Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Lesa Snider

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Tokyo

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Foreword

In the short but crowded history of consumer technology, only two products ever became so common, influential, and powerful that their names become verbs.

Google is one.

Photoshop is the other.

(“Did you Google that guy who asked you out?” “Yeah—he’s crazy. He Photoshopped his last girlfriend out of all his pictures!”)

It’s safe to say that these days, not a single photograph gets published, in print or online, without having been processed in Photoshop first. It’s usually perfectly innocent stuff: a little color adjustment, contrast boosting, or cropping.

But not always. Sometimes, the editing actually changes the photo so that it no longer represents the original, and all kinds of ethical questions arise. Remember when TV Guide Photoshopped Oprah’s head onto Ann-Margaret’s body? When Time magazine darkened O.J. Simpson’s skin to make him look more menacing on the cover? Or when National Geographic moved two of the pyramids closer together to improve the composition?

Well, you get the point: Thanks to Photoshop, photography is no longer a reliable record of reality. Photoshop is magic.

And now, all that magic is in your hands. Use it wisely.

Trouble is, Photoshop is a monster. It’s huge. Just opening it is like watching a slumbering beast heave consciousness. Dudes, Photoshop has over 500 menu commands.

In short, installing Photoshop is like being told that you’ve just won a 747 jumbo jet. You sit down in the cockpit and survey the endless panels of controls and switches. Now what?

You don’t even get a printed manual.

If there were ever a piece of software that needed the Missing Manual treatment, it was Photoshop.

The beast has been tamed at last by its new master, Lesa Snider: a natural-born Missing Manual author with Photoshop credentials as long as your arm.

She had worked on Missing Manuals, side by side with me in my office, for four years, in all kinds of editorial and production capacities. Today, when she’s not writing the bestselling Photoshop book (you’re reading it), she’s out in the real world, teaching Photoshop seminars, writing Photoshop articles, reviewing Photoshop for magazines, and generally serving as Photoshop guru to the masses.

The Missing Manual mantra runs through her blood: Make it clear, make it entertaining, make it complete (hence the thickness of this book). And above all, don’t just identify a feature: Tell us what it’s for. Tell us when to use it. (And if the answer is, “You’ll never use it,” tell us that, too.)

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this book isn’t for everybody. In fact, it’s aimed primarily at two kinds of people: people who have never used Photoshop, and people who have.

But seriously, folks. If you’re new to Photoshop, you’ll find patient, friendly introductions to all those nutty Photoshoppy concepts like layers, color spaces, image resolution, and so on. And, mercifully, you’ll find a lot of loving attention to a time-honored Missing Manual specialty—tips and shortcuts. As Photoshop pros can tell you, you pretty much have to learn some of Photoshop’s shortcuts or it will crush you like a bug.

On the other hand, if you already have some Photoshop experience, you’ll appreciate this book’s coverage of Photoshop CC 2014’s new features: Focus Area, perspective warp, new blur filters, new font features, smarter smart guides, 3D printing, and so on.

In 2013, Adobe announced that now on, you must rent Photoshop, monthly or yearly. You can no longer buy it outright. One of the motivations, Adobe said, was a desire to create an ever-changing, ever-improving Photoshop. There wouldn’t be one megalithic new version every couple of years. Instead, little enhancements would come along all year long, added as soon as they were ready.

So what are we to make of this “Photoshop CC 2014” thing? Are we back to yearly megalithic releases? Has Adobe abandoned its Photoshop Forever concept?

Yes and no. The company still plans to Photoshop all year long. But it also plans to create the periodic “milestone” edition of Photoshop, a breather, a catch-up version that rolls in all the little changes (and a few more) since the last one. In part, this idea is a crumb thrown to people who write (and buy) books about Photoshop; nobody would be served well if Photoshop were a shape-shifting target forever.

In any case, get psyched. You now have both the most famous, powerful, magical piece of software on earth and a 900+-page treasure map to help you find your way.

The only missing ingredients are time, some photos to work on, and a little good taste. You’ll have to supply those yourself.

Good luck!

—David Pogue

David Pogue is the founder and anchor columnist for YahooTech.com, having been groomed for the position by 13 years as the tech columnist for the New York Times. He’s an Emmy-winning TV correspondent (CBS News and NOVA on PBS), a Scientific American columnist, and the creator of the Missing Manual series.

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The Missing Credits

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About the Author

Lesa Snider is on a mission to teach the world to create—and use!—better graphics. She’s an internationally acclaimed speaker, a stock photographer, and the founder of the creative tutorial site PhotoLesa.com. Lesa is the author of The Skinny Book series of ebooks (www.theskinnybooks.com) many video-training workshops (www.lesa.in/lesacl) and the coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual. She writes a regular column for Photoshop User, Photographic Elements Techniques, and Macworld magazines. Lesa is also a long-time member of the Photoshop World Dream Team of instructors and can be spotted teaching at many other conferences around the globe. You can connect with her online on Facebook (www.facebook.com/PhotoLesa), YouTube (www.lesa.in/ytvideochannel), Twitter (@PhotoLesa), and PhotoLesa.com.

During her free time, you’ll find Lesa at the dojo practicing Muay Thai kickboxing, with her husband at a sci-fi convention dressed up in her Star Trek best, or cooking Italian meals. Email: lesa@photolesa.com.

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About the Creative Team

Dawn Schanafelt (editor) is associate editor for the Missing Manual series. When not working, she plays soccer, makes beaded jewelry, and causes trouble. Email: dawn@oreilly.com.

Melanie Yarbrough (production editor) works and plays in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she enjoys baking as much as possible and biking around the city. Email: myarbrough@oreilly.com.

Nan Reinhardt (proofreader) is not only a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, but she is also a multi-published romance novelist. Nan and her husband divide their time between a city home and a lake cottage (both in the Midwest), where they enjoy swimming, boating, and fishing. Email: nan@nanreinhardt.com.

Ron Strauss (indexer) specializes in the indexing of information technology publications of all kinds. Ron is also an accomplished classical violist and lives in Northern California with his wife and fellow indexer, Annie, and his miniature pinscher, Kanga. Email: rstrauss@mchsi.com.

Shangara Singh (technical reviewer) is the author of the popular exam aids for Photoshop and Lightroom—study guides for people who want to become an Adobe Certified Expert, or an Adobe Certified Associate—published by Examaids.com. He has also authored a keyword hierarchy for stock photographers (Keyword-Catalog.com), and has his own stock photo website, SensaStockImages.com (SensaStockImages.com).

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Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to my husband, Jay Nelson, for making everyday life incredibly fun and for learning to appreciate heavy metal music, namely Ozzy Osbourne. 

I’d like to express galactic thanks to iStockphoto.com and Fotolia.com for providing some of the imagery in this book. A big hug and thanks to David Pogue who so graciously wrote the foreword for this book. To Jeff and Scott Kelby for believing in me and nurturing my career in immeasurable ways. To Derrick Story for his wisdom before I got started on this project, and a great big jug of Umbrian vino rosso to Dawn Schanafelt for editing this book and keeping me on track. Her input makes me a better writer and I’m lucky to have her on our team. To my brilliant and long-time tech editor, Shangara Singh, whose expertise has helped create the best Photoshop book yet and whose humorous comments always make me giggle.

Special thanks to Marcus Conge (www.digitalmanipulation.com) and Jay Nelson for helping with the 3D chapter, to Rod Harlan for consulting on video editing, to Richard Harrington (www.photoshopforvideo.com) for helping with actions, to Taz Tally (www.taztallyphotography.com) for helping with the print chapter, as well as Bert Monroy (www.bertmonroy.com) and Veronica Hanley for guidance on all things vector-related. To Deborah Fox (www.deborahfoxart.com) for the beautiful art in the painting chapter, to Tanya and Richard Horie for their expert advice on the painting chapter and brush customization options (as well as creating my logo), to Karen Nace Willmore (www.karennace.com) for her HDR and wide-angle photography, and to Jeff Gamet (www.macobserver.com) for keeping me sane and helping with the first edition of this book.

To my esteemed colleagues—and good friends—Jack Davis, Ben Willmore, Eddie Tapp, Judy Host, Peter Cohen, Gary-Paul Prince, Larry Becker, Kevin Ames, Terry White, Dave Moser, and Andy Ihnatko, who all expressed their pride and confidence in me. I’d also like to thank our creativeLIVE.com family for promoting this book, as well as LensProToGo.com for supplying me with incredible Canon gear to shoot with (if you need to rent camera gear, they’re the best!).

Last but not least, buckets of appreciation to my friends who gave their support—or a cocktail!—when I needed it most: Master Vu Tran, Bob and Elsbeth Diehl, Kathryn Kroll, Leslie Fishlock, and most importantly, Fran Snider, the best mama a girl could have (wish Daddy could’ve held this book!). To our beautiful kitties, Samantha and Sherlock, who forced me to get out of my pretty purple Aeron chair and play The Laser Pointer Game with them at exactly 5:15 pm each day.

May the creative force be with you all!

—Lesa Snider

Introduction

Congratulations on buying one of the most complicated pieces of software ever created! Fortunately, it’s also one of the most rewarding. No other program on the market lets you massage, beautify, and transform images like Photoshop. It’s so popular that people use its name as a verb: “Dude, you Photoshopped the heck out of him!” You’d be hard-pressed to find a published image that hasn’t spent some quality time in this program, and those that didn’t probably should have.

The bad news is that it’s a tough program to learn; you won’t become a Photoshop guru overnight. Luckily, you hold in your hot little hands a book that covers the program a practical standpoint, so you’ll learn the kinds of techniques you can use every day. It’s written in plain English for normal people, so you don’t have to be any kind of expert to understand it. You’ll also learn just enough theory (where appropriate) to help you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Note

Prior to Photoshop CC, Adobe offered two versions of the program: Photoshop Standard and Photoshop Extended, which included extra features such as 3D tools. But they combined those two versions Photoshop CC, so you get all the features.

What’s New in Photoshop CC 2014

Adobe has added some incredibly useful new features to Photoshop CC 2014, especially where productivity is concerned. Graphic designers will be especially pleased with all the new features and timesaving goodies, although there’s also a lot of good stuff for photographers, too.

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice is that Adobe redesigned most of the program’s dialog boxes to accommodate Retina displays (Apple’s super-high resolution monitors, called HiDPI on PCs), so they’re noticeably shorter and wider (they’re also a darker gray and the buttons are square, so they look more Windows-like than Mac-like in their design).

Here’s a quick overview of all the new stuff (don’t worry if you don’t yet understand some of the terms used here—you’ll learn them as you read through this book):

• New blur filters. This version of Photoshop CC sports two additions to the Blur Gallery family of filters that let you simulate motion in a photo that doesn’t have any (or that doesn’t have enough). The Path Blur filter lets you create the appearance of motion along a path that you draw—it can be straight or riddled with curves—and then fine-tune the blur’s direction, angle, speed, and even how much blurring occurs at the path’s start and end points. And the Spin Blur filter lets you put an incredibly realistic spin on any object by using a simple set of on-image controls. Both filters let you customize how blurry the object appears.

• Typekit access, font searches, and instant font previews. One of the great benefits of having a subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud service (see the box on Meet the Creative Cloud) that it gives you access to hundreds of fonts via the online font service Typekit (www.Typekit.com). In this version of the program, you can get to these fonts right Photoshop’s font family menu and—once you install them (which is incredibly easy)—you can use them in any program on your machine that sports a font menu. Also new in the realm of text is the ability to search all your installed fonts by typing part of a font’s name (or attribute) the font family menu. And when a type layer is active, you can point to any font in the font family menu and Photoshop previews your existing text in that font, right there in your document.

• Better smart guides. These incredible layer alignment helpers are now turned on automatically, and now show you a lot more info about the spacing in your document. When you have the Move or Path Selection tool active, you can ?-click (Ctrl-click on a PC), and then point anywhere in your document to see distance measurements between the currently active layer’s content and everything else in the document (even its edge). By Option-dragging (Alt-dragging) an object, you can both duplicate that layer and see the distance between the duplicate and the original object as you drag.

• Sync layer comps and access them in smart objects. Layer comps let you create multiple versions of an image or design without having to duplicate the document. New in this version of the program, you can layer comps by syncing them with the layers you updated (a big timesaver when you make a global change to your project), plus you can access a document’s layer comps after you’ve placed it into another document as a smart object—without opening (editing) the smart object.

• Linked smart objects. Instead of embedding smart object content your documents, you can now link then to external content. This is great news for both designers and photographers who routinely combine large files a single document. You can now also convert an embedded smart object a linked one, or vice-versa. The Properties panel, Info panel, and status bar can all display handy info about linked smart objects, as well as help you fix any broken links (caused by renaming or moving the linked file on your hard drive) and any content that you changed while the Photoshop document that contains it was closed. Finally, the new Package command copies the Photoshop document and all its linked content so you can easily hand the whole shebang off to someone else.

• in-focus areas with Focus Area. This new command summons a dialog box that automatically selects the in-focus parts of an image. It does a great job if the photo has a strong focal point and a blurry background, and the dialog box includes a couple of sliders and brushes that you can use to fine-tune the selection. You can also send the selection straight over to the Refine Edge dialog box for more tweaking.

• Better color blending with content-aware tools. All of Photoshop’s content-aware tools now work faster and do a better job of blending colors, especially when you use them in an area that’s a gradient (think skies, water, and so on). These days, instead of having adaptation presets for the Patch and Content-Aware Move tools, you get a Structure and a Color field that let you enter precise settings for more realistic blending. Adobe also updated the Fill command’s Content-Aware option to perform better blending, and it now includes a Color Adaptation checkbox.

• Editable scripted patterns. Scripted patterns are a fantastic way to create new textures and backgrounds, although editing the JavaScript that powers ’em was a real pain. Now, choosing one of the eight built-in scripts summons a dialog box that lets you easily customize the pattern’s density, size, and color variations. You can apply scripted patterns to paths, too, as well as save your customizations as handy presets that you can use again later.

• Perspective warp. This command lets you change the perspective of an image, but only in certain areas that you specify. By drawing a grid atop your image, you can warp that area to make stuff like buildings and flat surfaces look correct (in other words, straight instead of angled).

• Editable masks for Camera Raw’s Graduated and Radial filters. Camera Raw’s Graduated and Radial filters are perfect for applying gradual changes to a photo in a linear or circular fashion (respectively). And you can now edit the masks made by both filters by using a brush. (Camera Raw is discussed throughout this book, but the bulk of the coverage is in Chapter 9.)

• Export web graphics with Generator. To the delight of web designers worldwide, the new Generator feature lets you instantly export web graphics that you’ve designed in Photoshop—and even create subfolders to organize them—just by using certain layer names. You’ve got to try this feature to believe it.

• 3D printing. You can now print 3D objects on a local 3D printer or send your file off to a 3D-printing service from inside Photoshop. The print preview that you get is incredible and even shows you the areas Photoshop filled in to make the object solid enough to print. If you go the printing-service route, the preview even estimates how much the project will cost. Chapter 21 helps you get started working in the increasingly popular realm of 3D.

There are also tons of little changes in Photoshop CC 2014, the direct result of Adobe’s customer-feedback initiative called Just Do It (JDI). Here’s a list: You can unlock a background layer by single-clicking its padlock icon (hooray!); you can turn the Color panel a Color Picker that’s always open; you no longer have to unlock a background layer to add a vector-based layer mask to it; you can create gradients with a single color stop; and the process for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud is simpler and now includes workspaces, keyboard shortcuts, and menu customizations. You can also export 3D color lookup tables for use in Adobe’s pro-level video editing apps; and the Copy CSS command now understands inner-shadow layer styles. When using the Liquify filter, you can pin the image’s edges down so they don’t get warped. The Brushes panel displays the last 30 brushes you used at the top of its panel for quick access, and uses a special highlight color to let you know when you’ve modified a brush’s settings. There’s also an Experimental Feature Manager tucked inside Photoshop’s preferences that lets you access “not yet ready for prime time” features that Adobe periodically releases.

Unfortunately, Adobe removed some useful panels because they were Flash based, including the Mini Bridge, Kuler, and Adobe Exchange panels (though, as Other Color Scheme–Generating Tools explains, you can download Kuler the Adobe Add-On website as an HTML-based panel). The Oil Paint filter also went the way of the dodo bird in this version due to outdated code (easy come, easy go!).

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Meet the Creative Cloud

Dude, what the heck happened to Photoshop CS7? What on earth does “CC” mean?

Great question. After CS6, Adobe decided to stop shipping boxed, perpetually licensed versions of their products. These days, your only option is to subscribe to—and then download—the software.

Using a service called the Adobe Creative Cloud, you can subscribe on an annual or monthly basis to one or all of Adobe’s products. For example, a single-app Creative Cloud subscription for Photoshop CC costs about $20 a month and gives you access to both Mac and PC versions of the program that you can install on up to two machines (say, a desktop and laptop). If you use two or more Adobe programs (say, Photoshop and InDesign), it’s cheaper to subscribe to all of their products for about $50 a month which, as of this writing, includes 24 programs and services (both Mac and PC versions)—including access to Adobe Typekit and the ability to share your projects via Behance (see the box on Sharing Images on Behance). That said, Adobe offers a special subscription geared toward photographers wherein you get Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom for a slick $10 per month (visit www.lesa.in/pslrfor10 for details). These prices may change, of course, so check with Adobe for current pricing.

Whichever option you choose, you simply subscribe, and then download the software to your machine using the Creative Cloud application. After that, your Adobe software phones home once a month via the Internet to validate your account; if Adobe can’t validate your account, your software stops working (along with your fonts). In other words, if you don’t pay, you don’t get to use the software (though there is a 30-day grace period if, for whatever reason, your computer can’t connect to the Internet).

Once you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, you get 20 GB of storage space, which you can use to host websites and sync documents between computers and tablets (think iPads), and to back up documents or share them with others (regardless of whether those folks have Creative Cloud subscriptions). You also get the ability to sync custom settings to the Cloud so they’re accessible on other machines: When you subscribe to the Creative Cloud and then install Photoshop, your Adobe ID appears in the Photoshop menu (the Edit menu on a PC) with a submenu that contains Upload Settings and Download Settings commands.

You can also sync documents to the Creative Cloud so you can access ’em on other computers (home and work, say). For example, you can designate a folder on your hard drive, and then any items you put it automatically sync to the Creative Cloud. Subscribers also get their hands on new features as soon as Adobe rolls ’em out; the Creative Cloud app notifies you of the and you can install it whenever you want. With larger updates, such as the Photoshop CC 2014 update, you install a whole new copy of the program. If you don’t need the older version, just it your machine folder to reclaim some hard drive space. However, if your workflow depends on a feature that was changed or removed, you may want to keep it around. (To learn the current version number of your copy of Photoshop CC, choose Help?System Info.)

Adobe will continue to sell and support Photoshop CS6 for a while; but that’s the last licensed copy you’ll ever get (and there’s nothing wrong with keeping it on your machine if you already own it—in fact, it’s a good idea). Like it or not, we’re now in the era of rental software. (To get the most your Creative Cloud subscription, check out your author’s ebook, Making the Most of Adobe’s Creative Cloud at www.theskinnybooks.com.)

If you’re in North America or the United Kingdom, you can purchase a Creative Cloud subscription through Adobe.com, Amazon.com, or Staples.com. Folks in other countries should go through Adobe.com.

And that, dear friends, is why the program is now called Photoshop Creative Cloud, a.k.a. Photoshop CC 2014.

About This Book

Adobe has pulled together an amazing amount of information in its online help system (see online Appendix B, available this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds), but despite all these efforts, it’s geared toward seasoned Photoshop jockeys and assumes a level of skill that you may not have. The explanations are very clipped and to the point, which makes it difficult to get a real feel for the tool or technique you need help with.

That’s where this book comes in. It’s intended to make learning Photoshop CC tolerable—and even enjoyable—by avoiding technical jargon as much as possible and explaining why and when to use (or avoid) certain features of the program. This friendly, conversational approach is meant to appeal to beginners and seasoned pixel pushers alike.

Some of the tutorials in this book refer to files you can download this book’s Missing CD page on the Missing Manuals website (www.missingmanuals.com/cds) so you can practice the techniques you’re reading about. And throughout the book, you’ll find several kinds of sidebar articles. The ones labeled “Up to Speed” help newcomers to Photoshop do things or understand concepts that veterans are probably already familiar with. Those labeled “Power Users’ Clinic” cover more advanced topics for the brave of heart.

Note

Photoshop CC functions almost identically on Mac and Windows computers, but for the sake of consistency, the screenshots in this book were all taken on a Mac. However, the keyboard shortcuts for the two operating systems are different, so you’ll find both included here—Mac shortcuts first, followed by Windows shortcuts in parentheses, like so: “press ?-A (Ctrl+A).” The locations of a few folders differ, too; in those cases, you get the directions for both operating systems.

About the Outline

This hefty book is divided six parts, each devoted to the type of things you’ll do in Photoshop CC:

• Part 1. Here’s where you’ll learn the essential skills you need to know before moving forward. Chapter 1 gives you the lay of the land and teaches you how to work with panels and make the Photoshop workspace your own. You’ll also find out the many ways of undoing what you’ve done, which is crucial when you’re learning. Chapter 2 covers how to open and view documents efficiently, and how to set up new documents so you have a solid foundation on which to build your masterpieces.

  Chapter 3 dives the most powerful Photoshop feature of all: layers. You’ll learn about the different kinds of layers and how to manage them, the power of layer masks, and how to use layer styles for special effects. Chapter 4 explains how to part of an image so you can edit just that area. In Chapter 5, you’ll dive headfirst the science of color as you explore channels (which store the colors that make up your images) and learn how to use channels to create selections; you’ll also pick up some channel-specific editing tips along the way.

  Note

  In this book, the word “select” is used only to refer to the act of creating selections. In most other instances, the word “activate” is used instead, as in “activate the layer” or “activate the Crop tool.”

• Part 2. Chapter 6 starts off by explaining the various ways you can crop images—both in Photoshop and in Camera Raw—and then demystifies resolution so you’ll understand how to resize images without reducing their quality. In Chapter 7, you’ll learn how to combine images in a variety of ways, simple techniques to more complex ones. Chapter 8 covers draining, changing, and adding color, arming you with several techniques for creating gorgeous black-and-white images, delicious duotones, partial-color effects, and more. You’ll also learn how to change the color of almost anything.

  Chapter 9 focuses on color-correcting images, beginning with auto fixer-uppers, and then moving on to the wonderfully simple (yet powerful) world of Camera Raw and the more complicated realm of Levels and Curves. Chapter 10 is all about retouching images to change reality and is packed with practical techniques for slimming and trimming. This chapter also covers using the various content-aware tools to remove objects or scoot them one spot to another, as well as how to use the Puppet Warp command to move just your subject’s arms and legs. Chapter 11 explains what sharpening really is, and covers which sharpening method to use when to make your images look especially crisp.

  UP TO SPEED: What Does “64-bit” Mean?

  The cool phrase in computing circles for the past few years has been “64-bit.” While that term may sound pretty geeky, it’s actually not that intimidating: 64-bit programs (a.k.a. “applications” or “apps”) simply know how to count higher than 32-bit programs.

  So what does that mean in practice? 32-bit programs can open and work with files that are up to 4 gigabytes in size—which is huge. But 64-bit programs can open files that are way bigger than that, as long as your computer’s operating system can handle 64-bit apps. (Mac OS X 10.5 [Leopard] and Microsoft Windows Vista [the 64-bit version, anyway] and later are up to the task.)

  64-bit programs can also make use of more memory than their 32-bit counterparts, which is crucial when you’re working with big honkin’ files. For example, the 64-bit version of Photoshop lets you use more than 4 gigs of RAM, which makes it run faster. (You can change how your machine’s memory is allotted by tweaking Photoshop’s preferences as described on The Missing Credits–The Missing Credits.)

  Older versions of Photoshop were available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but Photoshop CC is available only in 64-bit (even on Windows computers), which is great news if you work with large files. And since most third-party plug-ins (Chapter 19) and filters (Chapter 15) now work in 64-bit mode, there’s little reason to cast a single glance backward. That said, you can still share Photoshop files with both Mac and PC folks, just like you always have.

• Part 3. This part of the book is all about creativity. Chapter 12 explains the many ways of choosing colors, and teaches you how to create a painting scratch. Chapter 13 focuses on using the mighty Pen tool to create complex illustrations and selections, along with how to use Photoshop’s various shape tools. Chapter 14 teaches you the basics of typography, and then moves on to creating and formatting text in Photoshop. You’ll find out how to outline, texturize, and place photos inside text, among other fun-yet-practical techniques. Chapter 15 covers the wide world of filters, including how to use smart filters; you’ll come away with at least one practical use for one or more of the filters in every category.

• Part 4. In Chapter 16, you’ll learn about printing images, beginning with an explanation of why it’s so darn hard to make what comes out of your printer match what you see onscreen. You’ll discover the programs different color modes and find out how to prepare images for printing, whether you’re using an inkjet printer or a commercial printing press. Chapter 17 focuses on preparing images for the Web, walks you through the various file formats you can use, explains how to protect your images online, and explains how to export web graphics using Generator. Rounding out the chapter is info on using the Slice tool on a web page design, and step-by-step instructions for creating animated GIFs.

• Part 5. This part is all about working smarter and faster. Chapter 18 covers actions (which help you automate tasks you perform regularly), and explains how to create gorgeous watermarks. Chapter 19 covers installing and using plug-ins (small programs you can add to Photoshop), and recommends some of the best. Chapter 20 teaches you how to edit videos in Photoshop and create stunning video portfolios, Chapter 21 gets you started creating and working with 3D objects and text, and Chapter 22 explains how to use Adobe Bridge for some slick organization and batch-processing tricks.

• Part Six: Appendixes. Appendix A covers installing (and uninstalling) Photoshop. Appendix B offers some troubleshooting tips, explains Photoshop’s help system, and points you to resources besides than this book. Appendix C gives you a tour of the mighty Tools panel. And Appendix D walks you through Photoshop CC’s 200+ menu items. All the appendixes are available this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds.

For Photographers

If you’re relatively new to digital-image editing or you’ve always shot film and are taking your first brave steps the world of digital cameras, you’ll be amazed at what you can do in Photoshop, but it can also be a bit overwhelming. By breaking Photoshop down digestible chunks that are most important to you, the learning process will feel less daunting. (There’s no sense in tackling the whole program when you’ll only use a quarter of it—if that much.)

The most important thing to remember is to be patient and try not to get frustrated. With time and practice, you can master the bits of Photoshop that you need to do your job better. And with the help of this book, you’ll conquer everything faster than you might think. As you gain confidence, you can start branching out other parts of the program to broaden your skills.

Here’s a suggested roadmap for quickly learning the most useful aspects of the program:

1. Read all of Chapters Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 (or at the very least skim them).

   These two chapters show you where to find all of Photoshop’s tools and features, and explain how the program is organized. You’ll learn how to open, view, and save images, which is vital stuff to know.

2. If your photos aren’t on your computer already— and you don’t use Photoshop Lightroom—read Chapter 22 about Adobe Bridge.

   Bridge is an amazingly powerful image organizer and browser that can help get your images onto your computer. It takes care of importing, renaming, and even backing up your precious photos. That said, if you use Lightroom, you can skip the Bridge chapter.

3. If you shoot in raw format (see the box on Raw versus JPEG) and need to color-correct your images in a hurry, read the section in Chapter 9 on editing in Camera Raw (Correcting Images in Camera Raw).

   That chapter includes a whole section on practical editing techniques you can use in Camera Raw, and a quick reference that points you to where you’ll find other Camera-Raw techniques throughout this book.

4. If you don’t shoot in raw and you need to resize your images before editing them, read Chapter 6.

   That chapter explains resolution and how to resize images without reducing their quality.

5. Proceed with Chapters Chapter 8, Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 to learn about color effects, correcting color and lighting, and all manner of retouching (retouching portraits, moving and removing objects, and so on), respectively.

6. When you’re ready to sharpen your images, read Chapter 11.

7. Finally, when you want to print your photos, read the section on printing with an inkjet printer in Chapter 16 (Printing on an Inkjet Printer).

   The chapter walks you through the printing process.

That’s all you need to get started. When you’re ready to dive further Photoshop, pick back up at Chapter 3, which covers layers, and then move on through the book as time permits.

The Very Basics

This book assumes that you know how to use a computer and that, to some extent, you’re an expert double-clicker and menu opener. If not, here’s a quick refresher:

To click means to move the point of your cursor over an object onscreen, and then press the mouse or trackpad button once. To drag means to click an object and then, while still holding down the mouse button, move the mouse to move the object. To double-click means to press the button twice, quickly, without moving the cursor between clicks. To right-click means to press the right mouse button once, which produces a menu of special features called a shortcut menu (a.k.a. contextual menu). If you’re on a Mac and have a mouse with only one button, you can simulate right-clicking by holding down the Control key while you click.

Most onscreen controls are pretty obvious, but you may not be familiar with radio buttons: To choose an option, you click one of these little empty circles that are arranged in a list.

You’ll find tons of keyboard shortcuts throughout this book, and they’re huge timesavers. If you see a sentence like, “Press ?-S (Ctrl+S) to save your file,” that means to hold down the ? key (or Ctrl key, if you’re using a PC), and then press the S key, too; then let go of both keys. (This book lists Mac keyboard shortcuts first, followed by Windows shortcuts in parentheses.) Other keyboard shortcuts are so complex that you’ll need to use multiple fingers, both hands, and a well-placed elbow. And sometimes you’ll combine keystrokes with clicking. For example, to ?-click (Ctrl-click on a PC) means to press and hold the ? (or Ctrl) key and then, while still pressing the key, click your mouse button.

If you’re comfortable with basic concepts like these, you’re ready to get started with this book.

About?These?Arrows

In this book (and in all Missing Manuals, for that matter), you’ll see arrows sprinkled throughout each chapter in sentences like this: “Choose Filter?Blur Gallery?Tilt-Shift.” This is a shorthand way of helping you find files, folders, and menu items without having to read through painfully long, boring instructions. For example, the sentence quoted above is a short way of saying this: “At the top of the Photoshop window, locate the Filter menu. Click it and, in the list that appears, look for the Blur Gallery category. Point your cursor at the words Blur Gallery (without clicking) and, in the resulting submenu, click Tilt-Shift” (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Choosing Filter?Blur Gallery?Tilt-Shift takes you to the menu item shown here.

About the Online Resources

As the owner of a Missing Manual, you’ve got more than just a book to read. Online, you’ll find example files so you can get some hands-on experience. You can also communicate with the Missing Manual team and tell us what you love (or hate) about the book. Head over to www.missingmanuals.com, or go directly to one of the following sections.

Missing CD

This book doesn’t have a CD pasted inside the back cover, but you’re not missing out on anything. Go to www.missingmanuals.com/cds to download sample files and the book’s appendixes. And so you don’t wear down your fingers typing long web addresses, the Missing CD page also offers clickable links to all the websites mentioned in this book.

Registration

If you register this book at oreilly.com, you’ll be eligible for special offers—like discounts on future editions. Registering takes only a few clicks. To get started, head to http://oreilly.com/register.

Feedback

Got questions? Need more information? Fancy yourself a book reviewer? On our Feedback page, you can get answers to questions that come to you while reading and share your thoughts on this Missing Manual. To have your say, go to www.missingmanuals.com/feedback.

Errata

In an effort to keep this book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We also note such changes on the book’s website, so you can mark important corrections your own copy of the book, if you like. Go to http://tinyurl.com/psccmm2e to report an error or view existing corrections.

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Part 1. The Basics

Chapter 1, Photoshop CC Guided Tour

Chapter 2, Opening, Viewing, and Saving Files

Chapter 3, Layers: The Key to Nondestructive Editing

Chapter 4, Selections: Choosing What to Edit

Chapter 5, Understanding Channels

 

 

Chapter 1. Photoshop CC Guided Tour

Photoshop CC is bursting with fabulous features that’ll help you edit and create your very own digital masterpieces. If this is your first foray the world of Photoshop, all these features will be new to you. If you’re an experienced pixel pusher, there are some surprises waiting for you, too. If you’re upgrading Photoshop CS5 or earlier, Adobe introduced major changes to the work environment back in CS6—like a brand-new color theme—and while these changes make Photoshop easier to use, they take some getting used to.

This chapter gives you a solid foundation on which to build your Photoshop skills. You’ll learn how to work with the Application Frame, and how to wrangle document windows and panels. Once you’ve gotten them placed just right, you’ll learn how to save your setup as a custom workspace. If you’re a beginner, the section on using Undo commands and history states will teach you how to fix mistakes and back out of almost anything you’ve done. Finally, you’ll learn how to fine-tune Photoshop’s behavior through preferences and built-in tools (called presets) that let you personalize your experience even more. Let’s dive in!

Meet the Application Frame

When you launch Photoshop CC for the first time, you’re greeted by the Application Frame shown in Figure 1-1. This frame confines all things Photoshop to a single resizable, movable window. You can grab the whole mess—documents, panels, and all—and drag it to one side of your screen (or better yet, to another monitor) so it’s out of the way. And if you open more than one document, they’re displayed in handy tabs that you can rearrange by dragging.

Chances are, you’ll either love the Application Frame or hate it. If you’re on a computer running Windows, you’re used to programs looking and behaving this way. But if you’re on a Mac and you’re coming an older version of Photoshop (like CS3), this arrangement may feel odd; in that case, you can turn off the frame by choosing Window?Application Frame to make Photoshop switch to the floating-window view used in older versions of the program. (PC folks are stuck with the frame.)

Note

In Photoshop CC, you’ll spot a special button at the bottom of each document window that looks like a rectangle with a curved arrow inside it. Clicking it uploads the current document to Adobe’s portfolio-sharing community site Behance—a great way to get critical feedback on projects. To learn more about Behance, see the box on Sharing Images on Behance and check out your author’s ebook “The Skinny on Behance” at www.theskinnybooks.com.

Figure 1-1. You can open several images at once; just click a document’s tab to summon it for editing. Photoshop stores the tools and adjustments you’ll use most in the panels on the sides of the Application Frame; a full introduction to panels starts on page 3. (Figure 1-9 on page 14 explains how to make your Tools panel have two columns like the one shown here.)

Note

Adobe reduced clutter back in Photoshop CS6 by removing the Application bar, which used to house extras like guides, grids, and rulers, as well as several menus. As you learn in the next few pages, those items are now sprinkled throughout the Tools panel, the View menu, and the Window menu.

Also, if you use Photoshop alongside other programs, the box on Hiding vs. Quitting explains how to get Photoshop out of the way without quitting it.

The Almighty Options Bar

Lording over the document window is the Options bar (Figure 1-2, top), which lets you customize the behavior of nearly every item in the Tools panel. This bar automatically changes to include settings related to the tool you’re currently using. The Options bar also includes the workspace menu, which lets you change the way your Photoshop environment is set up (you learn about workspaces on Customizing Your Workspace).

Unfortunately, the Options bar’s labels are fairly cryptic, so it can be hard to figure out what the heck all those settings do. Luckily, you can point your cursor at any setting to see a little yellow pop-up description called a tooltip (you don’t need to click—just don’t move your mouse for a couple seconds).

Tip

If the tooltips drive you crazy, you can hide ’em by choosing Photoshop?Preferences?Interface (Edit?Preferences?Interface on a PC) and turning off Show Tool Tips.

When you first install Photoshop, the Options bar is perched at the top of your screen, but it doesn’t have to stay there. If you’d rather put it somewhere else, grab its end and drag it wherever you want, as shown in Figure 1-2, middle. If you decide to put it back later (also called docking), just drag it to the top of the screen and, when you see a thin blue line appear (Figure 1-2, bottom), release your mouse button.

Figure 1-2. Top: The Options bar is customization central for whatever tool you’re currently using. But it doesn’t have to live at the top of the screen; you can undock it by dragging the tiny dotted lines circled here. Middle: Once you’ve freed the Options bar, you can drag it anywhere you want by grabbing the dark gray bar on its far left. Bottom: To redock the Options bar, drag it to the top of your screen. Once you see a thin blue line like the one visible here, release your mouse button.

Tip

If a tool seems to be misbehaving, it’s likely because you changed one of the Options bar’s settings and forgot to change it back. These settings are sticky: Once you change them, they stay that way until you change them back. Figure 1-17 explains how to reset a tool to its factory-fresh settings.

Note

Adobe recently added the ability to shrink the Options bar to a narrower version, which is handy if you’ve got a small screen. Skip to Changing Photoshop’s Appearance for the scoop.

Swapping Screen Modes

Photoshop includes three different screen modes for your document-viewing pleasure. Depending on what you’re doing, one will suit you better than the others. For example, you can make an image take up your whole screen (with or without the menus and Options bar), hide Photoshop’s panels, and so on (see Figure 1-3). To give each mode a spin, you first need to open an image: Choose File?Open, navigate to where an image lives, and then click Open.

Tip

You can free up precious screen real estate by pressing the Tab key to hide the Options bar and panels (pressing Shift-Tab hides all the panels except the Tools panel). This trick is a great way to get rid of distractions when you’re editing images, especially if you have a small monitor. To bring the panels back, press Tab again or mouse over to the edge of the Photoshop window where the panels should be; when you move your cursor away the panels, they’ll disappear again.

It’s a snap to jump between modes. Just press the F key repeatedly—unless you’re in the middle of cropping an image or using the Type tool (if you are, you’ll type a bunch of Fs)—or use the Screen Modes menu at the bottom of the Tools panel (circled in Figure 1-3, top). These are your choices:

• Standard Screen Mode is the view you see when you launch Photoshop for the first time. This mode includes menus, the Application Frame, the Options bar, panels, and document windows. Use this mode when the Application Frame is active and you need to scoot the whole of Photoshop—windows and all—around on your monitor (except for undocked panels or free-floating windows).

• Full Screen Mode With Menu Bar completely takes over your screen, puts your document in the center on a dark gray canvas or frame, and attaches any open panels to the and right edges of your screen. This mode is great for day-to-day editing because you can see all of Photoshop’s tools and menus without being distracted by the files and folders on your desktop. The dark gray background is also easy on the eyes and a great choice when color-correcting images (a brightly colored desktop can affect your color perception).

  Tip

  You can change Photoshop’s canvas color anytime by Control-clicking (right-clicking on a PC) the canvas itself. the shortcut menu that appears, choose Default (the dark, charcoal gray you see now), Black, Dark Gray, Medium Gray, or Light Gray. If none of those colors float your boat, you can pick your own by choosing Custom Color to open the Color Picker, which is explained on Choosing Individual Colors.

• Full Screen Mode hides all of Photoshop’s menus and panels, centers the document on your screen, and puts it on a black background. (If you’ve got rulers turned on, they’ll still appear, though you can turn ’em off by pressing ?-R [Ctrl+R]). This mode is great for displaying and evaluating your work or for distraction-free editing. And the black background really makes images pop off the screen (though the next section shows you how to change it to another color).

Figure 1-3. The many faces of Photoshop: Standard Screen Mode (top), Full Screen With Menu Bar (bottom left), and Full Screen (bottom right). You can edit images in any of these modes, though some give you more screen real estate than others. The Screen Modes menu (circled) lives at the bottom of the Tools panel. Figure 1-9 on page 14 tells you how to switch to a two-column Tools panel like the one shown here.

Changing Photoshop’s Appearance

While the dark gray interface colors introduced in CS6 are supposed to be easier on the eyes and help you see the colors in images more accurately, you may disagree. You may also want to increase the size of the text labels in the Options bar and panels. Fortunately, you can change several aspects of the program’s appearance by choosing Photoshop?Preferences?Interface (Edit?Preferences?Interface on a PC), as Figure 1-4 shows.

The next section tells you how to customize Photoshop’s look and feel even more by opening, closing, rearranging, and resizing panels. Read on!

Figure 1-4. Not a fan of the dark gray color theme? Use these settings to pick something lighter (the light gray square reverts to CS5’s color theme). To change Full Screen Mode’s background color to something other than black, use the Full Screen drop-down menu. Photoshop also sports a narrow Options bar (circled), which is nice for small screens. If the text labels throughout the program have you squinting, make ’em bigger by using the UI Font Size menu shown here (then quit and restart Photoshop to make your change take effect).

UP TO SPEED: Hiding vs. Quitting

If you need to do some work on your desktop or in another program, you can temporarily hide Photoshop, saving you the time and toe-tapping of quitting it and then restarting it again later.

On a Mac, press ?-Control-H or click the yellow dot at the top of the Application Frame to minimize the window (if you’ve changed your Appearance system preferences to Graphite, the dot is gray instead). Your workspace disappears, but Photoshop keeps running in the background. To bring it back to the forefront, click its icon in the Dock. You can also make Photoshop temporarily disappear by pressing ?-H; the first time you do, a dialog box appears asking if you’d like to assign that keyboard shortcut to make it hide Photoshop instead of hiding text highlighting, guides, and so on. (To change it back, edit your keyboard shortcuts as explained in the box on Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus, or Photoshop’s preferences as described in the first Note on Note.)

On a PC, you can minimize (hide) the program by clicking the minus button in Photoshop’s upper right; Windows tucks the program down your taskbar. To get it back, click its taskbar icon.

If your machine has at least 8 GB of memory (RAM), there’s absolutely no downside to hiding Photoshop. However, if you’re low on memory and your machine’s fan is cranking away, then choose Photoshop?Quit Photoshop (File?Exit on a PC) instead.

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Working with Panels

The right side of the Application Frame is home to a slew of small windows called panels, which let you work with frequently used features like colors, adjustments, layers, and so on. You’re free to organize the panels however you like and position them anywhere you want. Panels can be free floating or docked (attached) to the top, bottom, left, or right sides of your screen. And you can link panels together into groups, which you can then move around. Each panel also has its very own menu, called (appropriately enough) a panel menu, located in its top-right corner; its icon looks like four little lines with a downward-pointing triangle and is labeled in Figure 1-5, left.

Figure 1-5. Here you can see the difference between expanded panels (left) and collapsed panels (right). Double-click a panel’s tab to collapse it vertically, rolling it up like a window shade; single-click the tab again to expand the panel. You can also collapse a panel horizontally by clicking the right-pointing double arrows in its top right (circled, right), at which point it turns a small button. To expand one of these buttons back a panel, just click the left-pointing double arrows circled here (circled, middle).

Take a peek at the right side of your screen and you’ll see that Photoshop starts you off with three docked panel groups filled with goodies it thinks you’ll use a lot (there’s more on docked panels coming up shortly). The first group contains the Color and Swatches panels; the second group contains Adjustments and Styles; and the third contains Layers, Channels, and Paths. To work with a panel, activate it by clicking its tab.

Panels are like Silly Putty—they’re incredibly flexible. You can collapse, expand, move, and resize them, or even swap ’em for other panels. Here’s how:

• Collapse or expand panels. If panels are encroaching on your editing space, you can shrink them both horizontally and vertically so they look and behave like buttons. To collapse a panel (or panel group) horizontally so that it becomes a button nestled against the side of another panel or the edge of your screen, click the tiny double arrow in its top-right corner; click this same button again to expand the panel. To collapse a panel vertically against the bottom of the panel above it, as shown in Figure 1-5, right, double-click the panel’s tab or the empty area to its right; single-click the tab or double-click the empty area to roll the panel back down. To adjust a panel’s width, point your cursor at its edge and, when the cursor turns a double-headed arrow, drag or right to make the panel bigger or smaller (though some panels have a minimum width).

• Add and modify panel groups. You can open even more panels by opening the Window menu (which lists all of Photoshop’s panels) and clicking the name of the one you want to open. When you do, Photoshop puts the panel in a column to the of the ones that are already open and adds a tiny button to its right that you can click to collapse it both horizontally and vertically (just click the same button again to expand it). If the new panel is part of a group, like the Character and Paragraph panels, the extra panel tags along with it. If it’s a panel you expect to use a lot, you can add it to an existing panel group by clicking and dragging the dotted lines above its button a blank area in the panel group, as shown in Figure 1-6.

• Undock, redock, and close panels. the factory, Photoshop docks three sets of panel groups to the right side of your screen (or Application Frame). But you’re not stuck with the panels glued to this spot; you can set them free by turning them into floating panels. To liberate a panel, grab its tab, pull it out of the group it’s in, and then move it anywhere you want (see Figure 1-7). When you let go of your mouse button, the panel appears where you put it—all by itself.

  You can undock a whole panel group in nearly the same way: Click an empty spot in the group’s tab area and drag it out of the dock. Once you release your mouse button, you can drag the group around by clicking the same empty spot in the tab area. Or, if the group is collapsed, click the tiny dotted lines at the top of the group, just below the dark gray bar.

  To redock the panel (or panel group), drag it back to the right side of your screen. To prevent a panel docking while you’re moving it around, ?-drag (Ctrl-drag) it instead.

Figure 1-6. Top: When you open a new panel, Photoshop adds it to a column to the of your other panels and gives it a handy button that you can click to collapse or expand it, like the Info panel’s button circled here. The tiny dotted line above each button is its handle; click and drag one of these handles to reposition the panel in the column, add the panel to a panel group, and so on. If the panel you opened is related to another panel—like the Brush panel and the Brush Presets panel—then both panels will open as a panel group with a single handle. Middle: When you’re dragging a panel a panel group, wait until you see a blue line around the inside of the group before you release your mouse button. Here, the Info panel is being added to a panel group. (You can see a faint version of the Info panel’s button where the red arrow is pointing.) Bottom: When you release your mouse button, the new panel becomes part of the group. To rearrange panels within a group, drag their tabs (circled) or right. If the blue highlight lines are hard to see when you’re trying to group or dock panels, try dragging the panels more slowly. That way, when you drag the panel a group or dockable area, the blue highlight hangs around a little longer and the panel becomes momentarily transparent.

Figure 1-7. To undock a panel (or panel group), click the panel’s tab (or a free area to the right of the group’s tabs), and then drag the panel or group somewhere else on your screen. To dock it again, drag it to the right side of your screen—on top of the other panels. When you see a thin blue line appear where you want the panel (or group) to land, release your mouse button.

Note

The Timeline panel (which was called the Animation panel prior to Photoshop CS6) is docked to the bottom of your workspace, which is a docking hotspot, too. That said, Photoshop refuses to let you dock the Options bar down there.

To close a panel, click its tab and drag it out of the panel group to a different area of your screen (Figure 1-7); then click the tiny circle in the panel’s top-corner (on a PC, click the X in the panel’s top-right corner instead). Don’t worry—the panel isn’t gone forever; if you want to reopen it, simply choose it the Windows menu.

Getting the hang of undocking, redocking, and arranging panels takes a little practice because it’s tough to control where the little rascals land. When the panel you’re dragging is about to join a docking area (or a different panel group), a thin blue line appears showing you where the panel or group will go.

Customizing Your Workspace

Once you arrange Photoshop’s panels just so, you can keep ’em that way by saving your setup as a workspace, using the unlabeled Workspace drop-down menu at the right end of the Options bar (see Figure 1-8). Straight the factory, this menu is set to Essentials, which is a good general-use setup that includes panels that most people use regularly. The menu’s other options are more specialized: 3D is designed for working with 3D objects (see Chapter 21), Motion is for video editing, Painting is for (you guessed it) painting, Photography is for working with photos, and Typography is for working with text. To swap workspaces, simply click one of these presets (built-in settings), and Photoshop rearranges your panels accordingly.

Note

Gone in this version of Photoshop is the What’s New workspace, which used to highlight all the menu items that included new features. However, all is not lost: you can choose Help?What’s New to visit Adobe’s site and see a handy summary of features, listed by the year they were released (for example, Photoshop CC June 2014, and so on).

Figure 1-8. Most of the built-in workspaces are designed to help you perform specialized tasks. For example, the Photography workspace puts the Histogram and Navigation panels at the top right. Take the built-in workspaces for a test drive—they’ll undoubtedly give you customization ideas you hadn’t thought of! If you don’t see the Workspace menu and you’ve got the Application Frame turned on, point your cursor at the right side of the Photoshop window and, when it turns a double-headed arrow, click and drag rightward to increase the frame’s size.

To save your own custom workspace, first open and arrange the panels you want to include. Next, click the Workspace menu and choose New Workspace. In the resulting dialog box, give your setup a meaningful name and turn on the checkboxes for the customizations you want Photoshop to save. In addition to panel locations, you can save any keyboard shortcut and menu settings you’ve changed (see the box on Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus for more on changing these items)—just be sure to turn on the options for all the features you changed or they won’t be included in your custom workspace. When you click Save, your workspace shows up at the top of the Workspace menu.

If you’ve created a custom workspace that you’ll never use again, you can send it packin’. First, make sure you aren’t currently using the doomed workspace. Then, the Workspace menu, choose Workspace and, in the resulting dialog box, pick the offending workspace and then click Delete. Photoshop will ask if you’re sure; click Yes to finish it off.

The Tools Panel

The Tools panel (Figure 1-9, left) is home base for all of Photoshop’s editing tools, and it’s included in all the built-in workspaces. Until you memorize tools’ keyboard shortcuts, you can’t do much without this panel! When you first launch the program, you’ll see the Tools panel on the side of the screen, but you can drag it anywhere you want by clicking the tiny row of vertical dashes near its top (Figure 1-9, right).

Figure 1-9. There’s not enough room in the Tools panel for each tool to have its own spot, so related tools are grouped toolsets. The microscopic triangle at the bottom right of each toolset’s button lets you know it represents more than one tool (the Move and Zoom tools are the only ones that live alone). To see the other tools, click the tool’s button and hold down your mouse button (or right-click the button instead); Photoshop then displays a list of the other tools it harbors in a fly-out menu, as shown here (left). Photoshop starts you off with a one-column Tools panel (left), but you can collapse it two columns (right) by clicking the tiny double triangles circled here (click ’em again to switch back to one column). To undock the Tools panel, grab the dotted bar labeled here and drag the panel wherever you want it. You can dock the Tools panel to the or right edge of your screen, or leave it floating free.

Once you expand a toolset as explained in Figure 1-9, you’ll see the tools’ keyboard shortcuts listed to the right of their names. These shortcuts are great timesavers because they let you switch between tools without moving your hands off the keyboard. To access a tool that’s hidden deep within a toolset, add the Shift key to the tool’s shortcut key, and you’ll cycle through all the tools in that toolset. For example, to activate the Elliptical Marquee tool, press Shift-M repeatedly until that tool’s icon appears in the Tools panel.

Tip

If you need to switch tools temporarily—for a quick edit—you can use the spring-loaded tools feature. Just press and hold a tool’s keyboard shortcut to switch to that tool, and then perform your edit. As soon as you release the key, you’ll jump back to the tool you were using before. For example, if you’re painting with the Brush and suddenly make an error, press and hold E to switch to the Eraser and fix your mistake. Once you release the E key, you’re back to using the Brush tool. Sweet!

You’ll learn about the superpowers of each tool throughout this book. For a brief overview of each tool, check out Appendix C, which you can download this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds.

Tip

If you can’t remember which tool an icon represents, point your cursor at the icon for a couple of seconds while keeping your mouse perfectly still. After a second or two, Photoshop displays a handy tooltip that includes the tool’s name and keyboard shortcut.

Foreground and Background Color Chips

Photoshop can handle millions of colors, but its tools let you work with only two at a time: a foreground color and a background color. Each of these is visible as a square color chip near the bottom of the Tools panel (labeled in Figure 1-9, where they’re black and white, respectively). Photoshop uses your foreground color when you paint or fill something with color; it’s where most of the action is. The program uses your background color to do things like set the second color of a gradient (a smooth transition one color to another, or to transparency) or erase parts of a locked Background layer (Restacking Layers); this color is also helpful when you’re running special effects like the Clouds filter (Pixelate).

To change either color, click its color chip once to open the Color Picker (Choosing Individual Colors), which lets you another color for that particular chip. To swap your foreground and background colors, click the curved, double-headed arrow just above the two chips or press X. To set both color chips to their factory-fresh setting of black and white, click the tiny chips to their upper (in a two-column Tools panel, they’re at the lower left) or press D. Remember those two keyboard shortcuts (X and D); they’re extremely handy when you work with layer masks, which are covered in Chapter 3.

Common Panels

As mentioned earlier, when you first launch Photoshop, the program displays the Essentials workspace, which includes several useful panels. Here’s a quick rundown of why Adobe considers these panels so important:

• Color. This panel in the upper-right part of your screen includes your current foreground and background color chips and, the factory, a trio of sliders and a rainbow-colored bar that you can use to pick a new color for either chip. As you’ll learn on The Color Panel, you can now use this panel as a color picker that’s always open!

• Swatches. This panel holds miniature color samples, giving you easy access to them for use in painting or colorizing images (and new in Photoshop CC 2014, the most recent swatches you’ve used show up in a handy row at the top of the panel). It also stores a variety of color libraries like the Pantone Matching System (special inks used in professional printing). You’ll learn all about the Swatches panel in on The Swatches Panel.

• Adjustments. This panel lets you create adjustment layers. Instead of making color and brightness changes to your original image, you can use adjustment layers to make these changes on a separate layer, giving you all kinds of editing flexibility and keeping your original image out of harm’s way. They’re explained in detail in Chapter 3, and you’ll see ’em used throughout this book.

• Styles. Styles are special effects created with a variety of layer styles. For example, if you’ve created a glass-button look by adding several layer styles individually, you can save the whole lot of ’em as a single style so you can apply them all with one click. You can also choose tons of built-in styles; they’re discussed starting on The Styles Panel.

• Layers. This is the single most important panel in Photoshop. Layers let you work with images as if they were a stack of transparencies, so you can create one image many. By using layers, you can adjust the size and opacity of—and add layer styles to—each item independently. Understanding layers is the key to Photoshop success and nondestructive editing; you’ll learn all about them in Chapter 3.

• Channels. Channels are where Photoshop stores the color information your images are made from. Channels are extremely powerful, and you can use them to edit the individual colors in an image, which is helpful in sharpening images, creating selections (telling Photoshop which part of an image you want to work with), and so on. Chapter 5 has the scoop on channels.

• Paths. Paths are the outlines you make with the Pen and shape tools. But these aren’t your average, run-of-the-mill lines: they’re made up of points and paths instead of pixels, so they’ll always look perfectly crisp when printed. You can also resize them without losing any quality. You’ll conquer paths in Chapter 13.

• History. This panel is like your very own time machine: It tracks nearly everything you do to your image (the last 50 things, to be exact, though you can change this number using preferences [see Changing How Far Back You Can Go]). It appears docked as a button to the of the Color panel group. The next section explains how to use it to undo what you’ve recently done (if only that worked in real life!).

• Properties. This panel, which is also docked to the of the Color panel group, is where you access the settings for individual adjustment layers, shape layers, linked smart objects, and layer masks. You’ll dive headfirst masks in Chapter 3; for now, think of them as digital masking tape that lets you hide the contents of a layer.

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The Power of Undo

Thankfully, Photoshop is extremely forgiving: It’ll let you back out of almost anything you do, which is muy importante, especially when you’re getting the hang of things.

You’ve got several ways to retrace your steps, including the lifesaving Undo command. Just choose Edit?Undo or press ?-Z (Ctrl+Z). This command lets you undo the very last edit you made.

If you need to go back more than one step, use the Step Backward command instead: Choose Edit?Step Backward or press Option-?-Z (Alt+Ctrl+Z). Straight the factory, this command lets you undo the last 50 things you did, one at a time. If you want to go back even further, you can change that number by digging Photoshop’s preferences, as the next section explains. You can step forward through your editing history, too, by choosing Edit?Step Forward or Shift-?-Z (Shift+Ctrl+Z).

Note

Photoshop only lets you undo changes back to the point when you first opened the document you’re working on, meaning you can’t close a document and then undo changes you made before you closed it.

Changing How Far Back You Can Go

If you think you might someday need to go back further than your last 50 steps, you can make Photoshop remember up to 1,000 steps by changing the program’s preferences. Here’s how:

1. Choose Photoshop?Preferences?Performance (Edit?Preferences?Performance on a PC).

2. In the Preferences dialog box’sHistory States field, pick the number of steps you want Photoshop to remember.

   You can enter any number between 1 and 1,000 in this field. While increasing the number of history states might help you sleep better, doing so means Photoshop has to keep track of that many more versions of your document, which requires more hard drive space and processing power. So if you increase this setting and then notice that the program is running like molasses—or you’re suddenly out of hard drive space—try lowering it.

3. Click OK when you’re finished.

Turning Back Time with the History Panel

Whereas the Undo and Step Backward commands let you move back through changes one at a time, the History panel (Figure 1-10) kicks it up a notch and lets you jump back several steps at once. (You can step back through as many history states as you set in Photoshop’s preferences—see the previous section.) Using the History panel is much quicker than undoing a long list of changes one by one, and it gives you a nice list of exactly what tools and menu items you used to alter the image—in chronological order top to bottom—letting you pinpoint the exact state you want to jump back to. And, as explained in a moment, you can also take snapshots of an image at various points in the editing process to make it easier to hop back to the state you want.

After you make a few changes to an image, pop open the History panel by clicking its button (circled in Figure 1-10, top) or by choosing Window?History. When you do, Photoshop opens a list of the last 50 things you’ve done to the image, including opening it. To jump back in time, click the step you want to go back to, and Photoshop returns the image to the way it looked at that point. If you hop back further than you mean to, just click a more recent step in the list.

Figure 1-10. Top: The History panel keeps track of everything you do to your images, starting with opening them. You can even take snapshots of an image at crucial points during the editing process, such as when you convert it to black and white and then add a color tint. Bottom: If you take a snapshot, you can revert to that state later with a single click. For example, if you’ve given your image a sepia (brown) tint and later changed it to blue, you can easily go back to the sepia version by clicking the snapshot you took of it, as shown here, without having to step back through all the other changes you made. What a timesaver! History states don’t hang around forever—as soon as you close the document, they’re history (ha!). If you think you’ll ever want to return to an earlier version of the document, click the “Create new document current state” button at the bottom of the History panel (labeled in here). That way, you’ve got a totally separate document to return to so you don’t have to recreate that particular state.

If you’d like the top of the History panel to include thumbnail previews showing what your image looks like each and every time you save the document—in addition to the thumbnail you automatically get by opening the image—open the History panel’s menu and choose History Options. In the resulting dialog box, turn on Automatically Create New Snapshot When Saving. Clicking one of these saved-state thumbnails is a fast and easy way to jump back to the last saved version of the document.

Tip

You can also get back to the last saved version of a document by choosing File?Revert (The Revert Command).

Taking snapshots of an image along the way lets you mark key points in the editing process. A snapshot is more than just a preview of the image—it also includes all the edits you’ve made up to that point. Think of snapshots as milestones in your editing work: When you reach a critical point that you may want to return to, take a snapshot so you can easily get back to that version of the document. To take a snapshot, click the camera icon at the bottom of the History panel. Photoshop adds the snapshot to the top of the panel, just below the saved-state thumbnail(s). The snapshots you take appear in the list in the order you take them.

The History Brush

The History Brush takes the power of the History panel and lets you focus it on specific parts of an image. So instead of sending the entire image back in time, you can use this brush to paint edits away selectively, revealing the previous state of your choosing. For example, you could darken a portrait with the Burn tool (High-Contrast Black and White) and then use the History Brush to undo some of the darkening if you went too far, as shown in Figure 1-11.

Here’s how to use the History Brush to undo a serious burn you’ve applied:

1. Open an image—in this example, a photo of a person—and duplicate the image layer.

   You’ll learn all about opening images in Chapter 2, but, for now, choose File?Open; navigate to where the image lives on your computer, and then click Open. Next, duplicate the layer by pressing ?-J (Ctrl+J).

2. Activate the Burn tool by pressing Shift-O and then darken part of your image.

   The Burn tool lives in a toolset, so cycle through those tools by pressing Shift-O a couple of times (its icon looks like a hand making an O shape). Then mouse over to your image and drag across an area that needs darkening. Straight the factory, this tool darkens images pretty severely, giving you a lot to undo with the History Brush.

   POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Erasing to History

   At some point, you’ll realize that the perfect fix for your image is something you zapped 10 steps ago. For example, you may change the color of an object only to decide later that it looked better the way it was. Argh!

   Happily, Photoshop’s “Erase to History” feature lets you jump back in time and paint away the edits you no longer want. Erasing to history is a handy way to leave some changes in place while recovering your original image in other areas.

   First, grab the Eraser tool by pressing E and then, in the Options bar, turn on the “Erase to History” checkbox. Next, in the Layers panel, click the layer you want to edit, and then in the main document window, start dragging over the areas you want to restore to their former glory.

   How is erasing to history different using the History Brush? They both do basically the same thing. The only benefit to using the History Brush instead of “Erase to History” is that the brush’s Options bar lets you pick a blend mode menu to create different color effects as you erase to the previous state. (You’ll learn more about blend modes in Part 2 of this book; they control how the colors you add to an image—by painting, darkening, filling, and so on—blend with or cancel out the color that’s already there.)

   

   Figure 1-11. By using the History Brush set to the image’s earlier state—see step 4 below—you can undo all kinds of effects, including a little over-darkening using the Burn tool. You can reduce the opacity of the History Brush in the Options bar to make the change more gradual. The Art History Brush works similarly, but it adds bizarre, stylized effects as it returns your image to a previous state, as shown in the box on page 566.

3. Grab the History Brush by pressing Y.

   You’ll learn all about brushes and their many options in Chapter 12.

4. Open the History panel and then click a saved state or snapshot.

   This is where you pick which version of the image you want to go back to. If you dragged more than once in step 2, you’ll see several Burn states listed in the panel. To reduce just some of the darkening, choose one of the first Burn states; to get rid of all the darkening where you painted, choose the Open state. To pick a state, click in the panel’s left-hand column next to a state, and you’ll see the History Brush’s icon appear in that column.

5. Mouse over to your image and drag to paint the areas that are too dark to reveal the lighter version of the image.

   To make your change more gradual—if, say, you clicked the Open state but you don’t want to erase all the darkening—just lower the Opacity setting in the Options bar. That way, if you keep painting in the same place, you’ll expose more and more of the original image.

You can use the History Brush to easily undo anything you’ve done; just pick the state you want to revert to in the History panel, and then paint away!

The Revert Command

If you’ve taken your image down a path of craziness which you can’t rescue it by using Undo or the History panel, you can revert back to its most recent saved state by choosing File?Revert. This command opens the previously saved version of the image, giving you a quick escape route back to square one.

Note

If you haven’t made any changes to your image since it was last saved, you can’t run the Revert command; it’s dimmed in the File menu.

 

Tweaking Photoshop’s Preferences

As you learned earlier in this chapter, Photoshop is pretty darn customizable. In addition to personalizing the way its tools behave and how your workspace looks, you can make lots of changes using the program’s preferences, which control different aspects of Photoshop and let you turn features on or off, change how tools act, and fine-tune how the program performs.

Tip

Tooltips work on preference settings, too! So if you forget what a setting does, just point your cursor at it for a second or two and you’ll get a tiny yellow explanation.

To open the Preferences dialog box, choose Photoshop?Preferences?General (Edit?Preferences?General on a PC), or press ?-K (Ctrl+K). When you choose a category on the side of the dialog box, tons of settings related to that category appear on the right. The following pages give you an idea of the kinds of goodies in each category, and you’ll find guidance on tweaking preferences sprinkled throughout this book.

Tip

You can cycle through the preferences categories by pressing and holding the ? key (Ctrl on a PC) while tapping the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard.

General

The General pane of the Preferences dialog box (Figure 1-12) is a sort of catchall for settings that don’t fit anywhere else. Most of these options are either self-explanatory (Beep When Done, for example) or covered elsewhere in this book. A few, however, are worth taking a closer look at.

Figure 1-12. The General preferences include the incredibly powerful History Log settings. If you turn on History Log, Photoshop keeps track of everything you do to the document. This is an invaluable tool for folks who need to prove what they’ve done to an image in order to bill clients or produce legal documentation of all the edits they’ve made (think law enforcement professionals and criminal investigators). It’s also a great way to bring an assistant or coworker up to speed on your workflow.

Unless you tell it otherwise, Photoshop displays the Adobe Color Picker (see Choosing Individual Colors) anytime you choose a color. If you’re more comfortable using your operating system’s color picker instead, you can choose it the Color Picker drop-down menu. If you download and install third-party color pickers, they show up in this menu, too. However, since the Adobe Color Picker is designed to work with Photoshop and all its built-in options, using another color picker may mean losing quick access to critical features like Color Libraries (Loading Color Libraries).

The HUD Color Picker setting refers to the on-image color picker you can summon when using a tool that paints, such as the Brush tool. (HUD is short for “heads-up display.”) It’s also available in a variety of shapes and sizes (strip or wheel in small, medium, and large), and you can choose among ’em here. See Painting Scratch for more on using the HUD Color Picker.

The Image Interpolation menu controls the mathematical voodoo Photoshop performs when you resize an image with the Image Size dialog box (The Mighty Image Size Dialog Box) or the Crop tool (The Crop Tool). Back in CS6, Adobe added the Automatic option, which tells Photoshop to pick the method that it thinks will work best for your image. Will it always choose wisely? Only you can tell.

Other notable options here involve a couple of cool features: animated zoom and flick panning (both covered in Chapter 2). If your computer is running at a snail’s pace, try turning off one or both features (they can really tax slower video cards).

The other noteworthy options in the General preferences have to do with painting and drawing vectors (Chapters Chapter 12 and Chapter 13, respectively). For example, “Vary Round Brush Hardness based on HUD vertical movement” means that dragging up or down with your mouse while changing paint color with the on-image (HUD) color picker (Painting Scratch) changes the brush’s hardness; if you’d rather have that motion change opacity instead, turn this checkbox off. “Snap Vector Tools and Transforms to Pixel Grid” causes new vector shapes and paths to automatically snap to Photoshop’s pixel grid, ensuring precise alignment when you’re designing graphics for the Web. Both these settings are turned on straight the factory.

Note

Deleting Photoshop’s preferences file can be a useful troubleshooting technique. (Doing so resets all the preferences to what they were when you first installed the program.) Just choose Photoshop?Quit Photoshop (File?Exit on a PC), and then press and hold Shift-Option-? (Shift+Alt+Ctrl) when you restart Photoshop. Online Appendix B (available this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds) has more about this procedure.

Interface

These preferences control how Photoshop looks on your screen. As you learned on Changing Photoshop’s Appearance, you can use the Color Theme swatches at the top of these settings to change Photoshop’s colors (click the light gray swatch to resurrect the color theme of CS5 and earlier versions). You can squeeze a little more performance out of slower computers by setting the three Border drop-down menus to None. That way, Photoshop won’t waste any processing power generating pretty drop shadows around your images or around the Photoshop window itself.

If you’re familiar with all of Photoshop’s tools and don’t care to see the little yellow tooltips that appear when you point your cursor at tools and field labels, turn off Show Tool Tips. And if you’d like new documents to open in separate windows instead of in new tabs, turn off “Open Documents as Tabs.”

Note

If you use Photoshop on a Mac laptop and you’re constantly zooming and rotating your canvas with your trackpad by accident, turn off Enable Gestures.

Sync Settings

One of the benefits of Adobe’s Creative Cloud (see the box on Meet the Creative Cloud) is the ability to store and thus access your custom settings on different machines—great if you happen to work in multiple locations. The Sync Settings preferences, shown in Figure 1-13, let you control which of your settings and preset goodies are stored on Adobe’s Creative Cloud. They also let you trigger the process of uploading or downloading them.

Photoshop displays your Adobe ID at the top of this preference pane, and you use a series of checkboxes to tell Photoshop exactly what you want to sync. to right, your options are preferences, workspaces (a recent addition), actions, brushes, swatches, styles, gradients, custom shapes, tool presets, patterns, and contours. Alternatively, you can leave the What To Sync menu set to Everything and, each time you click Upload, all the settings that can be uploaded will be.

Note

New in Photoshop CC 2014, if the Workspace checkbox is turned on, any keyboard shortcut or menu customizations you’ve made using the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box (see the box on Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus) are included in your syncs. Nice!

Figure 1-13. Adobe simplified the sync-settings process in the latest version of Photoshop, and added the ability to upload any custom workspaces that you’ve saved (page 12). Technically, you don’t really sync settings any more, you merely upload them to—or download them from—Creative Cloud using the handy buttons shown here. That’s it. Photoshop even keeps track of when your last upload occurred.

Once you’ve clicked the Upload button to store your settings on Creative Cloud, you can access them on another machine by signing in with your Adobe ID. To do it, get comfy in front of the new machine, launch Photoshop, choose Help?Sign Out [Adobe ID], and in the Creative Cloud dialog box, click Sign Out. Then choose Help?Sign In, enter your credentials, and then click Sign In. Next, choose Photoshop?[Adobe ID]?Download Settings (Edit?[Adobe ID]?Download Settings on a PC), or pop open the Sync Settings preferences pane and click Download. Either way, Photoshop grabs the custom goodies you uploaded your other computer and loads ’em so they’re ready for you to use.

File Handling

These preferences, visible in Figure 1-14, control how Photoshop opens and saves files. If you’re a Mac person and you plan on working with images that’ll be opened on both Macs and PCs, make sure the Append File Extension menu is set to Always and that Use Lower Case is turned on. These settings improve the chances that your files will open on either type of computer without a hassle. (PC users can leave their File Handling settings alone because file extensions are required in Windows, whereas on a Mac they can be turned off.)

Since CS6, you’ve had the ability to keep working while Photoshop saves your file in the background—meaning you don’t have to wait until it’s finished to do something else—plus the program automatically saves your document at regular intervals. (CC lets you save additional documents before the first one finishes; there’s more on that in Chapter 2.) The “Save in Background” setting lets you turn background saving on or off, and you can control how the Auto Recovery feature works. To have Photoshop save your file more often than every 10 minutes, pick another duration the Automatically Save Recovery Information Every menu (your choices are 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, or 1 hour).

Figure 1-14. Photoshop’s File Handling preferences mostly deal with saving and document compatibility settings. This is also where you access the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in’s preferences (it’s installed with Photoshop, and you’ll learn all about in Part Two of this book). Click Camera Raw Preferences to see them.

Straight the factory, Photoshop is set to display a dialog box each time you save a file that asks if you want to save the image for maximum compatibility with PSD and PSB files (the native Photoshop format and the format for really big files, respectively; see File Formats); doing so improves the chances that your files can be understood by other programs like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. If that pesky dialog box annoys you, set the “Maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility” menu to Always and you’ll never see the dialog box again (plus you’ll have the peace of mind that comes with knowing your images will play nice with other programs). You can also keep Photoshop automatically compressing these files (to save ’em faster), but you’ll end up with bigger files. If speed is more important to you than file size, then turn on “Disable Compression of PSD and PSB Files.”

Note

The Adobe Drive option lets you connect to a digital asset management program (also called a DAM) in order to organize, track, and store files in a central location that other folks can access (so they can work on those files, too). Visit www.lesa.in/adobedrive for more info.

Another handy option is the Recent File List Contains setting, which lets you change the number of documents Photoshop lists in the Recent files menu (found by choosing File?Open Recent). This field is automatically set to 20, but feel free to change it if you frequently need to reopen the same documents.

Performance

The Performance preferences control how efficiently Photoshop runs on your computer. For example, the amount of memory the program has to work with affects how well it performs. In the Memory Usage section, the Let Photoshop Use field’s factory setting tells the program to use up to 60–70 percent of your machine’s available memory (the exact number may vary). If you’re tempted to increase it to 100 percent for better performance, don’t. Other programs need to use your computer’s memory, too, and leaving it set between 60 and 70 percent ensures that all of them get their fair share (after Photoshop takes the biggest chunk, that is).

The History & Cache section lets you change the number of history states that Photoshop remembers, as explained on Changing How Far Back You Can Go. You can also let the program set optimal cache levels and tile sizes for you; all you have to do is pick the kind of document you work on the most. Your options are “Tall and Thin,” “Default,” and “Big and Flat”; just click the one that’s closest to what you regularly use. Here’s why this matters: Cache levels controls how much image info is temporarily stored in your computer’s memory for things like screen and histogram refreshing (histograms are covered on Using Levels). The cache tile size is the amount of info Photoshop can store and process at one time (for example, larger tile sizes can speed things up if you work with documents with really large pixel dimensions). See? Now you appreciate Photoshop managing these settings for you!

If your computer’s hard drive is running low on space, consider adding another drive that Photoshop can use as a scratch disk—the place where it stashes the bazillions of temporary files it makes when you’re editing images (so that’s where those history states are stored!). If you don’t have a separate scratch disk, Photoshop stores those temporary files on your computer’s primary hard drive, taking up space you could be using for other documents. When you add a new internal hard drive or plug in an external drive, that drive appears in the Scratch Disks list shown in Figure 1-15.

To add one or more scratch disks, click the square in the “Active?” column next to each hard drive you want to use, and then drag the drives the order you want Photoshop to use them. For the zippiest feel, use a solid-state drive (SSD) that’s at least 256 GB in size (and is separate the one where your operating system is installed). Also, avoid using USB2-based drives, as they tend to be sluggish and can actually make Photoshop run slower (USB3-based drives work just fine).

Note

When it comes to Photoshop’s scratch disk, speed matters, and faster is better. Since the speed the disk spins plays a big role in a scratch disk’s performance, stick with disks rated at 7200 RPM (revolutions per minute) or faster. Slower 5400 RPM disks can take a toll on Photoshop’s performance, and 4200 RPM drives slow…Photoshop…to…a…crawl. Better yet, spend the extra money for a solid state drive (SSD), which has no moving parts and uses an electronic system to read and write data, making it much faster than its spinning cousins.

Figure 1-15. To give Photoshop the green light to use the new drive, put a checkmark in the disk’s “Active?” column, and then drag it up the first position. After that, Photoshop will be a little zippier because it’ll have two hard drives reading and writing info instead of one.

More than ever before, Photoshop CC takes advantage of your computer’s built-in ability to draw and process graphics. This results in faster and smoother performance when you’re doing things like resizing images with Free Transform, rotating your canvas temporarily with Rotate View, and using the HUD Color Picker (you’ll learn about all these features throughout this book). If you turn off the Use Graphics Processor setting, you lose all these superpowers, though you might squeeze a little more performance out of your machine. If you’ve got a newer machine, be sure to leave this setting turned on. That said, you can control how much your graphics processor is being tapped by clicking Advanced Settings (your choices are Basic, Normal, and Advanced).

Cursors

These preferences control how your cursor looks when you’re working with images. There are no right or wrong choices here, so try out the different styles and see what works best for you. Photoshop includes two types of cursors: painting cursors and everything else. When you choose different options here, Photoshop shows you a preview of each cursor. The Brush Preview color swatch controls the color of the brush preview that appears when you resize your brush by Control-Option-dragging (Alt+right-click+dragging on a PC) or right. To change this color, click the color swatch, choose a new hue the Color Picker dialog box, and then click OK. (See Controlling the Brush Cursor’s Appearance to learn how these options affect the Brush tool.)

Tip

If you press Caps Lock on your keyboard when you’re working with a tool that uses a brush cursor, Photoshop switches it to the precise cursor instead (it looks like a tiny crosshair). To switch back to the regular brush cursor, press Caps Lock again. This is a fantastic troubleshooting technique to remember!

Transparency and Gamut

The Transparency settings let you fine-tune what a layer looks like when part of it is transparent. Like the cursor settings, these options are purely cosmetic, so feel free to experiment. (You’ll learn more about transparency in Chapter 3.) The Gamut Warning section lets you set a highlight color that shows where colors in your image fall outside the safe range for the color mode you’re working in or the printer you’re using. (Chapter 16 has more about these advanced color concerns.)

Units and Rulers

The Units & Rulers preferences (Figure 1-16) let you pick which unit of measurement Photoshop uses. The Rulers menu, not surprisingly, controls the units displayed in your document’s rulers (though you can change them on the fly by right-clicking a ruler, as described on Guides, Grids, and Rulers); your choices are pixels, inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, and percent. If you work on a lot of documents destined for print, inches, points, or picas are probably your best bet (in the USA, that is). If you create images primarily for the Web, choose pixels instead. Leave the Type menu set to Points unless you need to work with type measured in pixels or millimeters, which can be handy if you need to align text in a web page layout.

Figure 1-16. To really save some time, take a moment to adjust the settings in the New Document Preset Resolutions section (resolution, as you’ll learn on page 254, controls pixel size). that point on, Photoshop automatically fills in the New Document dialog box with the settings you entered here (you’ll learn about creating documents beginning on page 38).

The Column Size settings are handy when you’re designing graphics to fit specific-sized columns in a page-layout program like Adobe InDesign. Just ask the person who’s creating the InDesign layout what measurements to use.

Guides, Grid, and Slices

These preferences let you choose the colors for your document guides (Guides, Grids, and Rulers), grid (Smart Guides), and slice lines (Slicing an Image). You can also set the grid’s spacing and the number of subdivisions that appear between each major gridline with the “Gridline every” and Subdivisions fields, respectively.

Plug-Ins

You can make Photoshop do even more cool stuff by installing third-party programs called plug-ins. There are several useful plug-ins out there, and this book has a whole chapter devoted to them (Chapter 19).

Note

These preferences used to let you store plug-ins somewhere other than your computer’s Photoshop folder, but Adobe recently removed that option. Evidently it was causing confusion as some folks used the same Plug-ins folder for multiple versions of the program, which resulted in a lot of crashes.

Photoshop comes with several built-in plug-ins, such as Adobe Camera Raw (Working with Raw Files) and most everything in the filter menu. And Photoshop CC 2014 sports a new plug-in named Generator, a JavaScript-based system used to create application programming interfaces (APIs). Generator’s capabilities will expand over time, but for now you can use it to generate (hence its name) GIF, PNG, JPG, or SVG files for the Web simply by naming layers or layer groups with specific tags (you don’t need to go near the File?Export or Save As commands). You’ll learn more about using Generator on Exporting Web Graphics with Generator, but this is where you turn it on.

The Filters & Extension Panels section lets you repopulate the Filter menu by turning on “Show all Filter Gallery groups and name” (Adaptive Wide Angle). Go ahead and leave both extension-related checkboxes in this section turned on so Photoshop can connect to the Internet if a plug-in or panel needs to grab information a website. However, since Adobe removed Flash-based panels this version of Photoshop (specifically, the Kuler, Mini Bridge, and Adobe Exchange panels), as of this writing, there aren’t any panels in the Window menu’s Extension category. (That said, if you download the HTML-based Kuler panel the Adobe Add-Ons website, it shows up in the Extensions category. Other Color Scheme–Generating Tools has details.) Any changes you make in this section take effect after you restart Photoshop.

Type

Photoshop has an amazing text engine under its hood that you’ll learn about in Chapter 14. The preferences here let you toggle smart quotes (the curly kind) on or off, as well as enable other languages. If you work with Asian characters, turn on the East Asian option and make sure Enable Missing Glyph Protection is also turned on. That way you won’t end up with weird symbols or boxes if you try to use a letter or symbol that isn’t installed on your machine. Photoshop can work with Middle Eastern and South Asian languages, too. (Any changes you make in the Choose Text Engine Options section take effect only after you restart Photoshop.)

Because seeing a font in its typeface is so handy when you’re choosing fonts, Adobe turned on font previews automatically back in CS5, and then in CS6 they removed the Font Preview Size from preferences altogether. These days, you adjust the preview size not in the Preferences dialog box, but by choosing Type?Font Preview Size, where you can pick among six handy options, none to huge.

3D

As you learned in the note on Note, Adobe merged the Extended and Standard versions of the program Photoshop CC, meaning everyone now has access to the program’s 3D tools. (Chapter 21 teaches you how to get started creating and working with 3D objects.)

You can use the preferences in this section to adjust the amount of video card memory (VRAM) Photoshop can use while you’re working in the 3D environment, as well as the color and size of the various overlays you’ll encounter when creating or editing 3D text and objects. The options on the right side of the preference pane let you change how Photoshop displays 3D objects, their interactive controls, and how much detail the program displays when you load a 3D object that was created in another program. Unless you’re an expert in working with 3D objects, it’s best to leave most of these settings alone.

Experimental Features

New in Photoshop 2014 is the ability to try new features before Adobe finalizes ’em. By doing so, you can give Adobe feedback that may help shape the final version of that particular feature. The list of experimental goodies available here will change over time, but as of this writing, it includes Enable Multitone 3D Printing (lets capable 3D printers print in more than one color), “Scale UI 200% for high-density displays (Windows only)” (uses a 200% zoom level for HiDPI displays), and “Use Touch Gestures (Windows only)” (allows gesturing on touchscreen monitors).

It’s up to you whether you want to live on the cutting edge. To try a new feature, turn on its checkbox, click OK, and then restart Photoshop. If you decide you don’t like that feature, pop open the Experimental Features preferences, turn the feature’s checkbox off, click OK, and (you guessed it) restart Photoshop.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus

Keyboard shortcuts can make the difference between working quickly and working at warp speed. They can drastically reduce the amount of time you spend doing things like choosing menu items and grabbing tools. Photoshop has a ton of built-in keyboard shortcuts and menus, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with ’em. You can reassign shortcuts, add new ones, and show or hide menu options. Here’s how to add or change keyboard shortcuts:

1. Choose Edit?Keyboard Shortcuts.

2. In the “Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus” dialog box, use the Shortcuts For menu to choose which type of shortcuts you want to add or change. Your options are Application Menus (like the File and Edit menus), Panel Menus (the menus on the program’s various panels), and Tools.

3. In the long list below the Shortcuts For menu, pick the shortcut you want to change. (If a list item has a flippy triangle next to it, click the triangle to see all the options nested within that item.)

4. Enter a new shortcut in the Shortcut field, and then click Accept.

5. To save your new shortcut to Photoshop’s factory set of shortcuts, click the first hard-disk icon near the top of the dialog box (to the right of the Set menu). In the resulting dialog box, click Save, and Photoshop names your shortcuts Photoshop Defaults (Modified). To create a brand-new set of shortcuts instead, click the second hard-disk icon with the little dots underneath it; in the dialog box that appears, give your custom shortcut set a meaningful name, and then click Save. (Creating separate keyboard shortcut sets lets you quickly switch back to Photoshop’s factory shortcuts, or switch between sets you’ve made for specific tasks by choosing one the Set menu at the top of the dialog box.)

You can also clear an existing keyboard shortcut for another use. First, make note of which menu the existing shortcut currently lives in. Next, find that menu’s name in the “Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus” dialog box’s list, click its flippy triangle to expand that item, and then click to highlight the shortcut. Finally, click the Shortcut button on the right and consider it free at last.

To help you remember the new shortcuts, you can print a handy chart to tack up on the wall. In the “Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus” dialog box, pick your custom set the Set menu, and then click Summarize. In the resulting Save dialog box, give the list of shortcuts a name, choose where to save it, and then click Save. Photoshop creates an HTML file that you can open in any Web browser or HTML-savvy program and then print. (You can impress your colleagues by telling them that you reprogrammed Photoshop to do your bidding; they’ll likely have no idea how easy it is to change this stuff.)

What if you need to reinstall Photoshop or upgrade to a newer version? The Migrate Presets feature copies over your keyboard shortcuts so you don’t lose ’em (see the Note on Note).

The “Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus” dialog box also lets you modify the program’s menus: If there are commands you rarely use, you can hide ’em to shorten and simplify menus. Click the Menus tab near the top of the dialog box and then, the Menu For drop-down menu, choose Application Menus or Panel Menus, depending on which ones you want to tweak. Next, click the little flippy triangle next to each menu’s name to see the items it includes. To hide a menu item, click the eye in its Visibility column; to show a hidden item, click then empty square in its Visibility column. (If you suddenly need to access a hidden menu item, choose Show All Menu Items the very bottom of the affected menu.) You can even colorize menu items so they’re easier to spot. To do that, pick the item you want to highlight, click the word None in the Color column, and then choose a color the resulting drop-down menu. Click OK and enjoy your new customizations.

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Working with Presets

Once you get comfortable in Photoshop, you can customize the behavior of almost every tool in the Tools panel. For example, if you find yourself entering the same Options bar settings over and over again for a certain tool, then saving those settings can save you time. In fact, Photoshop includes a bunch of built-in tool recipes, called presets, such as frequently used crop sizes, colorful gradient sets, patterns, shapes, and brush tips. You can access ’em through the tool’s Preset Picker at the far of the Options bar, as shown in Figure 1-17 (top).

Click a preset in the list to activate it, and then use the tool as you normally would. To save a new preset, enter your custom settings in the Options bar, and then click the Create New Preset icon labeled here. Give the preset a name in the resulting dialog box, click OK, and it appears in the Preset Picker list. To reset a tool to its factory-fresh settings, load additional presets, or access the Preset Manager (Figure 1-17, bottom), click the gear icon.

Figure 1-17. Top: To access a tool’s presets or create new ones, open its Preset Picker at the far of the Options bar (circled). Bottom: The Preset Manager gives you access to presets for all of Photoshop’s tools (except for the Convert Point tool—see page 575). Click the gear circled here to open this menu, which lets you change the size of the previews, as well as reset, replace, and otherwise manage presets. To save your eyesight, set the preview size to Large List so you can actually see what your options are. Changing the preview size here also changes it in the Preset Picker.

The Preset Manager (Figure 1-17, bottom) handles loading, saving, and sharing Photoshop’s built-in presets, as well as any you create yourself. You can open it by choosing Edit?Presets?Preset Manager. Each group of settings, like a category of brushes, is called a preset library. To see a certain preset library, choose it the Preset Type drop-down menu at the top of the Preset Manager.

Clicking the gear icon labeled in Figure 1-17 (bottom) lets you set the category of presets you’re viewing to the factory-fresh settings (choose “Reset [name of category] Presets” and then click OK) or load new ones. You can make these adjustments when you’re using the tools themselves, but the Preset Manager gives you a bigger preview space, which makes these organizational chores a little more tolerable.

Note

Photoshop’s Migrate Presets feature lets you easily transfer presets the previous version of the program (in CC, it only transfers presets the most current version of Photoshop; other versions are simply ignored). The first time you crack open Photoshop CC, the program kindly asks whether you want to transfer your presets the most recent version hanging around on your machine. If you accept, your goodies are copied over to CC (if the older presets have the same name as the newer ones, Photoshop copies only the newer ones). If you don’t encounter the Migrate Presets option when you first launch CC, it means the installer didn’t find any presets to copy over.

If you didn’t migrate your presets when you first launched the Photoshop, you can do it anytime by choosing Edit?Presets?Migrate Presets, or by resetting your preferences (the first Note on Note explains how). Happily, migrating presets in CC doesn’t require you to restart the program before using ’em.

Sharing Presets

Once you’ve got your own custom settings for tools, styles, or what have you, feel free to share them with the masses. You can share them with other computers (handy when the whole team needs to use the same color swatches or brushes, say) and upload them to the Web (for the whole world to download).

In Photoshop CC, managing and sharing presets is easy:

• To share all your presets—including actions, keyboard shortcuts, menu customizations, workspaces, brushes, swatches, gradients, styles, patterns, contours, custom shapes, and tools—choose Edit?Presets?Export/Import Presets. In the resulting dialog box, use the Export Presets tab to tell Photoshop which goodies you want to share (say, actions and workspaces), and then click Export Presets (see Figure 1-18). Photoshop opens the “Choose a Folder” dialog box—just pick a spot that’s easy for you to find, and then click Open. Photoshop creates a new folder named Exported Presets in the location you picked and dutifully lets you know that it has put your presets there.

  To import presets, click the Import Presets tab, and then click Import Folder. In the resulting dialog box, navigate to where the presets live on your hard drive and click Open. Back in the Export/Import Presets dialog box, choose the presets you want to import the left-hand list (or click the Add All button), and then click Import Presets.

  

  Figure 1-18. Using the Export/Import Presets command is a great way for big companies, schools, and design firms to share their presets across a whole army of computers. Doing this ensures consistency and accuracy in the artwork they create, and can boost production speed through the use of carefully crafted actions (see Chapter 18). To choose an item for exporting or importing, double-click it in the column on the left, or single-click it and then use the direction buttons (circled) to add or remove presets the list.

• To share just a few presets (excluding actions, keyboard shortcuts, menu customizations, and workspaces) create a preset library of your own by opening the Preset Manager (Edit?Presets?Preset Manager) and choosing the presets you want to share (Shift-click or ?-/Ctrl-click to highlight ’em). Next, click the Save Set button, and in the resulting Save dialog box, give your custom library a name. Unless you pick a different location on your hard drive, Photoshop automatically saves it in the folders where it stores all custom settings. When everything looks good, click Save.

  Once you’ve saved your custom library, you can email it to folks or upload it to a website for others to download. If you’re uploading it to the Web, make sure the file keeps the extension Photoshop gave it (.abr for brushes, for example), and that it doesn’t have any spaces in its name (use “DragonScalesBrush” rather than “Dragon Scales Brush,” say).

  If you’re on the receiving end of a preset library, open the Preset Manager and click Load. Navigate to where the library lives, and then click Open. (Alternatively, you can choose Edit?Presets?Export/Import Presets, and then click the Import Presets tab shown in Figure 1-18.) The next time you use a tool that has custom presets, you’ll see the new library’s options in the tool’s Preset Picker menu.

  To add to the fun, you can also rename individual presets. In the Preset Manager dialog box, choose the relevant library the Preset Type menu, and then click the soon-to-be-renamed preset to activate it. Click the Rename button, type a new moniker in the Name field, and then click OK.

  To a preset library you never use, choose it the Preset Manager’s Preset Type menu, and then click Delete.

Tip

If you’ve managed to mess up one of Photoshop’s built-in preset libraries by adding items that don’t work the way you want, you can easily restore it: Open the Preset Manager and choose the library you want to reset. Then, click the gear icon circled back in Figure 1-17, bottom, and choose “Reset [type of preset]” (for example, Brushes). Photoshop asks if you want to replace the current brushes or append (add to) them. Click OK to replace the brushes, and you’ll be back to the factory-fresh settings.

 

Chapter 2. Opening, Viewing, and Saving Files

Chances are good that if you’re holding this book, you’re spending a lot of time in Photoshop. So the ability to shave off a minute here and there routine stuff can really add up. Heck, if you’re lucky, you’ll save enough time to read a book, ride your bike, or catch an episode of Marvel’s Agents of Shield.

One way to steal back some of that time is to work more efficiently, and that means learning tricks for the less glamorous stuff like opening, viewing, and saving files. And since you’ll be doing these things so often, it’s important to form good habits so your documents are set up properly the get-go. (It would be truly heartbreaking to find that the artwork you’ve spent weeks creating is too small to print, or that you saved the file in such a way that you can’t edit its contents later on.) Finally, since a key part of working with images is navigating vast pixel landscapes, this chapter teaches you some handy ways to move around within your images onscreen.

 

Creating a New Document

Photoshop gives you a variety of ways to accomplish most tasks, including creating a new document. Sure, you can choose File?New, but it’s faster to press ?-N (Ctrl+N). Either way, you’ll be greeted with the New dialog box shown in Figure 2-1, which Adobe recently simplified slightly.

Figure 2-1. Top: The New dialog box is where life begins for any Photoshop file you make scratch. The settings here let you pick, among other things, the document’s dimensions, resolution, and color mode, all of which affect the quality and size of the image. You’ll learn more about these options in the following pages. New in this version of Photoshop is the ability to pick a custom background color. To do so, click the swatch next to the Background Contents menu (circled) to summon the Color Picker. Bottom: Whatever you enter in the Name box appears in the document’s title bar (circled).

You’d think naming a document would be simple: Just type something in the Name box and you’re done, right? Not quite. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• If you’re working on a Mac, don’t start file names with periods. Files whose names start with periods are invisible in Mac OS X (meaning neither you nor Photoshop can see them), which makes ’em darn hard to work with. (That said, if you’ve got the know-how, you can dip your Mac’s Terminal app—or use a third-party program—to see hidden files.)

• If folks need to open your files on both Mac and Windows machines, don’t put slashes (/), colons (:), angle brackets (<, >), pipes, (|), asterisks (), or question marks (?) in the file names, either.

Photoshop’s Ready-Made Documents

After you’ve named your document, you need to pick a size for it. You’ve got two choices here: Enter the dimensions you’d like in the New dialog box’s Width and Height fields, or pick one of Photoshop’s canned choices (4?x6? landscape photo, 640x480–pixel web page, and so on) the Preset and Size menus shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. Once you choose an option the Preset menu (which includes different types of paper, electronic formats, and recently opened document sizes), Photoshop sets the Size menu and its related fields (including Width, Height, Resolution, and Color Mode) to the appropriate settings. Presets are great timesavers, and they can help you avoid mistakes when creating new documents.

The advantage of picking a canned option is that, in addition to filling in the dimensions for you, Photoshop plugs in resolution and color-mode settings. You’ll learn more about these two options in a minute, but if you’re new to the program, these presets (document recipes) are a great way to make sure you’re starting off with a well-configured document. If you use a preset in the Film & Video category, for instance, you automatically get document guides that help you keep important parts of the image or text within a safe viewing area (see Guides, Grids, and Rulers for more on guides). Besides, the presets can be helpful even if they’re not exactly what you need. For example, if you find one that’s the right size but the wrong resolution, just pick it, adjust the resolution, and you’re on your way. (The box below explains how to create a document that has the same size and resolution settings as an existing one.)

UP TO SPEED: Stealing Document Settings

Need to create a document that’s the same size and resolution as an existing document? No problem—just snag the original file’s settings and use ’em to make another. You can swipe a document’s settings in several ways:

• Open the existing document and then press ?-N (Ctrl+N) to open the New dialog box. Click the Preset drop-down menu, which includes the names of all open documents. Pick the document you want and Photoshop adjusts all the dialog box’s settings to match.

• With the existing document open, press ?-A (Ctrl+A) to create a selection around the document’s edges, and then press ?-C (Ctrl+C) to copy the document’s contents to your computer’s memory (a.k.a. the Clipboard). Next, choose File?New or press ?-N (Ctrl+N) and Photoshop fills in the document’s settings for you. (If you’ve created a selection that’s smaller than the document itself, you can use this maneuver to create a new document that matches the selection’s rectangular dimensions; see Chapter 4 for the full story on selections.)

• If you want to base your new document on the last new document you created since you launched the Photoshop, press ?-Option-N (Ctrl+Alt+N) or hold down the Option key (Alt on a PC) while you choose File?New.

Tip

Photoshop includes a bunch of presets for common video formats as well as devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Choose Film & Video or Mobile & Devices the New dialog box’s Preset menu and you’ll see a slew of useful goodies!

Setting Size and Resolution

In Photoshop, the word “size” refers to two different things: file size (640 kilobytes or 2.4 megabytes, for example) and document dimensions (like 4?x6? or 640x480 pixels). You’ll find plenty of advice throughout this book on how to control file size, but this section is about the size of your document’s canvas.

Photoshop can measure canvas size in pixels, inches, centimeters, millimeters, points, picas, and columns. In the New dialog box, just pick the unit of measurement that’s appropriate for your project—or the easiest for you to work with—the drop-down menus to the right of the Width and Height fields. If you’re designing a piece for the Web or for use in presentation software, pixels are your best bet. If you’re going to print the image, inches are a common choice. Columns come in handy when you’re making an image that has to fit within a specific number of columns in a page-layout program, such as InDesign or QuarkXPress.

Note

Photoshop assumes you want to use the same unit (say, inches) to measure width and height, so it automatically changes both fields when you adjust one. If you really do need to work with different units, just hold the Shift key while you pick the second unit to make Photoshop leave the other field alone.

The New dialog box’s Resolution field controls pixel size by specifying the number of pixels per inch or per centimeter in your document. High-resolution documents have smaller pixels, as they contain more pixels per inch than low-resolution documents of the same size. You’ll learn all about resolution in Chapter 6. For now, here’s some ready-to-use guidance: If you’re designing an image that will be viewed only onscreen (in a web browser or a slideshow presentation, for example) enter 72 in the Resolution field. If you’re going to print the image at home, set the resolution to at least 240 pixels per inch; if it’s headed to a professional printer, enter 300 or more instead.

Tip

If you don’t know the exact size your document needs to be, it’s better to make it really big; you can always shrink it down later. See Resizing Images for more on resizing documents.

Once you enter in the Width, Height, and Resolution fields, Photoshop calculates the document’s file size—the amount of space it takes up on your computer’s hard drive—and displays it in the New dialog box’s lower-right corner (in Figure 2-1, for example, the file size is 2.25 MB).

Just because you make a document a certain size doesn’t mean you can’t have artwork in that file that’s bigger than the document’s dimensions. Photoshop is perfectly fine with objects that extend beyond the document’s edges (also called document boundaries), but you can’t see or print those parts. It may sound odd, but if you paste a photo or a piece of vector art (see the box on Raster Images vs. Vector Images) that’s larger than your document, those extra bits will dangle off the edges (text that you make with the Type tool can dangle off, too). To resize your document so you can see everything—even the stuff that doesn’t quite fit—choose Image?Reveal All; Photoshop modifies the document’s dimensions so everything fits.

Choosing a Color Mode

The New dialog box’s Color Mode menu determines which colors you can use in the document. You’ll spend most of your time in RGB mode (which stands for “red, green, blue”), but you can switch modes whenever you like. (The drop-down menu to the right of the Color Mode menu controls the document’s bit depth, which is explained in the box on Understanding Bit Depth.)

Unless you choose a different color mode, Photoshop automatically uses RGB. The Color Mode menu gives you the following options:

• Bitmap restricts you to two colors: black and white. (Shades of gray aren’t welcome at the Bitmap party.) This mode is useful when you’re scanning high-contrast items like black-and-white text documents or creating graphics for handheld devices that don’t have color screens.

• Grayscale also contains no color, but expands on Bitmap mode by adding shades of gray between pure black and pure white. The higher the document’s bit depth, the more shades of gray—and so the more details—it can contain. Eight-bit documents include 256 shades of gray; 16-bit documents extend that range to over 65,000; and 32-bit documents crank it up to over 4.2 billion (see the box on Understanding Bit Depth for more on bit depth). Use this mode if you’re designing an ad for a newspaper printed in black and white.

• RGB Color is the color mode you’ll use the most, and it’s also the one your monitor and digital camera use to represent a wide range of colors. This mode shows colors as a mix of red, green, and blue light, with each having a numeric value between 0 and 255 that describes the brightness of each color present (for example, fire-engine red has an RGB value of 250 for red, 5 for green, and 5 for blue). As with Grayscale mode, the higher a document’s bit depth, the more details it can contain. In this mode, you can choose among 8-, 16-, and 32-bit documents. (See Chapter 5 for more on RGB mode.)

• CMYK Color simulates the colored inks used in professional printing (its name stands for “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK”). This mode doesn’t have as wide of a color range as RGB because it’s limited to the colors a printer—whether it’s an inkjet, commercial offset, or digital press—can reproduce with ink and dyes on paper. You’ll learn more about CMYK in Chapter 5, and Chapter 16 explains when you should use this mode.

• Lab Color mode, which is based on the way we see color, lets you use all the colors human eyes can detect. It represents how colors should look no matter which device they’re displayed on, whereas RGB and CMYK modes limit a file’s colors to what’s visible onscreen or in a printed document, respectively. The downside to this mode is that many folks have a hard time creating the colors they want in it. You’ll find various techniques involving Lab mode sprinkled throughout Part 2 of this book.

UP TO SPEED: Understanding Bit Depth

You may have heard the terms “8-bit” and “16-bit” tossed around in photographic circles (confusingly, neither has anything to do with Photoshop being a 64-bit program, as the box on What Does “64-bit” Mean? explains). When people refer to bits, they’re talking about how many colors an image contains. Photoshop’s color modes determine whether a document is an 8- or a 16-bit image (other, less common options are 1-bit and 32-bit). Since you’ll run these labels fairly often, it helps to understand what they mean.

A bit is the smallest unit of measurement that computers use to store information: either a 1 or a 0 (on or off, respectively). Each pixel in an image has a bit depth, which controls how much color information that pixel can hold. So an image’s bit depth determines how much color info the image contains. The higher the bit depth, the more colors the image can display. And the more colors in your image, the more info (details) you’ve got to play with in Photoshop.

To understand bit depth, you need to know a little about channels. Photoshop stores your image’s color info separated a single channel for each color (see Chapter 5 for details). For example, an RGB image has three channels: red, green, and blue. By viewing all three channels at once, you see a full color image.

With all that in mind, here’s a quick tour of your various bit choices in Photoshop:

• In Bitmap color mode, your pixels can be only black or white. Images in this mode are called 1-bit images because each pixel can be only one color—black or white (they’re also known simply as bitmap images).

• An 8-bit image can hold two in each bit, which equals 256 possible color values. Why 256? Since each of the eight bits can hold two possible values, you get 256 combinations. (For math fans, that’s 2⁸). Images in Grayscale mode contain one channel, so that’s 8 bits per channel, equaling 256 colors. Since images in RGB mode contain three channels (red, green, and blue), folks refer to them as 24-bit images (8 bits per channel x 3 = 24), but they’re still really just 8-bit images. With 256 combinations for each channel (that’s 2⁸ x 2⁸ x 2⁸), you can have over 16 million colors in an RGB image. Since CMYK images have four channels, folks refer to them as 32-bit images (8 bits per channel x 4 = 32), but again, these are still 8-bit images. Over 200 combinations per channel and four channels add up to a massive number of possible color values, but since you’re dealing with printed ink, your color range in CMYK is dictated by what can actually be reproduced on paper, which reduces it to about 55,000 colors.

• 16-bit images contain 65,536 colors in a single channel and are produced by high-end digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras shooting in raw format and/or by really good scanners. On your screen, these files don’t look any different other images, but they take up twice as much hard drive space. Pro photographers love 16-bit images because the extra color range gives them more editing flexibility, even though the larger file sizes can slow Photoshop down. Also, not all of Photoshop’s tools and filters work on 16-bit images.

• 32-bit images, referred to as high dynamic range (HDR), contain more colors than you can shake a stick at. See Creating HDR Images for more info.

For the most part, you’ll deal with 8-bit images, but if you’ve got a camera that shoots at higher bit depths, by all means, take a weekend and experiment to see if the difference in quality is worth the sacrifice of hard drive space (and editing speed). And if you’re restoring a really old photo, it may be helpful to scan it at a high bit depth so you have a wider range of colors to work with. (See the box on Scanning 101 for more scanning tips.)

Choosing a Background

The New dialog box’s Background Contents menu lets you choose what’s on the background layer—the only layer you start out with in a new document or when you open a photo. Your choices are White, Background Color (uses the color your background color chip is set to [Foreground and Background Color Chips]), Transparent (leaves the background completely empty), and a new option: Other. If you pick Other, the Color Picker opens to let you choose a custom color. (The same thing happens if you click the tiny white square to the right of the Background Contents menu.)

What you choose here isn’t crucial—if you change your mind, you can fill the background layer with another color (Filling a Layer with Color), turn off its visibility (Hiding and Showing Layers), or it once you start adding other layers (your document has to contain at least one layer). The Transparent option is handy if your document is part of a bigger project where it’ll be placed on top of other artwork; when you choose this option, you see a gray-and-white checkerboard pattern, as explained in the box on Seeing Transparency.

Advanced Options

The Advanced section at the bottom of the New dialog box contains the following menus:

• Color Profile. A color profile is a set of instructions that determine how computer monitors and printers display and print your document’s colors. Unless you’re using a document preset, this menu is set to the same profile listed in the Color Settings dialog box (Calibrating Your Monitor), which, unless you’ve changed it, is “sRGB IEC61966-2.1.” Leave this setting alone unless you know you need to use a specific color profile for your project; otherwise, the image’s colors may not look the way you expect them to. You’ll learn all about color profiles on Understanding Color Gamuts and Profiles.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Seeing Transparency

  What’s up with the gray-and-white checkerboard pattern in my new document? I thought it was supposed to be blank!

  If you tell Photoshop to make your background layer transparent, then it fills your new document with a checkerboard pattern. Don’t worry: That checkerboard is just what the program uses to represent transparency on the background layer. In other words, the checkered pattern is just a reminder that there aren’t any pixels on that layer (or on that particular part of a layer).

  If you want, you can change how the checkerboard pattern looks by choosing Photoshop?Preferences?Transparency & Gamut (Edit?Preferences?Transparency & Gamut on a PC). In the Transparency Settings area, tweak the options to make the squares bigger or smaller or change their colors. If you can’t stand seeing the checkered pattern no matter what it looks like, turn it off by setting the Grid Size option to None. When you’ve got things set the way you want, click OK.

• Pixel Aspect Ratio. This setting determines the shape of the image’s pixels by changing their size. This setting gets its name the term aspect ratio—the relationship between an image’s width and height. (For example, a widescreen television has an aspect ratio of 16:9.) the factory, Photoshop’s pixels are square. Although square pixels are fine for photos, printed images, and onscreen use, they look funky and distorted in video, which has a tendency to make everything appear short and fat (including people). So if you’re using Photoshop to make a video, try to find out which video format you need and then choose Film & Video the Preset menu, and the appropriate size the Size menu. That way, Photoshop adjusts this setting accordingly.

Saving Your Custom Settings

If you’ve gone to the trouble of getting your document’s settings just right and you expect to create lots of similar documents, save those settings as a preset before you click OK to create your new document. In the New dialog box, click the Save Preset button to open the dialog box shown in Figure 2-3, and then type a descriptive name for your timesaving preset.

Figure 2-3. Use these checkboxes to tell Photoshop which settings you want it to remember. When you create a new document using a preset you’ve made, the program grabs any settings you didn’t include in the preset the last new document you created. For example, if you turn off the Color Profile checkbox shown here, your preset doesn’t include a color profile, so Photoshop assigns the currently active color profile (Color Settings—see page 722) to the new document.

Saving Files

After you’ve put a ton of work whipping up a lovely creation, don’t forget to save it or you’ll never see it again. As in any program, be sure to save early and often so your efforts don’t go to waste if your computer crashes or the power goes out.

Tip

Photoshop sports a life-saving Auto Recovery feature that automatically saves a backup copy of your document every 10 minutes (though you can change that interval; see the box on Photoshop’s Magical Auto Recovery). You can also keep working while Photoshop saves your file in the background, meaning you don’t have to wait until it’s finished to do something else. Even slicker is the ability to trigger yet another document save before the first one finishes!

The simplest method is to choose File?Save or press ?-S (Ctrl+S). If you haven’t previously saved the file, Photoshop summons the Save As dialog box so you can pick where to save the file, give it a name, and choose a file format (your options are explained in the next section). If you have already saved the file, Photoshop replaces the previously saved version with the current version without asking if that’s what you want to do. In some situations, that’s fine, but it can be disastrous if you wanted to keep more than one version of the document.

Note

When you’re saving files, it’s best to leave the file extension (the period and three letters, like .psd, or .jpg) on the end of the file name. The file extension makes it easier for your computer to tell what kind of file it is so it can pick a program that can open it.

You can play it safe by using the Save As dialog box every time you save. It always prompts you for a new file name (see Figure 2-4), which is handy when you want to save another version of the document or save it in a different format. Choose File?Save As or press Shift-?-S (Shift+Ctrl+S) to open the dialog box. For documents you create in Photoshop, the format menu is automatically set to Photoshop, which is perfect because that format keeps all your layers and smart objects intact in case you need to go back and change them later. This is the format you want to use while editing images. Then, when you’re finished and ready to save the image for use in another program—or for posting on the Web or sending in an email—you can save it in a different file format, as the next section explains.

Note

When you run the Save As command, Photoshop assumes you want to save the document in the original folder whence it came. To change this behavior, choose Photoshop?Preferences?File Handling (Edit?Preferences?File Handling on a PC) and turn off “Save As to Original Folder.”

File Formats

You’ll learn all about file formats in Chapters Chapter 16 and Chapter 17, but this section provides a quick overview.

If you remember nothing else, remember to save your images as PSD files (Photoshop documents) because, as the previous section explained, that’s the most flexible format. That said, sometimes you need to save a document in other formats because of where it’s headed. For example, InDesign and recent versions of QuarkXPress (two popular page-layout programs) are adept at handling PSD files, but not all programs understand what the heck a PSD file is. In that case, try saving the document as a TIFF file; nearly every image-handling program on the planet can open TIFFs.

Figure 2-4. The Save As dialog box lets you save a copy of your file with a different name, in a different location, and in a different format. When you save a file as a Photoshop document (also known as a PSD file), its layers remain intact and fully editable even after you close the document. In fact, you may want to store all your PSD files a single photo shoot—right alongside the originals your camera—in a folder named “in progress.”

Note

If you need to save a document that’s bigger than 2.51 GB (that’s 30,000x30,000 pixels), save it in Large Document Format (PSB format), which gets you past Photoshop’s 2 GB limit on PSD files. Photoshop also supports BIGTIFF format, which lets you circumvent the 4 GB size limit of TIFF format.

Graphics destined for the Web are a different animal because they’re specially designed for onscreen viewing and faster downloading. Here’s a quick cheat sheet to tide you over until you’ve got time and energy to make your way to Chapter 17:

• JPEG is commonly used for graphics that include a wide range of colors, like photos. It compresses images so they take up less space, but the smaller file size comes at a price: loss of quality.

  Note

  Because JPEGs can’t be saved as 16-bit files, Photoshop automatically converts ’em to 8-bit. If that sentence is as clear as mud to you, flip back to the box on Understanding Bit Depth to learn more about image bit depth.

• GIF is a popular choice for graphics that include a limited number of colors (think cartoon art), have a transparent background, or are animated (Animating a GIF).

• PNG is the up-and-comer because it offers true transparency and a wide range of colors. It produces a higher-quality image than JPEG format, but it generates larger files. Metadata (Working with Raw Files) and ICC profiles (Finding and Installing Drivers and Color Profiles) are included with the file when you save it as a PNG, and Photoshop now lets you save PNG files that are up to 2 GB in size.

For more on creating and preparing images for the Web, hop over to Chapter 17. If your image is headed for a professional printer, visit Chapter 16 instead.

Opening an Existing Document

Opening files is simple in most programs, and that holds true in Photoshop, too. But Photoshop gives you a few more options than you’ll find elsewhere because it’s amazingly versatile at working with a wide range of formats. Photoshop knows how to open Adobe Illustrator, Camera Raw (Working with Raw Files), JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, EPS, and PDF files (Working with PDFs), along with Collada DAE, Google Earth 4 KMZ, Scitex CT, Targa, and several other file formats most folks have never heard of.

Note

These days, Photoshop supports more formats than ever, including JPS and PNS (a stereo image pair that’s captured by cameras with two lenses or one lens that’s split in half to produce 3D images), as well as BIGTIFF (for TIFFs larger than 4 GB). It also allows for more bit depth (think “colors”) in TIFF files. (For more on bit depth, see the box on Understanding Bit Depth). Photoshop CC lets you open JPEGs that are 65,535 pixels in width or height (in CS6 the limit was 30,000 pixels).

You can open files in Photoshop in several ways, including the following:

• Double-clicking a file’s icon whose format is associated with Photoshop (like JPEG or TIFF), no matter where it’s stored on your computer.

  Tip

  To change file association on a Mac, single-click the file’s icon and then press ?-I. In the resulting Info dialog box, locate the Open With section, and then pick a program the drop-down menu. If you want to change the association for all files of that kind on your computer, click Change All.

  On a Windows machine, right-click the file’s icon and choose “Open with”?“Choose default program.” the program you want and make sure “Use this app for all [file format] files” is turned on, and then click OK.

  Now you can double-click the file and the program you specified will pop open. Nifty, eh?

• On a Mac, dragging the file’s icon onto the Photoshop icon (the blue square with “Ps” on it) in the Dock. (This trick doesn’t work in the Windows taskbar.)

• Control-clicking (right-clicking on a PC) the document’s icon and, the resulting shortcut menu, choosing Open With?Adobe Photoshop CC 2014. (This method works only for file formats that are associated with Photoshop.)

• Launching Photoshop and then choosing File?Open or pressing ?-O (Ctrl+O) to rouse the Open dialog box, discussed in the next section.

• Dragging the document’s icon the Photoshop program window.

• Choosing File?“Open as smart object” as discussed on Opening Files as Smart Objects.

You can also use Adobe Bridge to preview and open documents. Head over to Chapter 22 to learn more about using Bridge.

The Open Dialog Box

When you choose File?Open or press ?-O (Ctrl+O), Photoshop summons the dialog box shown in Figure 2-5. All you need to do there is navigate to a file on your hard drive and then click Open.

UP TO SPEED: Photoshop’s Magical Auto Recovery

Every time you lose a Photoshop document to a computer crash, a baby frog dies.

OK, not really, but it sure can ruin an otherwise perfectly good day.

Happily, Photoshop includes an Auto Recovery feature that automatically saves a backup copy of all your open Photoshop documents as fully layered PSD files every 10 minutes. That’s right: If the program crashes, the documents pop back open the next time you launch Photoshop.

These back-up, or recovered, documents are stored on you scratch disk (see Performance) in a folder named PSAutoRecover. The only caveat is that if you run out of hard-drive space on your scratch disk, the back-up documents won’t be saved.

These back-up documents are temporary and don’t hang around forever (which isn’t a big deal if you remember to save your file every so often). They disappear if you do any of the following:

• Choose File?Save in your original document.

• Choose File?Revert in your original document.

• Close your original document without ever saving it.

• Close a back-up document without saving it first.

• Save a back-up document to another location.

This fabulous, derrière-saving feature is turned on straight the factory, though all this automatic saving can take a toll on performance. If you notice that Photoshop feels sluggish—say, if you frequently work with a lot of big documents open at the same time—you can turn Auto Recovery off. Choose Photoshop?Preferences?File Handling (Edit?Preferences?File Handling on a PC) and turn off Automatically Save Recovery Information Every. You can also change the auto-save interval to every 5 minutes by using the drop-down menu to the right of that setting (handy if you’re doing detailed retouching and your image is changing significantly every few minutes). If you want to leave Auto Recovery on but have it happen less frequently (to increase performance), you can set the auto-save interval to 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour.

Figure 2-5. The Open dialog box lets you navigate to the image you want to open. The format drop-down menu at the bottom automatically changes to match the format of the document you pick. PC users see slightly different options in the Open dialog box than the ones shown here. For example, they don’t see the Enable drop-down menu, and the format drop-down menu is unlabeled.

Note

The Windows version of Photoshop CC sports a recently redesigned Open dialog box that looks just like the standard Windows Explorer window, complete with a search box that helps you locate files faster. Nice!

On a Mac, in addition to letting you peruse the murky depths of your hard drive, the dialog box also lets you narrow your search by choosing a format the Enable drop-down menu. (Sorry PC folks: The Open dialog box for the Windows version of Photoshop doesn’t include this menu.) If you pick just the format you want to find, Photoshop will dutifully dim everything else (you can’t choose dimmed items), which is handy when you’ve saved the same image in several different formats—like PSD, JPEG, and TIFF.

Tip

To open more than one file the Open dialog box, ?-click (Ctrl-click) to choose files that aren’t next to each other in the list or Shift-click to choose files that are. When you click Open, Photoshop dutifully opens each file you picked.

If you leave the Enable drop-down menu set to All Readable Documents (or, on a PC, leave the unlabeled format menu set to All Formats), you’re telling Photoshop it’s OK to open any file format it recognizes. If you try to open a format Photoshop should know how to open but for some mysterious reason thinks it doesn’t (see Opening an Existing Document for a list of formats Photoshop recognizes), someone may have saved the document with the wrong file extension. (Since all programs, including Photoshop, rely on the file extension to figure out which type of document they’re looking at, be careful not to change these multi-letter codes that appear after a document’s name.) If you run this problem, Mac users can use the Format drop-down menu (PC users can choose File?Open As instead) to tell Photoshop which format the document should be, and the program will ignore the file’s extension and try to open it based on the format you pick.

Tip

If you’re looking for a specific image but can’t remember its name, try using Bridge to find it (see Chapter 22). It gives you a nice preview of each image along with tons of other info like keywords, ratings, and more. Bridge also offers filtering and search options to help hunt down the image you want. Alas, you have to install Bridge separately Photoshop CC; see Installing Bridge for the details.

Opening Multiple Files within a Single Document

If you’re creating one image many—say, to combine several photos a collage or several group shots one perfect image where everyone’s eyes are open—it’s helpful to know how to open multiple files within the same document. As with most things in Photoshop, there are a few ways to get it done:

• Dragging and dropping files a Photoshop document. Simply ?-click (Ctrl-click) to activate multiple files and then drag ’em an open Photoshop document. One by one, the images appear in the document on separate smart object layers (you’ll learn all about layers in Chapter 3). Photoshop surrounds each image with resizing handles; if you need to resize the image, you can go ahead and do that now (Resizing Images has more on resizing). To embed an externally linked smart object (Creating Smart Objects), Option-drag (Alt-drag) the file instead.

  Press Return (Enter) to accept the size change—even if you didn’t make one—and the next image appears on a separate layer, also with resizing handles. Repeat this process until you’re finished adding images to the document.

• Using the “Load Files Stack” command. To use this command, choose File?Scripts?“Load Files Stack.” In the resulting Load Layers dialog box, the Use drop-down menu lets you choose what you want to open: individual image files or whole folders of images. Click the Browse button to tell Photoshop where the images or folders are stored on your hard drive; you can ?-click (Ctrl-click) files within the Browse dialog box to more than one at a time. Click Open (OK on a PC) and you’re deposited back in the Load Layers dialog box, where you can see the list of images you’re about to load. If you’re combining several shots one, turn on “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images.” If you want Photoshop to convert all the layers a single smart object, turn on “Create Smart Object after Loading Layers.” (For more on using smart objects, flip to Using Smart Objects.)

When you click OK, Photoshop opens the files at warp speed and then copies and pastes them a new document, all on separate layers. (Unfortunately, you can’t use this command to add files to an existing document. Bummer!)

Tip

You can trigger the same behavior in Bridge by activating multiple files in Bridge’s Content panel and then choosing Tools?Photoshop?“Load Files Photoshop Layers.” (For more on Bridge, see Chapter 22.)

Opening Files as Smart Objects

Smart objects are one of those glorious features that make Photoshop truly amazing. You’ll learn a lot more about them in Chapter 3, but here’s a quick overview: smart objects are basically containers that can store raster, vector, or raw files (Working with Raw Files) in their original formats. (See the box on Raster Images vs. Vector Images for info on rasters vs. vectors.) In this version of Photoshop, that content can be embedded inside the Photoshop document or linked to wherever the file lives on your hard drive (the latter helps keep your Photoshop document’s file size down).

Using smart objects forces Photoshop to keep track of important information about the original file—including its original pixel dimensions and any superpowers inherent to that format, like the ability to resize vectors without sacrificing quality—so you can experiment with different sizes without losing quality, and quickly open the program whence the image came (such as Illustrator or Camera Raw). In addition to the image types just mentioned, you can also open TIFF, PDF, and JPEG files as smart objects, as well as convert multiple layers or an entire Photoshop document a smart object.

To open an image in a new document as a smart object, choose File?“Open as Smart Object.” In the resulting dialog box, choose the file you want to open. When you click Open, Photoshop loads the file as a smart object in a new document. To include an image as a smart object in a document that’s already open, choose File?Place Embedded or File?Place Linked instead. See Chapter 3 for more about layers and smart objects.

Tip

Photoshop opens some images as smart objects automatically. Any time you choose File?Place Embedded or Place Linked, or drag a raster image a Photoshop window, it’ll open as a smart object without you having to think twice about it.

Opening Recent Files

This one’s a real timesaver. Like many programs, Photoshop keeps track of the documents you’ve recently opened. Choose File?Open Recent to see a list of the last 20 documents you worked on, with the latest one at the top of the list. If you’ve moved or renamed the file since you last opened it in Photoshop—put it in a different folder on your hard drive, say—the program will try to find it for you when you choose it this list. If the document isn’t on your hard drive anymore, Photoshop displays a message letting you know it can’t find the file.

If you want Photoshop to remember more (or fewer) than 20 files, choose Photoshop?Preferences?File Handling (Edit?Preferences?File Handling on a PC). Then change the number in the “Recent file list contains” field. You can set it as low as two or as high as 100. Just remember that a higher number means a longer list of recent documents to sift through!

UP TO SPEED: Raster Images vs. Vector Images

The images you’ll work with and create in Photoshop fall two categories: those made from pixels and those made from points and paths. It’s important to understand that they have different characteristics and that you need to open them in different ways to preserve those characteristics:

• Raster images are made pixels, tiny blocks of color that are the smallest elements of a digital image. The number of pixels in an image depends on the device that captured it (a digital camera or scanner) or the settings you entered when you created the document in Photoshop. The size of the pixels depends on the image’s resolution (see Pixels and Resolution), which specifies the number of pixels in an inch. Usually pixels are so small that you can’t see them individually; but, if you zoom in on a raster image, the pixels get bigger and the image starts to look like a bunch of blocks instead of a smooth image. JPEGs, TIFFs, GIFs, and PNGs are all raster images. (Technically raw files are rasters too; that is, once you open ’em in a program that can interpret them, such as Camera Raw).

• Vector images are made up of points and paths that form shapes; these shapes are then filled and stroked (outlined) with color. (In Photoshop CC, you can create vector images as easily as in drawing programs such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw.) Paths are based on mathematical equations that tell monitors and printers exactly how to draw the image. Because there aren’t any pixels involved, you can make vector images as big or small as you want, and they’ll still look as smooth and crisp as the original. Photoshop can open vector images, but unless you open them as smart objects (Opening Files as Smart Objects), Photoshop will turn them pixel-based raster images through a process called rasterizing.

In the figure below, the image on the is a raster image and the one on the right is a vector image (the right-hand version shows the paths it’s made from). Vectors are handy when you’re designing logos and other illustrations that you might need to make bigger at some point. You’ll end up working with rasters more often than not because photos are raster images and Photoshop is a pixel-based program (as are all image-editing and painting programs). That said, Photoshop has a slew of tools you can use to draw vectors (see Chapter 13), and it lets you open vector files. And as Combining Vectors and Rasters explains, you can create amazing artwork by combining raster and vector images.

Working with PDFs

Saving a document as a PDF file is like taking a picture of it so others can open it without needing Photoshop—they just need the free Adobe Reader (or any other PDF-viewing program, like Preview on the Mac). PDFs can store text, images, and even video at a variety of quality settings. They’re also cross-platform, which means they play nice with both Macs and PCs. It’s an amazingly useful file format that’s becoming more common every day (see Chapter 16).

You open PDFs the same way you open any file: Choose File?Open, find the PDF you want, and then click Open. If someone created the PDF in Photoshop, it opens right up. If someone created it in another program, Photoshop displays the Import PDF dialog box (Figure 2-6) so you can choose which parts of the document you want to import (full pages or just the images) and set the resolution, dimensions, and so on.

Figure 2-6. If you’re lucky and the person who created the document was a PDF pro, she may have included size-specification goodies like crop size, bleed area, trim, and art size (you’ll learn about most of these terms in Chapter 16). In that case, you can eliminate some resizing work on imported files by choosing one of the size options the Crop To menu shown here. If you decide to import multiple pages, Photoshop creates a new document for each one.

Working with Scanned Images

It used to be the case that, if you had a scanner that knew how to talk to Photoshop, you could use it to import images straight the program. However, the TWAIN plug-in, which lets Photoshop communicate with scanners, is an older technology that’s no longer being updated. These days, Adobe wants you to use the scanning software that came with your scanner instead. Another option is to use the third-party program VueScan (www.hamrick.com). If you go that route, save your image as a TIFF and then open it in Photoshop.

Tip

The Mac version of Photoshop CC includes an Import?“Images Device” command; however, if you’re using Mac OS 10.8 or later, it won’t work (to find out why, read the educational yet complex Macworld article available at www.lesa.in/scanninginps). One solution is to use Apple’s Image Capture program to scan the image, and then open it in Photoshop.

The bottom line is that these days Adobe really doesn’t want you scanning images straight Photoshop because they’d have to keep up with the ever-evolving technological gymnastics that allow scanners and different operating systems to communicate with each other.

Each scanner has its own software, so there’s no standard set of steps to work through to perform an actual scan—they’re all different. Unfortunately, that means you have to read the documentation that came with your scanner to figure out how to get it done (the nerve!). Nevertheless, the box below has some scanning tips to help you out.

Working with Raw Files

Of all the file formats you can work with, raw may be the most useful and flexible. Professional-grade digital cameras (and many high-end consumer cameras) can capture images in this format. The info in a raw file is the exact, unprocessed information the camera recorded when it took the picture. (By contrast, when shooting in JPEG format, the camera processes the image by applying a little noise reduction, sharpening, and color boosting.) Raw files contain the most detailed information you can get a digital camera, including what’s known as metadata: info on all the settings the camera used to capture the image, like shutter speed, aperture, and so on. You can edit raw files using the pre-installed Photoshop plug-in Adobe Camera Raw (shown in Figure 2-7), where it’s light years easier to correct color and lighting than in Photoshop. You’ll learn more about editing in Camera Raw in Chapter 9.

UP TO SPEED: Scanning 101

Just because all scanning software is different doesn’t mean there aren’t a few guidelines you can follow to produce good scans. Keep these things in mind the next time you crank open your scanner:

• Scan at a higher bit depth than you need for the edited image. Yes, the files will be larger, but they’ll contain more color info, which is helpful when you’re editing them. (See the box on Understanding Bit Depth for more on bit depth.)

• Scan at a higher resolution than you need for the finished image so the files include more details. You can always lower the resolution later, but it’s best not to increase it. However, Photoshop CC includes some updated math that makes it pretty darn good at creating enlargements (see the box on Upsampling Without Losing Quality for the scoop).

• If your scanner software lets you adjust the image’s color before you import the file Photoshop, do it. Making adjustments before you import the image lets you take advantage of all the info your scanner picked up.

Figure 2-7. Adobe Camera Raw (a.k.a. ACR or just Camera Raw), launches automatically when you open a raw file. If you’ve got a brand-new camera, you may have to Camera Raw before you can open your photos. To do that, open the Creative Cloud app by clicking its icon at the top of your screen and see if there’s an for Photoshop (online Appendix A has more on checking for updates). You can also open Camera Raw within Photoshop as a filter. The box on page 393 has the lowdown.

Opening Raw Files

Opening a raw file in Photoshop is just like opening any other kind of image except that it opens in the Camera Raw window instead of the main Photoshop window. You can open raw files by:

• Double-clicking the file’s icon. Your computer launches Photoshop (if it wasn’t running already) and then opens the Camera Raw window.

• Control-clicking (right-clicking on a PC) the file’s icon, and then choosing Open With?Adobe Photoshop CC. Since Camera Raw is a plug-in that runs in conjunction with Photoshop and Bridge, it isn’t listed separately, but your computer knows to open the file in Camera Raw.

• Using Bridge to find the file, and then choosing File?“Open in Camera Raw” or pressing ?-R (Ctrl+R). You can also Control-click (right-click) the file in Bridge and choose “Open in Camera Raw” the resulting shortcut menu. (You have to install Bridge separately Photoshop, as discussed in Chapter 22.)

Tip

If you’ve got a bunch of raw images that need similar edits (cropping, color-correcting, and so on), you can open them all at once by Shift- or ?-clicking (Ctrl-clicking) them in Bridge—if you’ve installed Bridge, that is; see Installing Bridge—or by choosing them on your desktop and then double-clicking or dragging them onto the Photoshop icon. When you click All at the top of the Camera Raw window, any edits you make then on affect all your open images. See the box on Processing Multiple Files for more on editing multiple files.

Duplicating Files

If your client or boss asks you to alter an image and you suspect he’ll change his mind later, it’s wise to edit a copy of the image instead of the original. That way, when he asks you to change everything back, you don’t have to sweat bullets hunting for a backup of the original or try to recreate the earlier version. Duplicating files is also handy when creating duotones (Delicious Duotones) and when you want to experiment with a variety of different treatments.

You can duplicate an open file by choosing File?Save As and renaming the image, but there’s a faster way: Make sure the file you want to copy is in the currently active window (just click its window to activate it), and then choose Image?Duplicate. In the Duplicate Image dialog box (Figure 2-8), give the file a new name and then click OK. You’ve just set yourself up to be the office hero.

Figure 2-8. A duplicate PSD file is exactly the same as the original, including layers, layer styles, and so on. If you need to create a single-layer (flattened) version—for use in a program that doesn’t support PSD files, say—turn on the Duplicate Merged Layers Only setting shown here. (The section starting on page 118 has more about flattening files.)

Changing Your View

Photoshop gives you a variety of ways to view images, and different views are better for different editing tasks. For example, you can get rid of the Application Frame (Meet the Application Frame), view images full screen, zoom in and out, or rotate your canvas to view images at an angle. This section teaches you how to do all that and more.

Zooming In and Out

Being able to zoom your image is crucial; it makes fixing imperfections, doing detailed clean-up work, and drawing accurate selections a zillion times easier. One way to zoom is to use the Zoom tool, which looks like a magnifying glass. You can click its icon at the bottom of the Tools panel or simply press Z (see Figure 2-9); then click your image, hold down the mouse button, and drag right to zoom in or drag to zoom out. Alternatively, you can click repeatedly with the Zoom tool to get as up close and personal with those pixels as you want, and then Option-click (Alt-click on a PC) to zoom back out. You can also zoom using your keyboard, which is faster if your hands are already on it: Press ? and the + or – key (Ctrl-+/– on a PC).

Figure 2-9. Top: You can also use the Zoom tool to focus in on a specific part of your image, but you have to turn off the Scrubby Zoom checkbox in the Options bar first. Then drag with the Zoom tool to draw a box around the pixels you want to look closely at. Release your mouse button, and Photoshop zooms in so the area you selected fills your document window. Bottom: Zoom in to 501 percent or closer and you’ll get the pixel-grid shown here.

Tip

If you’re moving items around, the pixel grid shown in Figure 2-9 makes it easy to see whether pixels are perfectly aligned horizontally and vertically. That said, you can turn it off by choosing View?Show?Pixel Grid.

If your computer has a graphics processor that supports OpenGL (see the box on Understanding the GPU, OpenGL, and OpenCL), you can hold down your mouse button while the Zoom tool is active to fly your image, zooming to a maximum of 3,200 percent; simply Option-click (Alt-click) and hold down your mouse button to zoom back out. This animated zooming makes you feel like you’re flying and out of the image—and it saves you several mouse clicks along the way.

When the Zoom tool is active, the Options bar gives you the following choices:

• Resize Windows to Fit. To have Photoshop resize your document window to accommodate the current magnification level, turn on this setting.

• Zoom All Windows. Turn on this checkbox to use the Zoom tool to zoom in on all open windows by the same amount simultaneously. This setting is helpful if you’ve opened a duplicate of an image in order to see what your edits look like at roughly the size the image might print. You can also use the Window?Arrange submenu to do pretty much the same thing. Your options there include:

  • Match Zoom. Zooms all open windows to the same magnification level.

  • Match Location. Zooms to the same spot in each window.

  • Match Rotation. Rotates each window’s canvas to the same angle.

  • Match All. Does all of the above.

• Scrubby Zoom. This option lets you click and drag to zoom. Drag right to zoom in, or to zoom out.

Tip

If you’ve got a scroll wheel on your mouse, you can use that to zoom, too. Just choose Photoshop?Preferences?General (Edit?Preferences?General on a PC), turn on “Zoom with Scroll Wheel,” and then click OK. You can also zoom by typing a percentage the lower-corner of the document window next to the status bar (see the box on The Status Bar: Document Info Central).

• 100%. Click this button—which was labeled Actual Pixels in previous versions of Photoshop—to see your image at 100 percent magnification. You can do the same thing by pressing ?-1 (Ctrl+1), by double-clicking the Zoom tool in the Tools panel, by entering 100 the zoom percentage field at the bottom-corner of the document window, or by choosing View?100%. Whew!

• Fit Screen. Clicking this button makes Photoshop resize the image so the whole thing fits inside your document window. (You can also press ?-0 [Ctrl+0] or choose View?“Fit on Screen” to do the same thing.) This is incredibly handy when you’re using Free Transform (The Transformers) on an image that’s larger than your document—it’s tough to grab bounding-box handles if you can’t see ’em!

• Fill Screen. This button enlarges your image so that it fills all available space in the document window, both horizontally and vertically. Fill Screen makes your image a little bigger than Fit Screen does; you’ll need to use the document window’s scroll bars to see the whole thing.

The View menu also includes two additional zoom options that you won’t find anywhere else:

• 200%. This option lets you jump to a zoom level of 200% in order to compensate for the extra pixel density found in Apple’s super high-resolution Retina displays (called HiDPI in Windows). Because those displays have twice as many pixels as regular displays, images designed for onscreen use look half their size. You can also zoom to 200% by ?-double-clicking (Ctrl-double-clicking) the Zoom tool in the Tools panel. To set the zoom of all open documents to 200%, Shift-?-double-click (Shift-Ctrl-double-click) the Zoom tool in the Tool’s panel. Alternatively, you can Ctrl- or right-click your canvas while the Hand or Zoom tool is active and choose 200% the shortcut menu. And if all that isn’t fast enough for you, you can give this command its own keyboard shortcut; the box on Customizing Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus explains how.

  Tip

  Windows users with a HiDPI monitor can try out an experimental feature (3D) that makes Photoshop automatically use a zoom level of 200%. Choose Edit?Preferences?Experimental Features and turn on “Scale UI 200% for high-density displays (Windows Only).”

• Print Size. This option used to be available in the Zoom tool’s Options bar, but in CC, it lives solely in the View menu. When you choose it, Photoshop previews your image at the size it’ll be when you print it. Keep in mind that your monitor’s resolution settings can make the print-size preview look bigger or smaller than it will really be, so use this feature only as an approximation. (That said, you can use the Screen Resolution field in Photoshop’s Units & Rulers preferences to control size in conjunction with monitor resolution.)

Tip

If your image is smaller than the document window (meaning you see a gray border around the edges of the image) or if the document window is smaller than the available space in the Application Frame, double-click the Hand tool in the Tools panel and Photoshop enlarges the image to fill the program window.

Moving Around in an Image

Once you’ve zoomed in on an image, you can use the Hand tool to move to another area without zooming back out. Grab this tool the Tools panel by clicking its icon (which, not surprisingly, looks like a hand) or pressing H, or just press and hold the space bar on your keyboard (unless you’re typing with the Type tool—then you’ll type a bunch of spaces!). When your cursor turns a hand, hold your mouse button down and then drag to move the image. When you get to the right spot, let go of your mouse button.

Tip

If you press and hold the Shift key while you’re using the Hand tool, Photoshop moves the contents of all your open windows at the same time. (You can do the same thing by turning on Scroll All Windows in the Options bar.)

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Zooming with Gestures

If you use a Mac with a multitouch trackpad or a Wacom tablet, you’ve got yet another way to zoom even if the Zoom tool isn’t active: Use the pinch and spread gestures. You can also flick or right with two fingers to move across the image or twist with your finger and thumb to rotate the canvas.

You can see examples of each of these gestures in the Mouse Preference pane. Choose ?System Preferences?Mouse, and then click the Trackpad tab. Pick an item in the action list on the side of the pane to see that gesture in action.

Zooming with gestures is all well and good…until you accidentally zoom or rotate your canvas by accident. That’s why it’s helpful to have the ability to turn Photoshop gestures off. To do so, choose Photoshop?Preferences?Interface and turn off Enable Gestures.

If you’re using Windows and you’ve got a touchscreen or a digital drawing tablet (see the box on The Joy of Painter for more on the latter), you can use gestures, too, though you don’t get the Enable Gestures setting described above.

In recent years, Adobe introduced a couple of other ways to move around a document: flick panning and the birds-eye view feature. If you’ve got a computer that can run OpenGL (see the box on Understanding the GPU, OpenGL, and OpenCL), you can use these fast and efficient ways to scoot one part of image to another. Here’s how they work:

• Flick panning lets you “toss” an image one side of the document window to the other, which is kinda fun. Just grab the Hand tool, click the image, and hold down the mouse button. Next, quickly move your mouse in the direction you want to go and then release the button—the image slides along and slowly comes to a stop. You can do the same thing by holding the space bar and then moving your mouse quickly while pressing the mouse button, or while using gestures on a Mac (see the box on Zooming with Gestures).

  Tip

  If you’re not a fan of flick panning, you can disable it by choosing Photoshop?Preferences?General (Edit?Preferences?General on a PC) and turning off Enable Flick Panning.

• Birds-eye view lets you zoom out of a magnified document quickly to see the whole thing (helpful when you’re zoomed in so far that you don’t know where you are in the image). To use it, just press and hold the H key and then click your image and hold the mouse button down: You’ll get an instant aerial view of your image with a box marking the area you’re zoomed in on. Let go of your mouse button (and the H key) to zoom back in.

Getting Oriented with the Navigator Panel

You can think of the Navigator panel as your GPS within Photoshop. It shows you what part of an image you’re zoomed in on. To open it, choose Window?Navigator. The panel displays a small version of your image called a thumbnail and marks the area you’re zoomed in on with a red box called the proxy preview. At the bottom of the panel, the percentage field shows your current magnification level; enter another number here to change it. You can zoom or out of the image by clicking the zoom buttons at the bottom of the panel (they look like little mountains) or by adjusting the slider nestled between them (see Figure 2-10).

GEM IN THE ROUGH: The Status Bar: Document Info Central

At the bottom of each document window is the status bar, shown below, which displays important info about your document. When you first start using Photoshop, the status bar shows the size of the document; K stands for kilobytes and M for megabytes. (If you don’t see any status information, the document’s window may be too small. Just drag the lower-right corner of the window to enlarge it. The curved-arrow icon to the left of the status bar is discussed on Getting Oriented with the Navigator Panel.)

Click the triangle next to the status bar (circled) and you get a menu that lets you control what the bar displays. Here’s what you can choose (the status bar only displays one of these bits of info at a time):

• Adobe Drive connects to Version Cue servers. Version Cue was Adobe’s method of attaching versions and enabling asset management throughout all of its programs, but they discontinued Version Cue back in Photoshop CS5. For more on Adobe Drive, see the Note on Note.

• Document Sizes displays the image’s approximate printing size (on the left) and approximate saved size (on the right). This option is selected the factory.

• Document Profile shows the image’s color profile (Understanding Color Gamuts and Profiles).

• Document Dimensions displays the width, height, and resolution of the image.

• Measurement Scale lets you see the scale of pixels compared with other units of measurement. For example, an image a microscope can measure objects in microns, and each micron can equal a certain number of pixels.

• Scratch Sizes tells you how much memory and hard disk space Photoshop is using to display your open documents.

• Efficiency lets you know whether Photoshop is performing tasks as fast as it possibly can. A number below 100 percent means the program is running slowly because it’s relying on scratch-disk space (Performance).

• Timing shows how long it took Photoshop to perform the most recent activity.

• Current Tool displays the name of the currently active tool.

• 32-bit Exposure lets you adjust the preview image for 32-bit HDR images (see Creating HDR Images).

• Save Progress displays the world’s tiniest status bar, which indicates Photoshop’s progress in saving a file.

• Smart Objects is a new option. It lets you monitor the status of linked smart objects (Using Linked Smart Objects) to see if any are missing (you placed a linked smart object and then moved the original file on your hard drive, say) or have changed (you modified the original file while the Photoshop document was closed, say).

Figure 2-10. As you zoom in on an image, the proxy preview box shrinks because you’re looking at a smaller area. You can drag the box around to cruise to another spot in the image. To change the color of the proxy preview box, choose Panel Options the Navigator panel’s menu. In the dialog box that appears, click the red color swatch, pick another color the resulting Color Picker, and then click OK. To make the Navigator panel bigger, drag its bottom-right corner downward.

Rotating Your Canvas

If you’re an artist, you’re gonna love this feature! The Rotate View tool rotates your canvas—without harming any pixels—so you can edit, draw, and paint at a more natural angle (see Figure 2-11). It’s like shifting a piece of paper or angling a canvas, but it doesn’t rotate the actual image—just your view of the image. (The box on Image Size vs. Canvas Space explains the difference between image size and canvas space.) Bear in mind, though, that your computer needs to be able to run OpenGL for this feature to work (see the box on Understanding the GPU, OpenGL, and OpenCL). To use this tool, press R or choose it the Hand tool’s toolset in the Tools panel.

Note

MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro users with multitouch trackpads can rotate the canvas by using the two-finger rotate gesture. See the box on Zooming with Gestures for more on using Mac gestures.

Figure 2-11. Grab the Rotate View tool, mouse over to your image, and then drag diagonally up or down to rotate it. When you drag, a compass appears that shows how far “north” you’re rotating the canvas, as shown here. If you’re not the dragging type, enter a number the Options bar’s Rotation Angle field or spin the little round dial to the field’s right. To straighten your canvas back out, click Reset View in the Options bar. To rotate all open images, turn on the Rotate All Windows checkbox. This tool is handy if you use a digital drawing tablet (see the box on page 552) and you’re retouching people (Chapter 10) or painting (Chapter 12).

Arranging Open Images

The Application Frame and tabbed-document workspace help you manage several open documents; if you turn off the Application Frame, your documents can get scattered across your screen. However, you can herd open windows together by using the commands listed under Window?Arrange (see Figure 2-12).

Figure 2-12. Use the Window?Arrange commands to create order out of chaos by tiling (top) or cascading (bottom) your windows. (You can’t cascade tabbed documents because they’re attached—or rather, docked—to the top of the Photoshop window. The fix is to choose Window?Arrange?“Float All in Windows” first, and then choose Cascade.) When the Application bar was removed back in CS6, the Arrange Documents menu disappeared along with it; however, Adobe moved its commands to the Window?Arrange submenu.

The Window?Arrange submenu offers a slew of choices:

• Tile All Vertically resizes your windows so you can see them all in columns.

• Tile All Horizontally does nearly the same thing, but arranges them in rows.

• 2-up, 3-up Horizontal resizes two or three windows so they fit one on top of the other in rows.

• 2-up, 3-up Vertical resizes two or three windows so they fit side by side in columns.

• 3-up Stacked resizes three windows side by side with one in a column and two in rows.

• 4-up, 6-up resizes four or six windows side by side in a tic tac toe–style grid.

  Note

  You can only pick a 2-up option if you have two images open, a 3-up option if you have three images open, and so on. If you’ve got fewer images open, the commands listed above are dimmed.

• Consolidate All to Tabs groups your open images in a single, tabbed window as shown in Figure 2-13, top.

  

  Figure 2-13. Tabbed documents are a handy way to organize open windows. You can slide the tabs or right to rearrange them (top) or drag a tab out of the tab area to create a floating window (upper middle). To redock a floating window, just drag its tab back the main tab area (lower middle). To close all tabbed documents, choose File?Close All. If Photoshop sees that you’ve edited some or all of those images, it asks if you’d like to save each edited image before closing it. To apply your answer to all the documents you’re closing, turn on “Apply to All,” as shown here (bottom). If the Move tool is active, you can Option-click (Shift-click) the tiny X at the far (far right on a PC) of each document tab to close all open documents, but for unknown reasons you don’t get the “Apply to All” option with this method. Weird!

• Cascade stacks your windows on top of one another, putting the largest one on the bottom and the smallest on the top.

• Tile resizes your windows to identical sizes and arranges them in rows and columns.

• Float in Window puts the current document in its own window if it’s part of a tabbed group of documents that share the same window.

• Float All in Windows splits all tabbed documents out their own windows and cascades these windows.

Tip

You can Control-click (right-click) a document’s tab to reveal a shortcut menu that lets you close that document’s window, close all windows, create a new document, open an existing one, or reveal where that document lives on your hard drive.

And you can cycle through all open documents by using the ?-tilde (~) keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Tab on a PC). To cycle through documents in the reverse order, press Shift-?-tilde (Shift+Ctrl+Tab) instead. This is especially handy when you’re showing off images in Full Screen mode, as described on Swapping Screen Modes.

UP TO SPEED: Understanding the GPU, OpenGL, and OpenCL

You might not know it, but your computer actually has two brains: a CPU (central processing unit) for interpreting and executing instructions, and a GPU (graphics processing unit, also called a video card) for displaying images and videos.

Newer GPUs take advantage of a technology called OpenGL, which helps computers draw and display graphics quickly and efficiently. (To learn more about it, go to www.opengl.org.) You can tell whether your GPU uses OpenGL by choosing Photoshop?Preferences?Performance (Edit?Preferences?Performance on a PC). In the Graphics Processor Settings section, check whether Use Graphics Processor is turned on (it probably will be). If the checkbox is dimmed (meaning you can’t turn it on), then your computer’s video card isn’t fast enough or doesn’t have enough memory to run OpenGL—le sigh.

If your computer can’t run OpenGL, some Photoshop features will take a long time to run. Others won’t work at all, including the Rotate View tool, birds-eye view, smooth pan and zoom, pixel-grid overlay (Figure 2-9), flick panning, scrubby zoom, HUD Color Picker, rich cursor info, the Eyedropper tool’s sampling ring, on-canvas brush resizing, and brush bristle tip preview. Other nifty features in CC that require OpenGL include all the 3D features, Auto Recovery, Free Transform’s Warp option, Puppet Warp preview, the Liquify filter, the Adaptive Wide Angle filter, the Lighting Effects Gallery, as well as all the filters in the Blur Gallery (Blur Gallery).

GPUs that are brand-spanking-new also support OpenCL, a technology that lets Photoshop use the GPU for processing tasks that aren’t specifically related to viewing graphics. Features that can use OpenCL include the Blur Gallery filters, which all perform better now than ever before.

Bet you feel like you have two brains now, too!