The goal if this four part tutorial is to get you familiarized with Photoshop if you are a complete beginner and have never worked with graphic editing apps before. This tutorial will teach you everything you need to know in order to get started. It will touch on the Tools, Layers, and Essential Tricks and finally sum it all up with an application of everything you learned. This tutorial uses Adobe Photoshop CS2, but not to worry if you are one of those who hopped the gun to get Adobe CS3 (or are still rolling around in Adobe Photoshop 7) since Adobe has a very good habit of keeping the learning curve associated with a new version at a minimum. So without further delay, let’s get started! So boom, you open up Photoshop. Before you can start working on anything, you will need to open up a new document, just as an artist will need a new canvas. Click on File> New. You should see the popup below: [img]http://i11.tinypic.com/6xso5cw.jpg[/img] The only things you have to worry about for now is the width and height of the new canvas. Everything else should be at the settings shown above. In the digital world, pixel’s are the unit of measure. Although you can choose the size of your canvas in inches/ft ect.., pixels is preferred. Also note the resolution is at 72 DPI (dots per inch). This is the resolution preferred when creating images for web usage i.e. banners, graphics, ect. If you are creating graphics for print, you would want to use a much higher resolution (300 dpi) in order to obtain a high quality print out. For this tutorial lets start of with a 500 x 500 px (pixel) canvas. Click on OK to create it. You should now have a nice white canvas to work with. For now however, lets switch gears and talk about the toolbar. Your tool bar should look something similar to the image below: [img]http://i17.tinypic.com/6sqetmw.jpg[/img] Here is a quick explanation of each tool and what they do. The important tools, which we will commonly use, are listed in bold. Don’t worry if you still don’t understand what exactly they do, we will go over examples of how to use the important tools later on. Also on some of the tools you can click and hold on the little triangle at the bottom corner of the tool icon to switch it with a similar tool. 1. Marquee Tool – A tool which allows you to select parts of an image so u can for example: duplicate them or drag them to a different place. 2. Lasso Tool – Instead of having a pre-defined shape for the marquee you can make your own shape with the lasso tool. 3. Crop Tool – Used to crop a document to make it smaller (or bigger). Once you crop it everything outside the cropped region will be deleted. 4. Healing Brush Tool 5. Clone Stamp Tool 6. Eraser Tool – Pretty much speaks for itself. 7. Blur Tool – Can be used to blur images when needed. 8. Path Selection Tool 9. Pen Tool 10. Notes Tool 11. Hand Tool 12. Move Tool – Probably the tool you will be using the most. Used to move/drag items that are selected (ex. Part of an image selected via the marquee) or to move layers around. 13. Magic Wand Tool – A great tool to help you select parts of an image which have the same color. For example, a person is standing in front of a white backdrop. By using the Magic Wand tool and clicking anywhere on the white are you will automatically select all the white area surrounding the person leaving the person unselected. You can now for example change the color of the backdrop! 14. Slice Tool – This tool is used for web designers making templates. Once a template is created in Photoshop it is then literally ‘sliced’ into separate smaller images so that it can be easily coded via HTML ect.. 15. Paint Brush – This one speaks for itself. 16. History Brush Tool 17. Paint Bucket Tool – This tool is used to fill a selected area with a certain color. Also by clicking (and hold) on the little triangle you can select the Gradient Tool. This important tool is used to create color gradients, a popular element in design. 18. Dodge Tool 19. Text Tool – This is yet another tool that speaks for itself! You simply drag out a box and away you type! 20. Rectangle Tool 21. Eyedropper Tool – This tool helps you pickup a specific color from an image. For example, by choosing the eyedropper and clicking on an image of a green sweater, you will get the specific shade of green you clicked on and it will be saved in the foreground color box. 22. Zoom tool – This tool can be used to zoom into an image when fine detail editing is required. You can zoom out by simply right clicking on the image (with this tool selected of course) and clicking Zoom out or by selecting “Actual Pixels” which will return you back to the regular size of the document. 23. Foreground color – You can double click on this box and select a color you wish to use. The color selected in this box will be used by the paintbrush, Paint Bucket tool ect… In the “#” feild you can enter an HTML color code. 24. Background color – The color selected in this box is used as a background color. It only makes its presence when you crop a canvas larger than it’s original size, the extra space will take on the color that is selected in this box. You will also notice that each time you select a tool, a “secondary toolbar” with features associated to the tool you selected will appear at the top of the page. For example, below is the secondary toolbar that appears when the paint brush is selected. [img]http://i7.tinypic.com/7yi1duq.jpg[/img] So there you go, a 1000 ft overview of all the tools Photoshop has to offer! With that all send and done, lets see how you can practically apply all these tools. Continue reading the next part of this tutorial: [url=http://www.friendsterforum.com/forum/graphics_arts_and_designs/beginners_guide_to_photoshop_pt2_about_layers-t42359.0.html]Part-2[/url]