Basics for Beginners Lesson 1 Part 1
Let’s Learn How to Use Photoshop!
Today we’re going to be teaching you How to Use Photoshop from the beginning.
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What’s up Photoshop fam, I’m Rick Navarro, this is the Pixel Laundry Photoshop Academy. Okay, so let’s open up Photoshop and take a look around. So I’m using the latest version of Photoshop, which is 21.0.3. If you’re a new user and you get your hands on a copy of Photoshop, it’s more than likely going to be like this or something very similar.
So when you open it up, first thing you have here is this application page that’s going to give you a list of all your previous documents that you’ve opened. If you’ve never opened it before, probably be empty. But here you’ve got an opportunity to learn. They’ve added these modules recently where they’re incorporating tutorials inside of the program which is really great. You’ll also have your previous work that you may have opened up from Lightroom or anything that you have tied to here with the cloud or any. Like I said, any previous documents that you may have opened up at some point. I personally don’t use this very much because I’m already a very acclimated user. So I’m actually going to turn this off. The way you do that is by going in here, to the Preferences. Let’s go ahead and open up general and we’re going to turn this auto home screen off and while we’re in here I’m also going to make sure that my use legacy transformer is clicked on. I’ll explain more about that later. As you can see, I’m working on a Mac. If you’re working on a PC, the major difference is going to be are your hot keys and which side be the X’s on to close your window. I’ve worked on both. There isn’t really a ton that’s super different. Basically all the concepts are all the same. It’s only the hot keys that might be a little bit different so when you open up, let’s go and open up just a document just so that we’ve got something to kind of look at.
Workspace
So when you open up a document, this is what’s going to come up. This is your workspace, this is where you’re going to access any of your tools that you’re going to use in Photoshop and what we can see is that there’s a number of tools that have come up and let’s talk about a few of those, okay? So, that this is known as your workspace in here but the beauty of this thing is that it’s completely interchangeable and you can use it and customize it in a way that makes sense for you. Maybe in the beginning you want to work as it has been presented to you, you want to use it the way that they’ve given it to you and through time you can use some of these things. I’m about to show you to kind of develop your own style and what works best for you. This is the default setup for Photoshop but I can show you here that I have saved certain workspaces that are functional for me. So I’m right-handed so, I like to have my tools on the right-hand part of the screen. So I take my, my toolbar and all my palettes and I’ve kind of stacked them together actually.
This is my on screen demo workspace that I use when I’m creating tutorials for you guys. I actually work, if you can see here, I’ve got a monitor here. I also have another computer, a monitor here and this is my main monitor. I actually work with this palette completely off of the screen so that I’m maximizing the amount of space that I’m using on my main monitor and that way I can work like this at full screen okay? But for the sake of demo purposes, I like to bring this one over so you guys can see exactly what I’m, what I’m doing and what tools I’m using.
As you can see, this is my YouTube or my tutorial setup workspace that I’ve created specifically for this type of demonstration. Okay let’s go back to the default set which is here. Okay and as you can see, you’ve got a number of panels that are up. These individual, these individual modules here, would call them panels and as you can see, you can switch through them and they will give you a whole host of options and each of these you’ll see a little, a little drop-down menu box in the corner that correspond with the individual panel. These are called our windows and you’ll find all of these, put all of these windows in the window menu, set which is up here and as you can see if I turn off adjustments, adjustments go away. If I turn it back on, adjustments will come back in Photoshop. You’re going to find that there are several ways to do the exact same thing and there is no right one way, there’s just the most convenient way for you and through time you learn techniques and shortcuts and workarounds that best with your workflow.
Hot keys
Over here on the left, this is called the toolbar and inside this toolbar are your main sets of tools that you’re going to use in Photoshop. These are the primary tools that you’re going to come back to on everything you do, no matter how simple or how complex, when you open up a brand new session or if you haven’t used it before, you’ll have these little hover over recommendations or kind of like tutorials, little tiny tutorials, that are not only give you what exactly it is that you’re using, but it’s also going to tell you what the hotkey is. So pro tip, take a glance at the letter that’s being given to you here because if you use that letter on the keyboard that is going to give you the hotkey for that individual tool so, this is a crop tool so the shortcut to the crop tool is C, see this is the lasso tool so, the shortcut to the lasso tool is L, a lot of these are going to find that they’re very intuitive. So, once you learn what the tool is, you can easily remember it because usually it’s the first letter of that tool. So the lasso tool is L, the crop tool is C, then you’ve got some others like the move tool which is an M, you would think but it’s v, and V is in move. So with time and practice you’ll remember that, I want to go ahead and turnoff those options.
So, we’re going to go into our preferences and we’re going to go click off show tooltips, you can turn that on if you want it, I’m going to turn it up now. So it’s not distracting while we’re working another thing, I want to show you in here right before we jump back is this interface and this interface option gives you different viewing options depending on your screen in your monitor or you’re working preference or your lighting situation or just personal preference, you may want to change the lighting scenario of your UI elements. I personally like them a little bit darker, dark colors tend to fade away in your eyes and I don’t want to focus on anything else other than the image that I’m working on. So I personally turn it down to dark but you may like it at a different color. So you can set it up there and there’s also other preferences here that you can kind of look into and manipulate. This will give you different user interface options that may be more preferential to your setup. So now that I hover over, it’s turned off those tooltips.
Zoom Tool
We can continue where we were, so this is the toolbar and again these are all the tools that you’re going to be using. This is your foreground and your background swatch that can be switched by clicking on this little arrow. if you double click inside here, you’ll get a color picker and that will allow you to manipulate and change colors and if for some reason you want to switch those foreground and background elements, all you have to do is hit X and it will flip those foreground and background colors for you okay? So if you go down here and you select your zoom tool you can use this to zoom in and out.
Now the way that this is set up right now is that if I click and drag it’s going to make a selection now, I can change the way that zoom tool operates if I use what’s called my options bar. Now for every single one of these tools take a look what’s happening up here. If I click on each of these tools I’m getting different sets of options that are being made available to me at the top that will further manipulate the image, excuse me, further manipulate the power or the capability of the individual tool. In this particular case I’m using the zoom tool. Now by default it’s set to the magnify so, that’s going to go in or zoom in, if I click here it’s going to zoom out. I can use this as a single click option or if I go into my preference settings I can go over here to tools and animate the zooms that way. If I click and hold it’s going to slowly zoom in and out for me. I never use the magnification tool that goes out I only use the hotkeys for this particular option. So now if you look here, if I hold down the ALT or option key on PC, it’s probably CTRL, if you hold down that key you’ll notice that the plus is turning into a minus so that is giving me an alternate that way, I don’t have to zoom in here, do my zoom click again, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out. So it’s a quick way to move very quickly in and out and again. If I click and hold it, it’ll animate it for me or if I just click one at a time it’s going to move for me now, if I want to move into a section I can click and drag and it’s going to highlight that section. Now that is your regular zoom scrubby, zoom if you click this option right here, it will now instead of making a selection now, I can just kind of point and click to the area that I want to zoom in on and I can zoom by clicking down and scrubbing all the way in and it’s going to magnify or zoom out. As I need so, I can zoom in anywhere I need by just going left and right with my mouse, this is my preferred method. I was actually a click and drag zoom guy for the longest time and I worked in a place that got me used to using the scrubby zoom and I haven’t looked back since because it just lets me move quicker now.
Hand Tool
If you’ll notice what I’m doing it is holding down the spacebar on my keyboard and that is bringing up the hand tool. The hotkey for the hand tool is the letter H, H for hand, as we mentioned earlier, pretty intuitive but while I am zooming in and out sometimes I might zoom too far and I need to move it over. So by holding the spacebar I can grab the entire image and move it over to wherever I need to be, okay. If you’ll notice there’s a little grid here, this is the default setting for Photoshop that will come on when you have a brand. New set of Photoshop, you can turn that off by going to view and show extras show and then your pixel grid, excuse me, not show extras, just show and it’s under your pixel grid and you can turn that off. So that you can actually get down there to the pixels. This is my preferred way to work because I deal heavily in imagery.
Some people deal have heavily in web design or something that may require the pixel grids and the precision that, that offers I don’t need that. So I turn it off because it’s visually distracting for me when I need to get in here and actually see the individual pixels.
How to Use Photoshop Part 2
The Photoshop Application Bar
This first bar here is known as the application bar and these have settings and menu sets that have to do with the application itself. Again like I mentioned earlier a lot of this can be very self-explanatory after you’ve been using it for a while for example if I need to manipulate something that has to do with the image, I’ll go to the image menu, set and adjust, adjust from there if I’m working on a specific layer, which is this palette right here and I need to do something that is specifically dealing with layers, I can go to the layer menu set and so on and so forth, type selections filters and the rest are again self-explanatory. The main ones you’re probably going to use are your image, your layer and your select. You have type options here but I rarely ever use them. I actually use more of my paragraph or paragraph styles, but I’ll show you that later. Filters, there’s going to be an entire set of filters that are going to be available to you but again pro tip, you don’t want to go too heavy on the filters. You get your effects in Photoshop typically by using a combination of techniques, not necessarily filters. Filters kind of scream amateur but they’re super fun to work with in the beginning. So get all those amateur bugs out, find out exactly what every single one of these things does and then later learn how to use them in combination with several techniques. So that it doesn’t scream like you’re a novice right at the beginning. So that is the application bar.
Palettes
Now this over here as we mentioned is the toolbar, now I want to show you how these palettes move around. How they can create a custom workspace for you. First and foremost, all of your palettes sit inside of what’s known as the application frame. This is basically the frame that allows Photoshop to be entirely self-encompassed in PCs. I believe it’s, it’s pretty much the default, but there’s probably an option that you can turn it off as well. I’ve been working with Mac’s for 15 years and they didn’t always kind of come by default. Sometimes the app case shouldn’t be floating so if you click off of it, you would all of a sudden be in a different application or on your desktop or in a Finder window and you didn’t realize you weren’t in Photoshop anymore and sometimes I got a little wonky, you get used to it. But after in the beginning, I should say that was a little strange so in some of these more recent versions of Photoshop I’ve noticed that the application is being turned on by default in the beginning, but if you don’t want that on you can turn it off.
Now some of the advantages of having it all together like this is that, if I am working in Photoshop and I do click out of it, it’s all self-encompass, it’s altogether, I don’t have to worry about It. That’s all of my Photoshop right there but if I want to work a little bit more seamlessly let me show you how my space actually looks and I could turn off this application frame. This is more how I Work now another hotkey for zoom, I meant to mention this earlier is if you hold down the CMD + Mac, CTRL for PC and plus or minus keys that allows me to zoom in and out of the window without using the zoom tool. Also if you hit the F key and you cycle through it meaning you tap it once, you tap it again, you tap it one more time, you’re going to get a couple different options that allow you different viewing spaces. So if I go full screen for this first one and hit command or control 0, this is going to give me 100% zoom. If I use the zoom tool, if I tap on Z, I can zoom in and out, if I use CTRL or CMD plus or minus, I can zoom in and out. So as you can see there’s several different ways to do the same thing.
Now again this is how I work because I have a lot of this memorized already but when you’re working in the beginning you don’t necessarily you may not necessarily want to do that. You may want to have everything right front and center but after you get a bit of a workflow and you know as many of the hotkeys as I do, I can kind of zoom in and out as I see fit and work, as I first make sure I’m on the right layer. I may be making adjustments; I can move very quickly because I know all of the hotkeys already. It’s good to come out of that and go back to our default workspace but as you can see the application frame is now gone. If I click out of there now I clicked out of Photoshop but once I’m in full-screen it’s almost like having the application frame still there okay.
Additional Photoshop Tools
I wanted to show you one more thing over here in the toolbar. If you’ll notice in the small, in the small right hand corner of every single one of these tools, there’s an arrow except the zoom tool and basically what that means is for every one of these buttons or every one of these tools that has an arrow in it, that there are additional tools that are under that main button. So if you’ll take a look over here you’ll notice, if I click and hold down a few more options come up for every single one of these tools by click and hold, click and hold this one right here is one of the other few ones that doesn’t have any more click and hold, click and hold, okay. So another way to access those is by holding the shift key and then cycling through whatever the hotkey is for that particular tool. So for example for the move tool, if I hold shift and hit V and tap it a few times now I’m cycling through all of the options for that tool and as I mentioned earlier you’ll notice that every time I click on a new tool, I’ve got a new set of options up at the top. Now, I’m not going to go through the each, each of the individual options for the tools because they can get really overwhelming very quickly but I just want you to know that they exist and that when we need them we’ll address them at that time, okay.
Tear Away Panels
So back to these panels. So how do we adjust the panel’s? What’s cool about these panels is that they are tear away panels and basically what that means is that they can be torn away from their original position. If you’ll notice, if you just click and drag it, you can pull out these individual panels and now you can create your own panels or your own palettes. So I can grab any one of these and combine them however, I want by dragging and dropping over them and you’ll notice that it highlights and that means that I can now drop it for my most frequently used panels. Now I can create custom panels and I don’t have to have all of them scattered all across the board, this might be something that kind of comes in time in terms of like what exactly are your favorite panels, but it’s super, super useful because you may be working on a smaller, smaller monitor, you may have a 13-inch monitor, you may have a 32-inch monitor and each of those monitors are going to offer you a different, a different option and how you want to work. If I’m on a smaller computer like, I’m traveling and I’ve taken a small laptop with me, my workspace setup might be different and I’ll save those preferences so that whenever I come back to that computer, it’s always ready for me to go. If I’m working here on a desktop then that, that set up might be different and this functionality allows me the flexibility in order to do something like that. So I can also, if I right-click on these with my mouse, I can close them and get rid of panels that maybe I don’t need or don’t use very often and remember again all of these panels are listed right here under the windows menu set and all of them are available for you at any time.
So if you accidentally close one, you know where you can go back and get one also in the upper right hand corner, you’ll notice there’s this little arrow, it’s a closed down option that will put that entire panel into an icon just like the tools which is super, super cool because when you start stacking these, you can save even more space by putting them down into an icon. Now watch what you can do with this. If I put them, stack them, I can stack them in sections and have them available to me just like I could by adding several panels to one palette, this resize right here will also allow me to stretch them out a little bit now. If you’ll notice I can put them at the top, I can put them in between or I can put them all out here and a panel and open it up together, a combination of these is my preferred way to work. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got some presets already saved and this goes under the workspace menu set under your workspace. You can see there’s going to be a few default. Now if you tend to work in one of these particular categories more than another like, for example, if you work on a lot of photography images, maybe the preset photography is the best way for you to work. If you work in a lot of web design, maybe the graphics and web options is the best way for you to work. This is something that your kind of just have to fill out with time. But you have a lot of options available and Photoshop has already given you a strong base to kind of begin and to kind of play with to start from, okay.
Customize your Photoshop Workspace
So, I’m going to go, let’s actually, let’s go ahead and create a custom layout. So what I want to do is, I’m going to grab my layers, I am going to grab characters going to go ahead and grab the history palette. Let’s grab adjustments and everything else. We’re going to close if I right-click on the panel tab itself, I can close the entire group or I can close just the one panel, close, close to app group minimize. Let’s go ahead and close the tab group which is going to close all of the tabs that are here together. Now if you’ll notice this one here didn’t close down and that was because it was separated top and bottom like this.
This group is defined, there’s a small thin line right here that separates these individual groups that allows me to work in groups as I see fit. So I’m going to close all these down here and leave this one open. Now actually what I’m going to do is grab my layers and my adjustments and I’m going to actually add one more paths with my pads here and the reason you might want a long stretch of… of real estate on your screen is because, especially in your layers, Photoshop can have something like 999 thousand layers or something crazy like that. I would never recommend doing that but I have worked on several projects where the layers are upwards over 50 layers. So having that space here to kind of navigate just on your layer’s palette alone is super helpful. So anyway, so I’m going to put this in here and I’m going to stack these but I’m not going to put them in the same layered grouping or in the same panel grouping. Now they’re together as one. I’m going to put this right here, over here and now I can scale and stretch it so that I am maximizing as much of my real estate as possible.
Now as I mentioned before I’m right-handed so I don’t like having to go across the screen, every single time to go to something. I may need my tool palette so I put my tools right over here on the right hand side and like I said if you drag till you get that little blue highlighted line that will allow you to snap all of the palettes together. So now they’re moving is one cohesive unit, I can drag them off my screen, I can pull them back on if I want to, okay. So I’ve created a custom workspace now, what you want to do here is go ahead and save that workspace. So if you go under workspace and you go new workspace you can now save all of your locations, all of your custom palettes and maybe any keyboard shortcuts that you’ve created. Photoshop will save them in Photoshop so that way if for some reason it gets shuffled you can reload that again. Let’s just name this sample, okay. I’m going to click all my keyboards, all my menus, where my toolbar is and click save and then if you go back here under workspace, you’ll notice there it is workspace sample. Now in addition to Photoshop’s default workspaces, I’ve got custom workspaces, that I can use to work with.
Concluding lesson 1
Okay guys. Thank you so much for watching. That’s all I got for you. That was Lesson one of the Pixel Laundry Photoshop Academy Photoshop 101 class. Yeah give it up for yourself. Thank you for sticking around. Make sure you click on the next video so you can catch the next class in this series of classes for Photoshop 101. Be sure to LIKE, subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you can get updates on our future videos.
Create every day. Talk to you guys real soon.
