FIGURE 1-2: The updated New Document dialog box has many options from which to choose. In this example the Photo category was selected.
Sample Images Can Help You Investigate More Features
Of course it helps to have an image open while exploring Adobe Photoshop. You are free to use your own or use the samples image files located here: https://www.agitraining.com/dummies
. This downloadable file includes files that can be used throughout the entire Adobe Creative Cloud All-in-One For Dummies book.
1 Go to https://www.agitraining.com/dummies
.
2 Click on the DummiesCCFiles folder to download the compressed folder.
3 After the folder is downloaded, right-click (PC) to access the contextual menu and choose Extract All and locate an easy-to-find location or Control-click (Mac) and choose Open.Inside the DummiesCCFiles folder, you find separate folders for each minibook. Images are available for you to use in the Book03_Photoshop folder. There are also additional miscellaneous images in the Images folder at the top level of this folder.
Opening an Image
You can open an existing Photoshop image in one of several ways:
If you see the start screen, you can click on the Open button and navigate to the folder that contains the image you would like to open.
Choose File ⇒ Open, select the file in the Open dialog box, and then click the Open button.
Choose File ⇒ Browse in Bridge. By selecting Browse in Bridge instead of Open, you launch the Adobe Bridge application. Read more about Adobe Bridge later in this section and also in Book 2.
Photoshop can open a multitude of file formats, even if the image was created in another application, such as Illustrator or another image-editing program. However, you have to open the image in Photoshop by choosing File ⇒ Open or, using Adobe Bridge, by selecting an image and dragging it to the Photoshop icon on the taskbar (Windows) or Dock (Mac). If you double-click an image file (one that wasn’t originally created in Photoshop, or from different versions) in a folder, the image may open only in a preview application.
If you’re opening a folder of images that you want to investigate first, choose File ⇒ Browse in Bridge to open Adobe Bridge, the control center for Adobe Creative Cloud. You can use Adobe Bridge to organize, browse, and locate the assets you need to create your content. Adobe Bridge keeps available, for easy access, native AI, INDD, PSD, and Adobe PDF files as well as other Adobe and non-Adobe application files. Adobe Bridge does not install by default with Adobe Photoshop. If you do not have it loaded you can read through the directions and highlights of using Adobe Bridge in Book 2, “Adobe Bridge.”
Getting to Know the Tools
You use tools to create, select, and manipulate objects in Photoshop CC. When you have Photoshop open, the Tools panel appears along the left side of the workspace (see Figure 1-3), and panels appear on the right side of the screen. (We discuss panels in the later section “Navigating the Work Area.”)
FIGURE 1-3: The Photoshop CC workspace includes the Tools panel.
In the Tools panel, look for a tooltip when you hover the cursor over any one of the tools. Following the tool name is a letter in parentheses, which is the keyboard shortcut you can use to access that tool. Simply press the Shift key along with the key command you see to access any hidden tools. In other words, pressing P activates the Pen tool, and pressing Shift+P rotates through the hidden tools under the Pen tool. When you see a small triangle in the lower-right corner of the tool icon, you know that the tool contains hidden tools.Table 1-1 lists the Photoshop tools, describes what each one is used for, and specifies in which chapter you can find more information about each one.
TABLE 1-1 Photoshop CC Tools
Button | Tool | What You Can Do with It | See This Chapter in Book 3 |
---|---|---|---|
|
Move (V) | Move selections or layers | 3 |
|
Marquee (M) | Select the image area | 3 |
|
Lasso (L) | Make freehand selections | 3 |
|
Object Selection (W) | Auto selects objects | 3 |
|
Crop (C) | Crop an image | 1 |
|
Frame (K) | Creates placeholder frames for images | 1 |
|