts that photo shop is going to look for. Now, I am going to save this here. Natalia, let's stop this video here and let's move on to our next video because I'm gonna take this file. I'll include this in the project file so that you can see this as well. And you can follow along if you want to, because in our next video, we're gonna look at the process of importing these keyboard shortcuts
7. Loading saved keyboard shortcuts: In our last video, we learned how to customise keyboard shortcuts and save them into a new file. In this video, we're gonna learn how to load that file in photo shop. All right, so let's get started by coming up to edit and keyboard shortcuts again. The keyboard shortcut for that is all to shift control K or option shift Command K on a Mac . Now, if you notice up here the set This is the keyboard shortcut set eyes currently set to the photo shop Default. In our last video, we created a new set called My Custom Shortcuts, where we basically changed the shortcut for file new. I just made some changes there, but that is not in this drop down. And I wanted to get rid of that, to show what it would look like if you're importing this either on your computer at home or if you create your own keyboard shortcuts using the skills that we learned in the last video and then want to import them into photo shop on a different computer or at a different time, this is how you would do that and they would not be there. So in order to load in our shortcuts. What will want to do is really kind of fake this, and basically we want to copy that file, that keyboard shortcut file that we had saved in the last video. So if I were to just pull over my explorer here, I have this file that we created in the last video, and I will include in the project files if you want to walk through this as well. But what we need to do is to find where photo shop is pulling in the keyboard shortcuts from now on. Windows System that's going to be C colon slash users slash your user name slash ap data slash roaming slash adobe slash adobe Photoshopped CC 2019 Assuming that's the version you're using or whatever version of photo shop you're using slash preset slash keyboard shortcuts. Now you got that. You got that memorized, right? Of course not. And that's something I never ever remember. So here is a little trick because, of course, on a Mac that is going to be different as well. So here's how we can get through this without having to remember where that is located. So I'm gonna move this off to the side and will pull this back in a little bit because what we want to do is let's click this little button here in order to save as and what we're basically doing is telling Photoshopped to save our current presets as a new ah as a new preset for shortcuts. But I don't really want to do that. All I want to do is to find this location. This is the location that it's actually going to save that, too. So if I take this here, I can right click copy, Come over here right click paste. And now that file is located where photo shop is going to look for keyboard shortcuts. So now if I come in here and cancel out of that ah, you'll notice that it's not going to show up right away. And the reason for that is because Photoshopped loads in all of the shortcut files when the program itself is loading. So now all we need to do is to close photo shop and reopen it, someone to cancel out of this and let's just close photo shop completely. And then when we relaunch photo shop. It's gonna load in all of our shortcuts, including the keyboard shortcuts file that we just placed in that folder. So, once I would give a moment for Photoshopped to relaunch here. We should see if we come back into our keyboard shortcuts. We should see that shortcut file in there. Here we go. Coming to edit keyboard shortcuts and are set. There we go. We have that new set. So if I switch to this Ah, you'll notice that now the shortcut is control and or control V. And of course, if we select this had okay, we've switched. And now control V is the new shortcut for command. Knew Now I'm actually going to come in here for the sake of this course, and I'm going to switch back to the Photoshopped defaults and use the Photoshopped default shortcuts. But that technique is something that I've used over the years and have used photo shop in boxed around from computer one computer to another and it saved a thana time because I don't have to recreate the short cuts that have grown familiar with. I also don't have to remember that folder and where it is because we can use that little trick in order to copy those files there. All right, so let's move on to our next video now, because I'd love to chat about one of the most important things that I did when I first started learning Photoshopped to really force me to start getting familiar with using keyboard shortcuts more and it's all around screen modes, so we'll look at that in the next video.
8. Screen modes: in this video, we're gonna learn about screen modes now. Screen boats can be a great way to hide some of photo shops interface so you can focus on your work. Let's see this in action to change our screen mode, we're gonna come up to view screen mode and choose the screen mode that we want now. Right now, it is on the standard screen mode, and that is photo shops default screen mode. But watch what happens when I change this to full screen mode with Menu Bar. When I do that, you'll notice that some of photo shops interface has been hidden, but we still have the menu bar. So just like the name implies full screen. But with that menu bar, and you also notice that the panel's over here on the right hand side are still visible as well. Now we can go into full screen mode and really hide everything if we want to. But when I do this for the first time, we'll have a little warning pop up, and this warning tells us that everything is going to be hidden. So this menu, the view menu up here, isn't going to be visible anymore, which means we're not going to be able to get back to our standard screen mode. So what it's telling us here is the keyboard shortcut to do that is F as in frank on the keyboard. Or we can hit, escape an escape exits full screen mode F, as in Frank will cycle between the full screen mode. So if I go into full screen, you can see what this looks like. And really everything is gone. But what's really cool about this is keyboard shortcuts still work. We're still in photo shop. Everything still works. It's just that all of the interface is hidden. So if I would hit control N in orderto create a new document, you'll see that's we still are. Have the ability to create a new document. Of course, if you accidentally hit F on the keyboard and hide everything, it can be scary. Who wouldn't everything go? How do I get everything back while to do that? You can either hit escape on the keyboard in order to get out of full screen mode, or and I would recommend learning this keyboard shortcut F, as in Frank, will cycle between the different full screen mode. So if I hit F, you can see it's going to bring us back to the standard screen mode hit F Again. It's gonna take us to full screen mode with Menu Bar Hit F one more time. It's going to take us to just full screen mode. Everything's hidden. Ah, and then, of course, F again if we want to get back to our standard screen mode, I also want to point out that you can access these screen modes over here in this little icon on the toolbar. If we long press on this click and hold, we can see the different screen. Moz here, uh, where we can just click on it in order to cycle between those, All right, So I'm gonna hit escape to get out of full screen mode here now, another great keyboard shortcut that you might have noticed on that little pop up there when we went into full screen mode. It's helpful for hiding photo shops interface, and that is tab. Now the tab key is not technically a different screen mode. That's why it doesn't show up in the menu when we go into the screen modes here, but it is helpful because it toggles between showing and hiding the panels and the tool options bark in the toolbar as well, actually, so let me hit tab here to see what happens. So when I hit Tab, you can see panels disappear. The ah options up here disappear as well as the toolbar over here all disappears. But we still have access to our menu. Very, very cool stuff. And then, of course, to get those back, I just hit Tab again in order to toggle those back on. But what if we still need to access our tool options up here and we still want to access the toolbar, But we want to hide these panels. We really just want toe Ah, hide that. Extend our workspace and be able to do that. Well, we can modify our tab shortcut with the shift key. So if I hit shift tab, watch what happens. You can see the panels on the right hand side disappear. But we still have our two options. We still have our toolbar, and we can access all of that there. And then, of course, to get that back, we just hit shift tab again in order to bring back those panels. So using all of these together, we can really get to control what parts of the interface we want to see now. In my case, when I was first learning photo shop over a decade ago, I used to try to hide as much of the interface as I could. I'd start hiding just the panels on the right with shift tab and try to do everything with shortcuts or in the menus. Then, after a few weeks of that, I would hide all of the panels. I would hit Tab in order to just hide all of the panels and work on Lee out of the menu or keyboard shortcuts. And then, finally, I would spend hours in full screen mode, hitting F a couple times to get two full screen mode, forcing myself toe, learn keyboard shortcuts, not rely on the menus, not rely on the panels and really only coming out of full screen mode if I absolutely had to. Now I will admit it may be work a lot slower than my classmates at first, but over time I got faster and faster, and I learned the keyboard shortcuts. And before long I was outpacing my classmates by moving around photo shop so much faster with the shortcuts that I needed to know to get stuff done. Okay, so to recap, use F as in frank in order to cycle between screen modes. So we have our standards screen mode, full screen mode with menu and full screen mode, and then f again in order to get back to standard screen mode. Use shift tab in order to cycle between just the panels on the right side, hiding those. So if I hit shift tab, you can see that which off and then shift tab again in order to turn those back on and tab in order to cycle between all the panels and the two options bar and the toolbar over here on the left side. So Tab, in order to do that and then tab in order to bring those back, now is a great time to take a break between videos to practice navigating around Photoshopped interface. When you're done practicing and are ready for more, I'll see you in the next video, where we'll learn how we can create new Photoshopped documents. See you there
9. New documents: in this video will learn about creating new documents in photo shop. So let's dive right in and create a new document. So we can either just go to the create new button here on the photo shop home screen, or we can always come up to file new in order to create a new document. Now we've seen this screen in the last section when we were looking at Art Board, but we didn't really focus too much on the options here. That's really what we're going to do in this video. So up along the top here we have our recent items, and this is going to fill up with all the different document sizes that you've created recently up here. We also have saved, So if there's any presets that you want custom presets that you've created, those will show up in here. Currently, there's nothing in here, but we'll look at that here in a second on. Then we also have a Siris of presets, and these come built into Photoshopped eso popular sizes for photos for print work for our in illustration. If you're working on Web design, if you're working on mobile design, if you're working in film or video. All of these have different presets that come built in with photo shop. And, of course, the settings that you choose your going to depend on what you're creating. Four. We can see these settings over here on the right hand side. So as we change these watch these settings here is they update right. So basically, we have, ah, the width of the document. So in this case, that's 1440 pixels because we have pixels selected so we can drop this down if we want inches instead. For once centimeters off, we want meters or points or Peca's really it really depends on what you're designing for what you're working for. So, for example, if you're creating a design for ah, sheet of paper, that's very different than creating something for a phone screen or for film and video, or something that you're working on with that you want to print as a photo. Typical print sizes things like that very, very different. You can choose all of the different options that you need here. Now let's go through these settings real quick just to get a better idea of really what they are. And that way you'll have a better idea of what Mike work best for you and your project. So the width and height are fairly straightforward. It's gonna be how wide and how tall the document is. And of course, it's going to very depending on this drop down that we looked at. So this is seven inches. Ah, but pixel wise, that would be roughly 2100 pixels wide. That's gonna be very different than if we type in seven here. Now it's seven pixels. So this unit here is going to be the number that, of course, associates with the unit of measurement that we're using. Ah, and the same goes for the height as well. Um, this is going to change depending on ah, what you're using in here, right? So if you go two inches, then of course, that's going to be five inches roughly equivalent to 1500 pixels. Ah, and and so on. So let's switch this back to our default here. Our default Photoshopped size to get this back to seven inches now below that, we also have the orientation and art boards and we've already looked at this, but orientation is fairly straightforward. You can see the little preview if you have a portrait mode or in landscape. Of course, you can rotate that later on, if you if you prefer, but you can set that up here and then. We've already looked at art boards in the previous section and what those are and how to work with those beneath that we have the resolution, so this controls the number off points or pixels per inch or centimetre, depending on how you have this drop down here. If you prefer to work in metrics, no, that's the number of pixels per inch right. So print materials typically need a resolution of at least 300 pixels per inch because it needs MAWR to get higher quality when it's printed. Now, digital screens air typically 72 or 96 pixels per inch. That's why if you go over to film and video, you can see all these presets here for H D. At 10 80 p, it's gonna be it 72 pixels per inch because the computer screen or a TV screen doesn't typically have as many pixels Ah as it does as print would need. If you ever curious about what sort of resolution your project needs, think about the end result. Is there going to be displayed on a TV screen? Well, then look up what the TV screen is, what the resolution is. If it's a 10 80 resolution that's going to be different than four K, and you can start to kind of reverse engineer it there, and then you can find the resolutions online. And what's going toe work for that as faras, the pixels per inch are concerned beneath that we have color modes, and again, that's really depends on what you're creating for. So rgb color means red, green and blue, and that's really how most digital screens display color. So again, if this is going to be for film or video, it's gonna be probably displayed on some sort of a digital screen, which usually means is going to be RGB. On the other hand, if you're doing something for print, then you pick one of these. Typically that color mode, you might want to switch it to see M y que, which is saying magenta, yellow and black, and that refers to the ink colors used by the printer in order to replicate the colors on a sheet of paper. Ah, so if you know that you're gonna be printing a design and it's primarily for prints, you probably will get more accurate colors by having your document and see him like a. But again, it all depends because some printers prefer things over others. So if you're actually doing a professional print project, typically you're gonna have a printer that is going to handle the actual printing side of it. And you want to reach out to them and see what sort of a format you need, what sort of color mode you need as well. Now, if you're not sure what to use by default, photo shop will work in RGB mode, and that's really kind of the default. I would recommend sticking with RGB unless you specifically have a reason to change it. Over here we have the oh, by the way, we also will die deeper into color modes later on. In this course. Don't worry, we're also going to dive deeper into bit depth and start to understand that better to ah, but basically the bit depth is going to be how much color information there is. So if you're familiar with camera, raw image is something else we're gonna talk about later on. In this course, those often have 16 bit color. So there's a lot more color information in them than something like an eight bit image, or 32 is just a crazy amount of call. Her information, which get student into a lot of three D imagery and things like that require much, much higher bit depth. But again, unless you have a reason to change it, I would recommend just leaving this at eight bit by default. Now, beneath that, we have the background contents, and by default photo shop is going to create a white layer as the background. You can change that color here. Of course, you can always change that later on as well. But this is just kind of the default. And ah, you can pick a color if you prefer to do that by clicking on this Swatch here Now, with all of that said, if I create this, you can see the back on contents or white. So as soon as I click on create Ah, you can see that the background of this document is white. And if we go into the properties panel, ah, you can see the width and height that was set based on what we had created, as well as the ah, resolution of pixels per inch that you can see here in the properties for this document. So now that we've seen this in action and have a better idea of what the settings are, let's learn how to create a custom preset someone to come back into file new And once we do this so we can see again what I mentioned earlier. We didn't really have anything in there before, but now we're starting to see items show up in this recent. So instead of the default Photoshopped size, because the last one that recreated was letter size in portrait orientation, it's 8.5 by 11. This is the recent items, but what if we wanted to change it? Let's say we have ah, different resolution, and I'm just gonna pick something here. Let's say Ah, two k image. Okay, so that's 2048 by 2048 at 72 resolution. Um, so if we were to say that we want this to be a preset. We create a lot of two K and two K images, and we want this to be a precept. Let's give this preset a name. So this is my two k custom document, cause it's a two K resolution here. And now that we have this, if we click on this little icon right here, that's going to save our preset. Um, and it didn't save the name here. So once we save that, if as soon as we do that, we'll see it show up in this saved tab up here that we looked at earlier. But there was nothing up there. So now we know how to add things in there. And of course, if you want to get rid of it, you can see the little trash can icon here, weaken. Delete that if we want to. And again, we can still come in here and make adjustments to this. If you want to maybe want the background to be black instead, Ah, and then we can save this office something else. So, um, with a black background weaken, make whatever sort of adjustments we want we can save this off, however we want to. And then, of course, as soon as I create this, the backgrounds going to black instead of white that you can see right there. So to recap in this video, we learned how to create new documents and got a run down on the different settings for new documents what they mean. And we also learned how to create a custom document preset. Now, in our next video, we're gonna take this to the next level and learn about the difference between saving a Photoshopped document and saving an image in a photo shop.
10. Saving documents: in this video, we'll learn about saving documents and photo shop and how it's different than saving an image. So here we have, ah, document open And let's say we've been working on this and we want to save it to come back to at a later time and the key thing I want to point out here. It's kind of difference between saving documents and saving and image is the layers panel over here. Now, we are gonna look at layers more in depth later on in this course, But it's important to keep in mind that when we're working in photo shop, one of the key things that we're gonna want to keep really. One of the key things that has a lot of power behind photo shop are the layers in that document. So let's start by saving this off. As of Photoshopped documents, I'm gonna come up to file save, as in the shortcut for that is shift control s or shift command s if you're on a Mac and let's just give this a name so we type that in the file name, so I'm gonna call this are saving documents example, and I'll save that in the project files for this course, How the save as type. I'm going to say this as a photo shop document and we have a few different options under here. Now, save as copy as a copy. It's gonna make more sense once we already have something saved. Right now, you can check this and it's not gonna do anything. We'll take a look at that here in a second. What that does. But, ah, we also have the ability to save layers. I would highly recommend leaving this checked, as I just mentioned. It's one of key things gonna want to keep in our Photoshopped documents to come back to. We also have the ability to save the I. C C profile, which is the color profile of the colors used for our document. And unless you have a specific reason to change this, I would recommend just leaving this as is, and that's what I'm going to do here. So let's save this file off, and then we have the ability to maximize compatibility. Ah, there are some other programs that will let you import PS D's Photoshopped documents, and this helps kind of with that I'm gonna go ahead and click on OK there and just leave that at the default. Okay? So once we've saved this as a Photoshopped document or a PSD file, how is that different than saving an image? Let's say we wanted to share this, and so they don't have a photo editor at all. Nothing that will open a PSD file. They don't have photo shop installed. Well, we can say still save this off as a different file type, as a different type of image in the process. To do that is pretty much the same as saving a document we come up to file save as. And the difference here is we're gonna want to change the file type o. Before we do that, I'll show you what this. Ah, as save as a copy check box does watch the file name here. So I check that it's gonna add the word copy to the end as pretty much all that check box does. But it is just a quick way to make sure that the file name is different. And so it's not going to be overridden. Um, if you have a file that's already called example, Space copy. It's gonna add another copy of the end, so it will never be exactly the same. But in this case, we don't need that because we're not going to say this as a PST or document. Anyway, we're going to see how we can save this as a J pic, and all we got to do is to change the type to the image format that we want. In this case, I'm gonna select JPEG from the list and then click on Save, and we're going to get some options. Every different image type is gonna have different types of options for high. You can save it. Since J. Peg is one of the most popular formats out there, let's walk through these options real quick to get a better understanding of what they are . Ah, the options up at the top are going to be like it says the quality. It's basically a slider to go from a much smaller file, but it's gonna have higher compression to a much larger file that has less compression, so you can see the estimate of file size here, crank this down. You can see the estimate of file size is much smaller, but depending on the image, you can see a little bit around like the H here between the M and the little bit of compression in there. Ah, if you're actually working with, ah, photograph or something that has a lot more complex colors, you're going to start to see a lot more compression in there. And it's really finding a happy medium two between the file size and the quality there. It's gonna very depending on what you're using. But in this case, it's OK to keep it the maximum, because that's really not a very big file, 100 and 60 k there now, beneath that, we have the format options, and this really has to do with how the data itself is written to the J pic file. We're gonna get nerdy here for a second. Basically, baseline standard. Uh, it's going to display the image when it's fully downloaded, not before. So think of this when you're browsing a website. If this images on the website, the website is gonna wait until that fire, the image is completely display or completely downloaded before it displays the image. And I know there's there's some hacks and things like that you can do on the Web as far as the coating on the website itself. But ah, strictly in the J peg. That's how. How it's how it's coated inside of the J peg itself on. Then we have baseline optimized, and this is going to tell the file or tell photo Shop when it saves this here. To automatically try to optimize those colors to make for a faller smaller file size, you can see the file size difference there. Ah, with optimized um, really again, it's going to depend on what your options are and what you're using. Some Web browsers have issues with baseline optimized. Some do not. It really kind of depends on what, what your use cases and then we have progressive, and that's going to give us the ability to choose how Maney scans. So this is something that was really a lot more popular back in the days of dial up with much slower Internet connections, it's gonna load as a much blurrier image, and then it's going to get progressively better as the file. As the whole file starts to download, you can tell it how many different scans you want before the entire file is downloaded. Um, but really, for practical purposes, unless you have a specific reason to change this out would recommend Baseline stated, because that has the most support across different computer types, different mobile applications, Web browsers and someone that's typically kind of the the default standard there. They should put that in the name. Okay, so let's click on, OK, And that's going to save off R J Peg file here. And if we hop over into the project files, you can see now we have a photo shop document and we also have a J peg. And what's cool about the J Peg is in this case, I'm in Windows Explorer. You can see it recognizes that we can see the preview. Ah, we could share this file if he wanted to with our friends or share this whoever want to on we have that saved up. Okay, so now that we have to files saved off a PSD in a J peg, let's save one more before we wrap up. This video is starting to run a little long, but we can move a little bit faster now that we've walked through this a few times. Ah, Before we actually save this, I'm going to do one thing, and I'm gonna turn off the background layer. You notice that that's gonna make this all checkered. That means that it's transparent and we're going to see that How that affects things here. Ah, in the next video, actually, but let's save this off as another very, very popular image type, and that is a PNG someone a save as. And we're gonna pick the file type as PNG hit save, and I'm gonna choose the smallest file size that's gonna be It's gonna try to compress it as much as possible Eyes gonna take a little bit longer to save. But realistically, again, this is not a very big file. So it's just going to still be a matter of milliseconds versus a matter of seconds. You can see it's saving down in the bottom left hand corner there. And now if we hopped back to our our project files if I pull this over here, there we go. We can see now we have a J peg. Now we have a PNG, and now we have a PSD So now let's actually move on to our next video and we're gonna build on this. We're going to continue to learn, and we're gonna learn, kind of look at the other side of things and look at opening up the files that we've saved off. How we can do that in photo shop and really start to learn some of the differences between the files that we've saved off themselves. So I'll see you in the next video.
11. Opening documents: in this video will learn about opening documents in photo shop. Now I know opening a document can seem like it's a pretty straightforward thing, and it is. But there's actually a few different ways that we can do it in photo shopping, depending on what we need to get done, that can determine which method we use Now, here on the photo shop home screen, there's a couple different ways that we can open documents directly from here We can open one that we've recently opened. Those will show up in this recent list. Here we can just click on that toe, open that up, or we can click on the open button here. Now, a universal method and something I usually just default to is to come to file open or used a keyboard shortcut much faster control Oh, or command Ope. And that is exactly the same. Is using the open button on Photoshopped home. Ah, you just aren't always on the photo shop home screen here when you're working inside a photo shop. So when we open this up, we're gonna get our dialogue box, and then we can just choose the file or files that we want to open. So let's open up this photo shop document And one key thing that I pointed out in the last video. We want to make sure to kind of to to mention this is when we open up the Photoshopped document, you'll notice in the Layers panel. Those layers have been saved. And that's something that's important to keep in mind when you're working with Photoshopped documents, because that's kind of a key element of photo shop are the layers so we can continue to turn these on or off, do whatever we want to do with them. But what about the J peg that we saved? What if we wanted toe open that image inside of this document that we already have open? Want to add that image to this one? Well, there's a couple different ways that we can do that. Either We can open the file first and then added to the existing document or weaken do what Photoshopped calls placing the file inside of an existing one. So let's start with that first way first, and the first step to doing that is really just what we went through. So let's go to file open and let's open up this J peg. And once we have this open, you'll see that we have this in a new tab. All right, so this is the J peg up here, and you'll also see that we only have one layer. And that's a limitation of J. Pecs. To keep in mind is that they don't support multiple layers. They only have this one layer, and we'll look at this more in depth later on in this course. But that's just something to keep in mind now, once we have this image open. If we wanted to merge this into the other document, what we can do is use the move, tool and left, click and drag. And when I do this, you'll notice that this highlights and then Aiken, bring this back down, and if you look closely, you'll notice that the cursor of the mouse has changed. It's adding a little plus sign, and you also notice up around the edges here noticed this black box around the edge that is letting us know that as soon as I let go of the mouse, I still have the left mouse button clicked as soon as I let go. It's going to drag that file into this one. So watch what happens when you let go and you can see it's been placed actually right where I ah had my mouse in the document so you can see this new layer Here is our entire J peg file. So if I double click on this just so for toe alleviate confusion, I'll rename this J. Peg and you can see that there now. The other method that I mentioned earlier is doing something called Placing the File, and there's a couple different ways that we can place. In order to do that, we're gonna come to file and you'll see there's either place linked or place embedded. And the difference here is that if you place the file linked than Photoshopped will link to the file on your hard drive. So if you move your Photoshopped document to a different computer without that linked file , it'll break the link. Embedded files, on the other hand, will make your Photoshopped document bigger, but it has the benefit of being completely inside or embedded inside of the PSD file. Unfortunately, hard drive space these days is pretty cheap. So unless you have a specific reason to link the file, I would really recommend embedding them to help avoid issues trying to open them in the future. So let's go with the embedded option here. The placing themselves is exactly the same. It's just a matter of whether it's embedded or linked. So by place embedded. Let's work on that PNG file that we saved in the previous video someone a select, the PNG click on place. And when I do this, you'll notice that we have this bounding box so it's filling up the entire size right, because that was the size of the original image. But if we want to, if we left click and drag, we can actually move this around if we want to, right And then as soon as we're happy with where this is placed, that's where the name place comes from because it gives us the ability to actually place this. Once we import it, Um, then we can either just hit, enter on the keyboard or click the little check box up here, and that will confirm that placement. Now, one quick thing I want to mention before we move on is you'll notice here in the layers panel. There's a couple different things going on to point out, Um, and one of them is that this here, you'll notice the checker background in the layers panel here. That checker. Actually, I'm gonna real quick come into the panel option again. We're gonna look at layers in much more depth later on. But I'm gonna make this little bit bigger so we can see so you'll notice the checker background here and here, but not here. And the reason for that is because Jay Peg images have a limitation. They do not allow transparency, PNG images. If you remember in the previous video, when we say that P and G, we turned off the background layer that made it transparent anywhere that there was nothing except for that text, right? We turned off everything else. So it is transparent. That's one cool thing about P and G's is that they will support transparency. But if you also notice we have something else going on here we have this little icon right here and this icon Onley appears on this layer. Now the unique thing about this layer, if you recall is this is the layer that we placed and we embedded the file into this photo shop file. Now, the way that Photoshopped does that is to embed it, cause it a smart object. We're going to cover smart objects a lot more in depth and different video in this course because it kind of outside the scope of this one in particular. But just keep in mind that that icon means that that layer is what Photoshopped calls a smart object. Basically, the entire image is embedded inside of the Photoshopped document. Now there are other benefits of smart objects and photo shop, and again, we're gonna look at some of those later on in this course. But smart objects are important for this video because there's one last thing I wanted to point out before we wrap up this video. And that is another way that we can open a file in photo shop by opening it as a smart object. Now, to do that, we just come in to file open as smart object. And if we were to open up this PNG again just to use it as an example, open it up. You can see that this file here is being opened into a new document. It's not being opened into the existing one, but it's being opened with that same icon. It's the only layer in here. So again, if he wanted toe merge this into our existing document, we could do exactly what we did before we saw earlier. We just used the move tool and move that over. But that is the key difference between opening and as a smart object and then placing the file in the document so opening will open the file in a new document and an M embedded as a smart object or weaken. Place it in the existing document that we already have open. Oh, and one last thing before we actually move on One very quick way of bringing files in. If I pull this over eso if you have a file on your hard drive as you can with a lot of different applications, photo shop is no different. We could come in here, left, click and drag this in. You can see that icon on the on the mosque cursor change. You can see the black box around here and you can see This is exactly what happened when we dragged it from one document to another one. Now, when we bring this in, we're going to be presented with this bounding box, just like we did when we were placing a document so we could move that around if we wanted to. Once we're happy with the placement of that again, we can it enter on the keyboard, check this check box, and that's going to embed that as a smart object. Okay, so to recap in this video, we learned how to open a Photoshopped document multiple ways of opening a Photoshopped document. We looked at opening up the J Peg file and adding it to our Photoshopped document by moving it across document. We also learned the difference between placing an embedded file and opening it as a smart object. Now, something else that we did in this video is to open up multiple files at the same time and not something that you'll be doing a lot of as you work in photo shop. So let's move on to our next video, where we're going to get more familiar with what it's like toe work with multiple files and photo shop. At the same time,
12. Working with multiple files: In our last video, we learned about opening documents in photo shop. In this video, we're gonna build on that knowledge by learning some tips and tricks for working with multiple files at once in photo shop. So let's start by opening up one of the files that we worked with in the last video. So I'm gonna pull over the project files and let's start with the photo shop documents. So if I take this document and as you can see here on the home screen, weaken just left click and drag this in, it doesn't have to be over here. We can drag it anywhere in the photo shop interface and you'll notice that we get the little tool tip that's gonna move it into Photoshopped. And so if we let go, that's going toe. Open up that photo shop document. Now let's add another document to this to see what happens if we when we already have a document open. So I'm gonna pull open my file Explorer again and, oh, that's the wrong video. There were working on multiple files. There we go. All right, so here, let's pull one of these in. So let's say we want to Ah, work with this J peg here. So I'm going to left, click and drag and bring it in. Now. We looked at this at the very end of the last video, and you'll notice the plus sign on the mouse cursor. The black box up here means that it's going to embed this file as a smart object inside of our document. This is exactly what we did in our last video, both through the menu, and we did a very end by dragging it in. But what if we didn't want to place it in there? What if we wanted to open it as a document, not inside of this existing one? Well, if we drag it up here to the option bar the menu bar, whichever one we prefer, then you'll notice that we no longer have this black box here. Right? So now we're just going to open that file up if we let go of the mouse. And as you can see, we have two different tabs here. If we left click, we can get between them. You can see the difference. This is the J peg files giving us some information were at 66.7%. Zoom. It's an RGB color mode. Eight bit depth color depth. Ah, this one here, you can see we're currently have layer one selected. So if I select this, you can see that changes to background uh, also at 66.7% zoom Also RGB color at eight bit color depth. Now we can use the left mouse button in order to go between these. But again, there's keyboard shortcuts for almost everything so we can switch between them using the keyboard shortcut, control tab or command tab. If you're on a Mac to use control Tab, you can see were cycling between these two different images, you can see which one is highlighted. Which one is in focus in which one is not very, very cool stuff. But that's not all. What if we wanted to be able to see both of these documents at the exact same time? Well, just like our panels that we learned about in a previous video, we can left click and drag this document in order to move it around. Think of it kind of like a browser window. You can move it around but watch what happens if I let go. You can see now this guy is docked in here and this one is free to float around. And I can actually move this to Ah, completely different monitor. If I wanted to course, that's outside of the video. But you can do that. If you're working on multiple monitors. It's a nice way to be able to see both at the same time. But we don't have to do that. We could actually view both of these in the same view. So let's come in here if we look just like the panels. If you look closely noticed the blue line. When I get right there, the mouse's right along that edge. Okay, now, when I let go, it's going to split that view. And again, Control Tab is still going to cycle between which one is in focus. You can see the text get lighter or darker. That keyboard shortcut still works depending, regardless of where those documents are in our window. Now, we don't have to open documents or images one at a time here inside of photo shop. So let's clear out the ones that we have here we could click on acts in order to close them individually, or we can come up to file close. Or we could use a shortcut of course, Control WR Command W. Or we could also close all and that's going to close everything that we have currently open . So as soon as I close all, it's just gonna close them all up. And what's really cool about this is now We could come in here. We can select all of these, drag him in just like we did, and you can see photo shop is going to open up all three and again. Control Tab is going to cycle between them left to right so you can see what's happening here. That's Ah, that's this little indicator here is because I'm holding down control with move tool, Right? So that's just letting me know the distances Anyway. We'll look at those later on in this in this course where you can see I'm cycling between those now, once we have all of these documents open. If we did want to merge them together, of course, we can manually click and drag each one over at a time like we saw in previous video. But as you can probably guess, there is a faster way to do that. And we can do that by coming into file scripts, load files into stack. Now there's a couple things to keep in mind here. Ah, the files actually have to be saved. They have to be saved to your hard drive. Right? So you can't be working on a temporary file. Um, so if wanna add are open files? If one of these was not saved, it would pop up a little warning saying that you it actually needs to be saved. That's fine. You could save it as a copy if you need to. Like we learned in a previous video. Now there's a couple different options that we have here. I just want to point out I'm not actually going to use them, But you could tell Photoshopped to try to automatically align the source images. This is great if you're doing something like bracketing and exposure bracketing you comptel Photoshopped to try to figure out ah, where those images overlap and everything and match all of them up Great way. If the camera didn't take pictures exactly the same on then you could also create a smart object after learning the layers to embed those like we saw earlier. But I'm just going to go ahead and click on OK, and we can see what photo Shop is going to do is going to create a new document and then it's gonna cycle through. If you look at the layers here, it's going to cycle through each one and it's going to actually add all of those documents to a single image. They're not smart objects. We didn't tell for a shop to create them. A smart objects. So they are actually layers inside of our image and which really cool about this is Photoshopped went ahead and named them. So this is the J peg. This was the TNG, and this is the photo shop document all inside of our single file. Okay, so in this video, we learned some tips and tricks for working with multiple files. Here in photo shop, we learned how to navigate between files using the tabs or the keyboard shortcut as well. We also learned how to organize the files into a different layout if we want. We also looked at opening multiple files at once and how toe automatically merge those into a new file using the load files into stack script. Now that we're more familiar with moving around in photo shop with multiple documents, let's move on to our next video, where we're going to get more familiar with how to pan, zoom and navigate our images here in a photo shop.
13. Panning, zooming and the Navigator panel: in this video, we'll get familiar with panning, zooming and navigating inside of Photoshopped. Okay, let's start with panting around our image because it's something that we actually looked at very briefly a couple videos ago, and there's a few different ways that we can pan around in photo shop. Ah, one of the easiest is to select the hand tool over here or again, keyboard shortcuts for everything. If we hover over this, you'll see that the keyboard shortcut is H. Now, when I select H and or selected the hand tool and start to move around, you'll notice that nothing is happening. And the reason for that is because this image we can see the end of the canvas here. But this image isn't actually at 100%. It's on Lee at 33.3%. So let's take this to 100%. And now, if I left click and drag, you can see how I'm panning around this image. Okay, so again, I used the options under the hand tool inward to zoom into 100% and now we can pan around. But as you can imagine, and I'm sure this congee it annoying to do to switch even the keyboard shortcut. H that means switching tools. So if we're painting or withdrawing or were masking something or working on something inside a photo shop on, we have to hit H in order switch. It's a few seconds lost every single time. Fortunately, there's a faster way to do it than even the keyboard shortcut H. So to see how this works, we're gonna have to switch to a different tool. Um, and I'm going to switch to the move tool here. And if we were to switch to the move tool, all we need to do in order to toggle the hand tool to pan around is hold down the space bar . So, really, this works for any tour. If I was in the paint brush tool, you'll notice that when I hold down space now I have the hand tool. If I'm in these select tool hold down space, I'm in the handle. And so it's a really quick way of panning around. I'm holding down space right now, and I'm also using the left mouse button in order to pan around this image really, really cool way of being able to toggle between whatever Truglio using and the hand tool. Okay, so now let's look at how we can zoom around our image. And again, there's a lot of ways that we can do this. We looked at one of them already using the hand tool to zoom into 100%. But if you notice in the hand tool, really, we only have a few different options here. It's not very, ah, very helpful if we want to zoom in and out at anything other than 100% fit to the screen or filled the screen. So the keyboard shortcut for zooming in and out. Or I guess I should say again, there's going to be a tool, but realistically, only a few times you're going to use the tool, and we'll look at the reason for using tool here in a second. Ah, but that is the zoom tool over here in the tool toolbar keyboard shortcut Hyzy. But really, one of the more popular ways that you're going to zoom in and out is using a keyboard shortcut, Control plus and control minus or, uh, that would be command plus and command to minus um on a Mac. So if I use control minus, you can see I'm zooming out and you'll notice a soon as I hit control. Then the cursor changes, right? So I'm in the hand tool and it cursor changes. But if I had control plus going to zoom in control minus zooming out, you can see the zoom percentage up here in the tab. You can also see it down here at the bottom. What's cool about this down here is the bottom. It's another way that we can do this weaken. Type it in. So let's say we know we want to be a 150%. You can type it in, hit, enter and get to a very specific zoom using this down here at the bottom. Now, just a couple seconds ago, I mentioned that there is a way or there is a benefit to using the magnifying glass tool in the tool panel. And if we zoom out here one of the big benefits you'll notice when I'm zooming in and out. Control plus control minus control plus control minus. It's always zooming in and out to the same place, right? It's pretty much zooming in and out to the center of the image. Now, with the magnifying glass or the zoom tool, I should say that's Ah, control them. Sorry, The shortcut is Z for that course. If I left, click and drag watch what happens. See, I can zoom in and out, but depending on where I'm at, I can zoom in and out to that part of the image. See how it's zooming in and out to these different parts of the image. Pretty cool stuff. Now, if you don't like this, if you don't like this aspect, you can turn off this scrubby zoom and instead, then you're going to draw a bounding box. So I'm left. Click and drag draw bounding box, and then that's going to zoom into that area. Hey, now really quick way of getting back. If we're at 161% we want to get back to 100%. Of course, we could click on 100% appear, but again, keyboard shortcuts for everything we can hit control zero, and that's going to take us back to fill the screen. We can hit control one, and that's going to take us to 100%. Just a couple really quick keyboard shortcuts that can help you with that in order to either fit to the screen. So fit the image to the screen so you can see everything or that's control zero. And then control. One is the short cut to go to 100%. Now, depending on the image that you're using and your panning around and zooming around, we're moving around this image. We're zooming in and out. Ah, you know, it can be easy to get lost in where we are. If we zoom in really far, these air just pixels, right? We don't really know where we are. Where on this butterfly are we? Ah, it can be hard to know. And that is where our navigator panel comes in handy. So let me open that up here. Come Goto window navigator. And this panel right here is super helpful. Let me actually take this and let's pull this off. So it's a little bit bigger. Hide that, and I'm gonna resize this so we can see it a little bit easier on the video here. Okay, so here we have this navigator panel, and if you look close. You can see this little box right here. This little box indicates what we're seeing over here. Hey, so what's cool about this is this is interactive. It's not just something that we can actually just use toe look at. We can actually use it to navigate so we can left, click and drag in order to move our our view around. You can see how we're doing this. We're moving that little box around, right? We can use the zoom slider down here. So this tells us we're at 1860.34% zoom. You can see that. That's also over here at the bottom left that we saw earlier. And in the tab up here, we can use this in order to zoom in and out so we can slide it, see how this box gets bigger. Zoom in and out. We can also just click on this in order to you know this. It's it's going by increments here when we click on it, as opposed to if we click and drag, it's a little more fluid, really kind of depends on what you're wanting to do and how you're actually working. Ah, with that now, depending on the image that you're using again, this is going to be very subjective. But sometimes in the Navigator panel, I found that the red box here is kind of hard to see. Like if you have on image where there's a lot of red, then it's hard to see a red box. So fortunately, you can change that. You can come in to the options here to the panel options, and you can change that to be a different color. So if we wanted to be blue, we could do that. It's just a visual thing, but it's something that's really helpful to know. It's one of those things that you don't know. It's there until you know it's there, and now you know it's there. So when you're working on an image, you can make sure that the Navigator panel is going to be helpful for you. Okay, so in this video, we learned how to pan around our image using the hand tool. We also learned how to zoom in and out using the zoom tool, as well as how to get a better sense for where we are looking at in our overall image with the Navigator panel. Now let's take a step back from photo shopped for a bit, because when we're using images inside photo shop, we should know Maura about those images and the differences between them. It's a lot of different types of files you can use and which one you use in different projects will vary. So let's move on to our next video, where we'll get a better understanding of the most common file formats you'll use in a photo shop.
14. Common files formats you'll use in Photoshop: in this video will take some time to get familiar with some of the common file types that you'll use in photo shop and why you might use one over the other in your projects. Now one of the most common file formats for digital images out there today is J. Peg, So let's get started with them. J. Peg stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. Now you'll notice that sometimes J. Peg does not have the E in the name. Sometimes it's just J p. G. Sometimes you will see it with the E. It will be J p E g for joint photographic experts Group. Photoshopped, by default, will use three characters when it saves it off. So it's just J p. G. As far as the data is concerned, there's really no difference between J. P G and J P E. G. Now the joint photographic Experts group was a group of experts. Of course, they got together in 1986 to figure out an industry standard for digital images, and that leads us right into some of the pros of working with J pic. This experts group came out with the first version of J peg in 1992 and then two years later, they came out with what is still being used today, the latest version of J. Peg in 1994. And it's really been an industry standard for digital images since 1994. Now that means that it's been around for a while, and so J pegs work almost everywhere. It's a huge pro of working with J Pegs is that when you're sharing an image on Leon Online on the Internet and you don't know what file type to use, you want to make sure they concede on the other end. You have a best chance that J. Peg will show up on the other end, and they are good quality. You can get good quality for a smaller file size. You can compress them down pretty well, so they are a good file format, but they're not going to work for everything. There are some cons toe working with J pegs, and they're not gonna work for every project. One of those is that J pegs do not support transparency. If you need a transparent background, J pegs aren't going to work for that just doesn't work in the file format. Now another con is that they are not lossless. Every time you save a J peg, you're going to lose data. Think of it kind of like, Ah, copy. If you save ah J Peg and then you save a J peg from that J peg. It's exactly the same as if you make a copy and then you make a copy of that copy. You make a copy of a copy of a copy. The further you go, the more data you lose and the worse the actual image looks, we've all seen this. Probably the most common things you've seen this in is with Mihm's online, where they get compressed down really far because they started off somewhere. They saved off as a JPEG and then along the line, who knows how many people edited it, cropped it down, saved it again as a J. Peg did whatever they were doing. And each time it's losing data, and it's just looking worse and worse, as as it goes now. Another con of J pegs is that there is no support for layers. We're gonna look at layers a lot more in depth later on in this course. But just know that if you're working with J Pegs and you want to share it with somebody who is actually going to do some significant edits to that, and you have a layered file when you save it off a JPEG, you're not going to be sharing those layers with that other person. So when would be a good time to use J Pecs? Really, I kind of alluded to it earlier. It's a good default format. Whenever you're sharing an image, he just want somebody to view the image, and you're not really sure. Ah, what to use J Pegs are good default because pretty much everything these days supports viewing J Pecs, so that leads us into another very common file type gifts. Now I know technically, the guy who came up with gifts said it's actually pronounced gifts, but I've always pronounced it gift because it stands for graphics, interchange format and graphics has a hard G, so I will always pronounce it. Gifts. Gifts were created by copy serve in 1987 as a file format that's going to work really well across slower connections. Now, one of the big pros to working with gifts is something that's kind of unique to file types . Digital image file types, I should say not a lot of digital image file types supports animation gifts. Do we've all seen animated GIFs online? Giffey is a very popular service that, ah is made up of animated GIFs. Another pro of gifts and working with gifts is that it does support transparency. Now there are some limitations to that. We'll look at that here in a second, but it does support some transparency. Another pro of working with gifts is unlike J pegs. They do have lossless compression, so you're not losing data when you save it over and over, like we looked at with J pegs. Now again, just like J Pegs, gifts are not going to be an end all for every single project. You need to know when to use them, because there are some cons for working with gifts. One of them and one of the big ones. Is this limited to 256 colors. I remember it was created as a format toe work across slower connections. One of the ways that it does that is by limiting the amount of colors that it has. So we've all seen animated GIFs, and they obviously don't look like an actual video. Big reason for that is because there's only 256 different colors in a gift. So when you're trying to take a video and turn it into an animated GIF, it has to lose a lot of those colors. And that's where that mixed match comes now. We talked a little bit before about transparency. Ah, one of the cons about transparency in gifts is that only one color can be transparent. Transparency in gifts is single bit, so only one color can be transparent. Another con of gifts We talked about this with J pegs. Gifts are no different. They do not support layers. So when might you want to use gifts? Well, really, if you have a smaller image that doesn't have a lot of colors to begin with, probably not a photograph you notice with videos and things like that, you're going to lose a lot of a lot of that definition. A lot of the colors in there, because it is limited to 256 colors. Logos are actually a great, uh, limited number of colors that can work with gifts pretty well. And, of course, we're all familiar with animation. It's a great way to share animation and just have fun on the Internet. Where would we be without animated? GIFs online? So let's move on to another file type that is PNG. PNG stands for portable network graphics. They were created in the 19 nineties, really, as an alternative to licensing GIF files from copy served, they created them on. What they did was they came up with a way of taking the best of gifts and the best of J pegs and merging them into a single file. And really, that really boils down to what P and G's were intended to be. Was the best of those to industry standards as gifts for much smaller files? J pegs for, uh, for larger ones and merging those two together. So some of the pros of P and G's is that you have two different types of transparency. You can pick from P, and G eight is an alternative to GIF files. It has 256 colors and one bit transparency, just like GIF files and because of that they can be much smaller, just like GIF files. But you also have the ability to choose PNG 24 which is a lot more like J. Peg. They have 24 bit colors, that and so they can support up to 16 million different colors. Um, now, unless you have a need for P and G eight, I would recommend these days just kind of defaulting to P and G 24 Another big pro of P and G's is because they support more colors. They have great support for transparency. It's not just one color that can be transparent in a PNG 24 image has great support for even fading transparency and most transparent rast arised images that you see online these days are going to be P and G's. Another big pro in the corner for P and G's is that it does support lossless compression. So again there's no data lost when you're compressing them. But just like everything else, P and G's again are not an end all be all. There are some constant working with P and G's. They can be larger than J pegs for images like photographs If you save the exact same image as A J. Peg and and as a PNG 24 you're gonna notice the PNG is generally going to be larger. Other is no animation that even though they were intended to be kind of a replacement for gifts, ah, they purposely left out animations and put them into M and G's or multiple image. Network graphics is a format of P and G's that really supports animation. Realistically, though, nobody uses M and G's anymore. It's not a file type you're going to see anywhere. So we're not even gonna talk about that in this court. Ah, and like a lot of the other file types that we've looked at so far, there is no layer support in PNG's. Okay, so when would you want to use PNG files Really a great way. A great time to use these is with logos and smaller images on your website. Uh, if you're gonna need a transparent background, they could be a great alternative to S V gs, which is a vector format. Um, really. It's a great, great way to get some transparency on your website when you need it. All right, so moving right along were on the homeward stretch here. Let's look at another image type tiff now. Tiff stands for Tagged image file format. It was created by a company called Aldous in 1986. They were actually bought out by Adobe in September of 1994 for $446 million. If you're interested, eso really Adobe now owns the tiff file format, and some of the pros to tiff files is that tiff files? Unlike all of the image formats we've looked at so far, tiff files support layers really, really nice. Nice feature of tiff files. They also support two different types of compression. Or really, I should say it supports either having absolutely no compression being un compressed as well as lossless compression, so you can get some really great quality with TIFF files without losing quality as you're saving them over and over again. Now, because it supports layers and no compression tiff files are often used as an alternative to Photoshopped documents or PSD files. Outside of Adobe software, for example, one of my favorite photography programs is called Capture One, and it defaults to creating tiff files when it's editing in an external editor like Affinity Photo or something like that. It passes back and forth tiff files so it can support layers. But it doesn't have to use the actual PSD file, which is a need. A file to photo shop. Now there are some cons to tiff files. Of course, as you can probably imagine, supporting layered files. Having no compression can make the files very, very large. Tiff files can get to be very large. Fortunately, hard drive space is pretty cheap these days, but nevertheless, tiff files can be pretty large now because of that tiff. Files are not really used on the Internet as a final images that you'll find on Web browsers. They're not really supported by Web browsers because they can be very large. And that's usually the exact opposite of what you want when you're making images for the Internet. So what are some of the best uses for tiff files? Well, I would recommend using them as a source image as you're making your edits. Then really, you can use the tiff file to say of all the layers, save it with no compression, and then when you want to actually share it with somebody save off a J peg from that. So using the example that we used before with the J. Peg instead of making a copy of a J peg and then another JPEG that's copy from that J peg and copy and copy and losing data. If you use the tiff file that your source, then every time you make a J peg, copy your making that from the tiff file, and you're not going to lose quality in that J peg over and over from saving it over each other every time. So that brings us to the final ah file format that I wanted to chat about in this video, and that is raw. Now you've probably heard about camera raw, and so we have an entire section that is focused on that in this course, but just real quickly. I do want to point out that Raw is not an actual file type. Every single camera manufacturer has a different file format. Four Camera rob. So, for example, Adobe created DMG files or digital negative files. And so if you see a DMG file that is a raw file format created by Adobe. If you take a picture on a canon camera and you're taking it in raw format, it's gonna come out as a CR two file. If you take a picture on a Sony Cameron, you're taking it in a raw format. It's gonna come out as an A R W file, and for Nikon, it's going to come out as an any F file. Those are different file formats or file types, but they're all raw files now. There are some great prose of working with raw. One of the big prose is that you're going to get a lot more data captured in the file that really is great, and it allows for much better post processing support. And so, for that reason, they really make a great original source backup. You take the picture as a as a raw file, and then that's going to be original source. You make any sort of edits to it. You save off a completely different version, like a J peg, and then you can always go back to the original sort. Now, like anything else, there are going to be some cons for raw images. One of the major Khan is that it is going to need to be edited before you can share it. Uh, unlike J pegs, not everything is going to open up a raw file. And so ah, you're gonna have to edit that in something like Photoshopped before you can share that offer, at least save it off as a J peg before you can, uh, share it on the Internet. Now, raw files do tend to be ah lot larger than J pegs. They store a lot more data, and so they are much larger again. Fortunately, hard drive space is pretty cheap these days, and so it's really worth it to have your originals as raw. And it's a lot better than losing those original photos. Okay, so when should you use raw images? Really, My recommendation is whenever you're taking a picture, if your camera supports, it shoots in raw. I would really recommend that we will talk about some mawr pros and cons and and really dive into a lot more of that later on. In this course, when we cover raw and see it in action inside of photo shop. Ah, but really, I would recommend if you can support. Shoot your images in raw. Then I would recommend doing that and at least having that as your original backup who? Okay, so I know we covered a ton of information in this video, and we haven't even talked about two of the big file formats that are native to photo shop . That would be PSD files, Photoshopped documents and PS B files. But let's take a break from this for now and move on to our next video, where we will learn more about those Photoshopped native formats.
15. PSDs and PSBs: In our last video, we learned a lot about some of the common file formats that will be using in photo shop in this video will continue on by learning about the to file formats that are native to photo shop and some of the differences between them. Now, the most common of these is one that you've probably heard of before P S d a P S d stands for photo shop document. It is the default file format in Photoshopped. So some of the pros for PSD files is that because it's the default file format in Photoshopped, it really supports everything inside of photo shop. If you do something in photo shop and you save it off as a PSD file, you're pretty much future proofing yourself because you can rest assured that later on in the future, when you want to open it back up again, you're not gonna lose the transparency, your adjustments or edits, or the background or anything that's in that file. PSD files are going to support everything inside of photo shop. Now there are some cons for PSD is they're not. They're not perfect and really one of the big ones is that they're not supported by a lot of other programs. They are native to photo shop now. The reason why I mentioned this is because Photoshopped is so popular that a lot of other photo editors have started adding support for PSD files. For example, a big competitors to photo shop is a program called Affinity Photo. An affinity photo will open PSD files, but there's a lot of features in Photoshopped that affinity photo does not have. So I wanted to point this out because if you open a PSD file in affinity Photo, you create a PSD file from Affinity Photo, and there's a photo shoot feature and Photoshopped that was used in that PSD file. It's not gonna open an affinity photo because it doesn't really know what it's looking at their. For example, as of this recording, three D layers are a great example of something that you can save in a PSD file in photo shop. But if you try to open it an affinity photo, it doesn't recognize three D cause that's not a feature, an affinity photo. So it's just really something that you have to be aware of when you're working with PSD files. Now another con of PSD files is that it has a maximum file size of two gigabytes. Now, when photo shop was first created, decades and decades ago, two gigabytes was a massive file. There's no way you're ever going to get that. And to be fair to gigabytes for a single file is still very large. But I've had Photoshopped files that are extend well beyond that, um into, you know, 10 2030 gigs for a single file. Um, and Photoshopped documents do not work four files larger than two gigabytes. So when you want to use PSD files is really as a default for when you're saving in Photoshopped. In the last video we talked about J pegs and I recommend using those as a default for saving. When you're sharing the file. Ah, the PSD file is gonna be your source image. That's where you're gonna keep all of your edits. And then you're going to save off a J pic file to share with somebody else. But you keep the PSD file so that it's easier to make edits. And, of course, if you do want somebody else to make edits to that and you're willing to share that PSD file that's going to save them a ton of time from trying to reverse engineer what you've done in the JPEG file in and try to try to do that. So that brings us to another file format that's native to photo shop, and that's P S B. That stands for photo shop. Big file. Now the reason for this, as I mentioned earlier when Photo shop was first created two gigabytes for a file, was just I mean, that's just massive for a single file. But that has really changed. With the advent of technology, advancing two gigabytes for a single file is not as unheard of anymore. So in 2003 Adobe introduced PSB Files or Photoshopped big files as really a way to solve the demands of increasing file sizes. So pro of PSB files is that just like PSD files? Ah, they really support everything that Photoshopped does. That's anything that you do in photo shop should be supported by a P. S B file. And by big I mean big PSB files are big. A single PSB file in theory can supports up to four exabytes each. Now, if you've never heard of a exabytes, I think you have megabytes and then 1000 megabytes is a gigabyte. Ah, 1000 gigabytes is a terabytes. Ah, 1000 terabytes is a petabytes, and then 1000 petabytes is an exabyte. So four exabytes, a single exabyte is one billion gigabytes. So we're talking four billion gigabytes in a single file. I have not had a PSB file be that large, and we're kind of in that stage of saying nothing will ever be that large. Of course, we said the same thing about two gigabytes a couple decades ago, so ah, who knows what the future holds? But for now, PSB files are a great example for ah are being able to save very, very large files. Now again, there's going to be constant them, like what I mentioned earlier PSD files. Ah, a lot of other programs outside of Photoshopped have started supporting PSD files, but really they don't support PS B files. Uh, I have yet to find a program that really supports them very well. Ah, and there I mean, to be fair, there needed to photo shop. So that's really the program that they're intended to be working in another con to PSB files is should be fairly obvious. The files are intended to be very large. Once you get beyond two gigabytes for a PSD file, PSB is going to be what you're going to pull into now. Oh, I do want to point out that you can't have PSB files that are smaller than two gigabytes if you if you want to do that. Um but just psd is there going to max out at two gigabytes? So once you have your filing starts to grow, if it grows beyond two gigabytes, photo shop is gonna kick up in there and say that it can't save the file. You're gonna have to save that as a PSB file in order to continue editing that file. OK, so a quick recap PSD files Photoshopped documents are the native file format in photo shop . They do have a limitation of two gigabytes per file and a benefit to PSD files is that because of the popularity of photo shop ah, lot of other photo editing programs have built in support for PSD files to be able to transfer them to and from Photoshopped with some limitations, of course, depending on the features in that file assed faras PSB Files or Photoshopped big files. They are an alternative file format in photo shopped to PSD files. File sizes practically unlimited, as we learned, but they really don't work in other photo editing programs they not really supported, at least as of this recording in another program. So that's something to keep in mind. Okay, so now that we're more familiar with some of the common file formats in photo Shop, let's move on to our next video, where we're gonna learn the differences between bit maps and vector graphics and really, when we're gonna want to use one over the other inside of photo shop.
16. Raster vs vector: in this video will learn about the differences between Raster and Vector graphics. So let's start with raster graphics now. Raster graphics are also sometimes called bit mapped graphics or pick so based graphics. And the reason for that is because Rast arised graphics are made up of pixels. So when you're editing a pixel based image orbit map image than really, what you're doing is you're editing them. One picks a lot of time in photo shop. There's a number of tools that are gonna let you at multiple pixels at a time, but behind the scenes, really, photo shop is just controlling them one pixel at a time in order to make adjustment. So this is an example of a raster image. Photographs are a great example of raster images, but watch what happens when I zoom in on this. What happens is it starts to get pixellated, because when we zoom in, there's Onley, so many pixels there. It's not something that we're going to be creating new pixels when we zoom in. We're seeing those pixels there, and so that is a downfall to rast. Arised graphics or pixel based graphics is once you start to scale it up really large. It's going to start to get pixellated based on the size of the original, in this case, since it's a photograph the size of the original image, once we scale it up beyond that, it's going to start to get pixelated. So that is really Rast. Arise graphics In a nutshell. Now some of the common file formats that you're going to see We talked about some of these J pegs, P and G's gifts. Those are all rast arised graphics. They are all pixel based graphics. Ah, if you're saving a J peg, a PNG or a gift file, those are all pixel based graphics. So in a nutshell, again pixel based graphics are going to pick slate when you scale them up. So when do you want to use your rast arised images so you don't want to get that over pixelated? Look, really. They're great for things that are much more complex. Photographs are very complex set of colors that are put together in a way. Each pixel is a different color, and it's putting it together in a way that it looks like a photograph, and that's really where rast arised images come into play. So let's kind of balance that and contrast that because the other side of that are vector graphics. So vector graphics are actually a mathematical algorithm. It's not a single pixel that has a color value that you can edit in Photoshop really, behind the scenes. It's a mathematical algorithm that are made up of points and curves and that tells the computer how to make that shape based on the math. Right. So some of the common file four matches you're going to see for vector our AI, which is Adobe illustrator E P s or S V G. Now Vetra graphics. A great way to think about them is kind of like connect the dots. So I mentioned that they're made up of a bunch of points and curves. And don't worry, when you create vector graphics, you don't really have to get into a mathematical side. Really, what you're going to do, you're gonna create a point, and then you create another point, and then it's going to have a line that connects those points. Once you start to create another points and then you close that that creates a shape. Now what's cool about this with vector graphics is because, technically, behind the scenes, this is all just a bunch of math. When you scale that up again, it's just a much a matter so the computer can render that and you zoom in and it looks beautiful. So that is a big difference because between rast arised graphics or pixel based graphics and vector graphics. Because the vectors are Justin algorithm, the computer is just going to re calculate that algorithm when you scale them. So when you want to use vectors is really when you need something that's going to scale infinitely without wanting to lose quality logos are a great example. Logo should always be vector because you never know when you create a logo. Is it going to be on a business card that's really small? Or is it going to be on a billboard that's massive When you scale it up, you don't want to get that picks elation like we saw in that photograph, which is exactly what's going to happen if you create your logo as a pixel based graphic. Now, in this course, we are going to cover some vectors, but we're not going to cover them in depth. The reason for that is because photo Shop is really great at Rast arised images. It really focuses on creating and editing pixel based graphics. Adobe has a different program called Illustrator that's really great at Vector graphics. And so, since we're really just focusing on photo shop in this course, there are some vector tools that you can use in photo shop, and we are going to cover some of those. But we're not going to dive nearly as deep into the vector side of things as we are with the pixel based graphics. Now I do want to point out that photo shops, native files, both Photoshopped documents and Photoshopped Big files do support both raster and vector graphics in the same file so you can have one layer that is a vector layer, and you can have one layer that is a pixel based layer. And save that off as a Photoshopped document or a Photoshopped big file and you'll be able to open that back up. Fine. Okay, so in a nutshell, raster graphics or pick So based graphics really are controlled on a per pixel level, and it's really easy to create complex images with a lot of colors. Photographs again, a great example of pixel based graphics where we're gonna look at this more in in death later on. But, um, really, what's happening when you take a picture is its determining what pick what color value each pixel is. And that's how those images get created. Um, but pixel based graphics are very easy to share in common file formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF files and so on. Vectors, on the other hand, are great when you want to be able to Skeel them without worrying about picks, elation, it could just re calculate that vector. And then there will be no pics elation. And when you scale them, it is difficult to create very, very complex images like photographs with a lot of colors in vector formats. And something else to keep in mind is that most Web browsers don't really support vector graphics. S V. GS are kind of an exception to this S v gs or call our scalable vector graphics, and they are getting more and more common for ways to displace things like logos on websites because you never know when you might want that to scale. Um, but for the most parts, illustrator files and a lot of vector files don't really work as well on Web browsers. Okay, so to recap, a pixel based graphic is kind of like something you see on the left side. It's really great to get a lot of detail. While vector graphics, it's more difficult, but they're mathematically calculated, so you can scale this up or down. However you want, you can see the icon on the right side could scale the upper down however you want in order to get the size that you want, and it's not going to get pixelated now. In our next video, we're gonna learn mawr about color modes and how they affect our digital images.
17. Understanding color modes: in this video will learn about color modes and how the effect our images in photo shop. So what are color Moz? Color modes are how Photoshopped determines the colors to use to generate the final image. One of my favorite examples of this is the ink cartridges in your printer. So when you have your different in cartridges, they have different colors, and then the printer takes those colors, mixes them together. And that's how you get the representation of whatever it is that you're printing out. And this is actually one of the color modes. In Photoshopped you have Saiyan, you have magenta, you have yellow and you have black. Now those collectively are known as C M. Why Kate see for Scion and for magenta y for yellow. And because if they did be, you might think it's blue K for black. Now see M y que is a color mode inside of photo shop, and really, because that's also how the printer chooses the colors and mixes them together. When you know you're going to be printing a design, C M. Y que color mode is probably the one that you're going to want to use inside a photo shop to get the most accurate representation once is actually printed out With. That said, there are other color modes inside of Photoshopped. There are actually eight different color modes. Inside of Photoshopped are the two most popular one We've already talked about that it's C M Y que. The other one is RGB. Now. RGB stands for red, green and blue. RGB is really the default color for digital screens, and for that reason it's what you're probably going to be using most of the time inside of Photoshopped RGB colors. What they do is there's 256 color values in each channel, So here's kind of what it looks like if you have a, The Red Channel has a value of zero. The Green Channel has a value of zero. The Blue Channel has a value of zero. The result is going to be pure black. However, if you have read with a value of 255 now, I mentioned that there were 256 color values in each channel. Zero is one of those values, so it goes up from 0 to 255 for a total of 256 color values. So if you have 255 across all three channels, all three colors red, green and blue, you're going to get pure white. But what's really cool about this is you can start to mix this, so if you have read, that's 255. Green and blue are zero. You're going to get pure red. Same with green. If you have green at 2 55 red and blue, it zero, you're going to get pure green. And, of course, for blue it's the same as well. Pure blue is going to be 255 in the Blue Channel, and red and green are going to have zero. It's really a similar process for a lot of the other color modes inside of Photoshopped, but it's important to know that the rules for those different color modes are going to very really. It varies. So, for example, the two that we've talked about. I mentioned that RGB goes from 0 to 255 and the color values C M. Y que, on the other hand, uses percentages. So in C m. Y que. If you have magenta at 100% you're going to get pure magenta. But you also have multiple channels you're gonna have. That's what Photoshopped cause him. A channel scion would be a channel magenta would be a channel yellow as a channel, black as a channel. And in this case, in order to get the color on the left hand side, we set the Magenta Channel to a value of 100%. Now you can start to mix and match this, and this is really where the power comes in. If we set the Yellow Channel to 100% and the Magenta Channel to 100% you're going to get this result on the left hand side, kind of ah, more red color. So to recap between those two C. M. Y que is really more popular for print. RGB is more popular. Four screens and at the end of the day, those are the two most common things that you're going to be using inside of creating images for inside of Photoshopped. It is going to be printed or it's going to be used on a digital screen, so C M y que and RGB are the two most popular color moat. With that said, there are some other color modes that we looked at, so let's take a quick look at some of those less common color moat. One of them is called bit map, the bit map color mode on Lee has two colors. It's going to be either black or it's going to be white, and this is so each pixel is gonna be white or black. If you zoom in on this, you can see it's either white or black. There's no gray in between. There's no colors. It's just gonna be white or black now to kind of contrast that another color mode is gray scale. Now, gray scale is going toe have. It's only going to be great now. You might think of this as black and white, but really, it's 256 shades of grey, so from 0 to 255 on the color value, there's not gonna be color, but you notice it's not just black and white. It's going to have different shades of gray in there as well, and this is a great color mode if you're printing and you want to make sure that you print without color printing in black and what is very common if you If you convert your image to a grayscale, then that's going to make sure that it's not using any of your color ink. It's just going to be printing in grayscale, and you're gonna get some good quality out of that. Um, of course, depending on the original quality of your image. Now, another color mode inside a photo shop is duo tone Duo Tone is something that is very niche , and it's really only going to be used if you know the reason to use it again. It's really helpful for printing. If your printer asks for this, this would be something that you do. Basically what duo tone does is it converts your image to gray scale image as far as you see, but lets you pick between up to four different colors. So earlier we saw the printer that had cartridges for scion magenta, yellow and black. If your printer has different colors that they're printing in, then this is where you would use duo tone in order to go in there and change those colors toe whatever they specify again, it's gonna be a very, very niche thing. And realistically, most of the time, Ah, you're not going to need that in your photo shop projects. Now the next color mode is indexed color indexed color converts the image to 256 colors, and then it stores the colors inside of an index in the file itself. What this does kind of what we learned about with GIF files. It limits the number of colors, but it also saves space, so it makes the file smaller because it has that index. Think of it like a book. The index is really where you go to look up information in the book If you want to get there fast and when you're loading an image on the Internet, if you want to get that, you want to get it as fast as you can. The index indexing it really allows that the computer to look at the index and pull that image down much faster. Of course, you are also limited to 256 total colors. The next color mode is lab color and this is another one that's very niche. You're probably not going to use it most of the time, but we want to cover it just just in case you know what it is. And that way, if you if you ever working on a project and somebody mentions that, you'll know what they're talking about and you'll know how to use it here in a photo shop lab color refers to see i e. Lab color space now see, AII was defined by the International Commission on Illumination in 1976. What they did was they tried to interpret the way that the human eye sees colors and interpret that into numerical values. So to do that, they use three different values and really photo shopped converts these into channels, so sort of like RGB had red, green and blue channels in lab colors. You're going tohave l A and B channels. Hence lab l stands for lightness. That is how light each pixel should be. It uses a grayscale value from 0 to 100 to determine that a is the green red hue of the pixel. So how green is it, or how red is it? kind of a scale there and and the hue of that pixel again, using a numerical values in this case from negative 127 all the way to 100. I'm sorry. Negative 128 to plus 127 and again, zero is also an acceptable value as well, and B is very similar, but its beauty a blue yellow hue of the pixel again values of negative 1 28 to plus 1 27 So the lab color no seams, very abstract lab color is very, very helpful if you have us a digital display that actually is using lab colors, and it is a very niche case. But if you're using lab ecology, probably want them to be very, very, very accurate. And that's really where lab comes in. So this is kind of example of the Lightness channel, so each pixel is using a grayscale value in order to determine how light D images that's gonna translate on a display that supports lab colors. Ah, the A channel is going to show green to red hues, and then the B channel is going to show blue to yellow hues. And when you put them all together, you can see there's a lot more in the blue to yellow, because when you put them all together in this particular image, you can see the sky and it's blue. And so there's a lot more blue in this image. Okay, so that brings us to the last color mode, and that is multi channel. Multi Channel basically gives 256 values of gray in scion, magenta and yellow in order to, uh, it. Basically, it's something again for the printing process. It has to be something that your printer supports. And so again, kind of like do a tone. This is gonna be something that if your if your printer asks for it, it's going Teoh. See that? So in this image on a screen, it's gonna look kind of strange. But what on the background? What it's doing is it's It's looking at scion magenta and yellow, and it's looking at different color values in each one of those colors, and the printer will have software to be able to extract that and then get a good quality print based on those color values and again It's going to be something that you only really want to use if your printer is asking for that. But if they do ask for that now you know what it is and how it works inside a photo shop. Okay, so to recap, we learned about the color modes in Photoshopped, the eight different color mode. Now, don't worry if a lot of what we cover doesn't make sense to you quite yet, Remember, you can always refer back to this in the future and at the end of the day, depending on what you're using photo shop for you may never use some of the other color, Moz. So when in doubt, you see m y que for print if you know you're gonna be printing it working cm like a you know it's going to be displayed on a digital screen work in RGB. Okay, Now let's move on to our next video where we're gonna learn about bit depth in photo shop
18. Understanding bit depth: in this video, we'll learn what bit depth, ISS and how it affects our images. So what is bit, depth? Bit depth is a term that refers to how much color information is stored inside of our image . So in order to understand this, we're talking about digital images. We're gonna have to get nerdy for a moment. This is probably the most technical of the videos in this course. But don't worry, we're gonna walk through this step by step. The reason why we're gonna have to get more technical is because we're talking about digital images. So we have to understand how computers work and how they store that information. So all computers work in binary, which means data is made up of ones and zeros and digital images are no different. All of the data is ones and zeros. So a simple example to this is ah, one bit image means that one bit of data is stored for each pixel. So basically, that data is either going to be zero. It's gonna be a black pixel, or it's gonna be a value of one, which means it's gonna be a white pixel. And we saw this in the previous video when we looked at the bit map color mode. But here it is again. As you can see, every single pixel in this image is either going to be a value of zero, which means it's a black pixel or it's going to be a value of one, which means it's a white pixel, so that is a one bit image goes from a value of zero to a value of one. Now it starts to get a little bit more complex here because a two bit image goes from 00 to a value of 11 a four bit image goes from 0000 to a value of 1111 Now the complexity here really starts to come in with patterns. So what do I mean by patterns? They just go back to the one bit because this is a great way of of showcasing this in a one bit image. As we learned, that picture is either going to be a value of zero or it's going to be a value of one. That means there's a total of two patterns. It's either zero or it's a one, so as our as our image data information grows, so too do the possible patterns in that image. So one bit image is from 0 to 1. There's two patterns, two bit image. 00 toe 11 There's four patterns. It's growing exponentially. A four bit image is 16 patterns and so on. Now. The reason why this is important is because the most popular bit depth out there is an eight bit image. It goes from 000000008 zeros. If I said that properly to eight ones, that is the, uh, the data that's being stored and the total number. If you remember the pattern is starting to accrue exponentially. The total number of patterns is 256 and that is exactly why, as we learned earlier in the last video, we're talking about color modes. Photoshopped holds color values between zero that is an acceptable value to 255 with a total of 256 possible color values that photo shop stores in side of eight bit images. But wait, there's more. As we learned in a previous video, one of the most popular color modes that you're going to be working with is RGB red, green and blue. So what that means is, in an eight bit image, it grows even mawr exponentially because we're not just talking about 256 color values across the entire image like we saw in the ah bit map image. It was just a one bit. We're talking about 256 possible color values in the Red Channel 256 possible color channel or color values in the Green Channel 256 in the Blue Channel. You're going to start to multiply all of those together, and when you do that, you get over 16 1,000,000 possible color combinations inside of an eight bit image. And that is exactly why a pit images are so popular. So many different color combinations you can do in side oven a pit. Images start to look very, very realistic, but it starts to get even more complex because there's mawr. There's possibility for mawr color information than eight bit images. Ah, 16 bit image camera. Raw images are very popular to be 16 bit, Um, so In that case, we're talking about 16 bits in the Red Channel, 16 bit in the Green Channel 16 Bitten. The Blue Channel were talking about 65,536 possible color values in each of those channels . And, as you can guess, it really starts to blow up. There's over 281 trillion color combinations in a 16 bit image. That's why so many original files like I mentioned camera raw or raw images are often much higher bit depth because you have so much more color information that you can play with as you're editing the photo, and then when you save it off, you can save it office something that is an ape it image. You're still getting 16 million different color combinations still gonna look great, but it's not using up all that data at the end result. Now you would think that it stopped at 16. No, there's actually 32 bit images, and this is really where this starts to get super crazy because each channel has over two billion possible color values. And so in that case you're talking about essentially limitless color combination. Inside of a 32 bit image. Ah, one of the most popular uses that I've seen for 32 bit images was when I'm working in three D. You really need a lot of different possible color combinations because you're talking from one computer program to another computer program in order to render that out in three D, And so ah uses all of that different color information in order to add little, little subtle differences. But inside a photo shop, how does this affect our images? As I mentioned before, Ah, lot of times the original the original image is going to be a much higher bit up. So probably one of the most obvious examples where you're going to see the difference between something like a 16 bit image and in a pit image is going to be when you start to see Grady INTs. It's because it's ah, it's a slow transition from one color to another, and when you don't have enough possible color values there to make that transition very smoothly, you can start to see banding as you can see. Ah, these are actually the same Grady in but in a fit vs 16 bit Ah, you can see how they look very, very different. And if you want to see this in a little bit more of a practical example, you can see the a pit image on the left hand side. You can start to see how it's a little bit more pixelated, little more granule, but you can also see some banding in there that's really starting to effect in this photo of a sunrise, whereas in the original 16 bit image, it's much smoother. And those those colors flow from one to another just because there's a much higher bit depth there in order to show all of those images. Okay, so to recap, bit depth is a technical term to refer to how maney bits of data are stored in this case in an image that can affect our images because it determines how many different color combinations are available in the image. And that brings us to an end of this class, where we learned about how to move around and navigate photo shops, interface and documents. So take a break, go grab your favorite drink, and when you're ready, I'll see you in the next class in this photo shop basics Siri's where will build on our knowledge as we learn about the core fundamentals of how Photoshopped works. See you there.
Dan LeFebvre
