Beginner Photoshop Techniques

These beginner Photoshop techniques will help you get a grasp on this very complex piece of software. The first time you open Photoshop, you'll be confronted with a variety of confusing menus. With time, they'll all make sense. A few simple exercises will help you learn Photoshop and understand how many controls work.

Cropping an Image
Start out by opening any image. Next, select the Crop Tool, which looks like two intersecting angles. Click anywhere on the image and drag your mouse while holding down the left mouse button. You'll see a square with dotted lines form, and the area outside the square is dimmed. The area inside the square is the part of the image that will remain when it's cropped.

Notice the clear squares around the edges of the dotted-line border? These are control points. Clicking them will allow you to change the shape of the cropped area. Clicking a corner square moves two sides of the box, while clicking the square in the center of a line only moves that line.

Highlight the area you want to save and double click. The image is automatically cropped to the new size. Don't like it? Go to the Edit menu and click Undo Crop, and the image will be returned to its original size. The Marquee selection tools work the same way as the Crop tool; simply click a point and drag the mouse to highlight an area. The Lasso tools can also be used to highlight an area that you'd like to copy or remove. The regular Lasso tool is freehand, while the Polygonal  Lasso tool lets you outline an object by clicking one control point at a time; this second option is usually the best for beginners.

Changing Brightness and Contrast
Most of the filters and adjustments in Photoshop use sliding scales to enhance or diminish the quality of an image. The Brightness and Contrast sliders are the easiest to master.
With your image still open, choose Brightness/Contrast from the Image menu under Adjustments. A new control panel will pop up, and you can move this anywhere on your screen. It's a good idea to keep it off the image so you can see what's happening. Start by sliding the Brightness control back and forth by dragging it with the mouse. You'll notice that the image becomes brighter as you move the slider to the right and darker as you move it to the left. At the extremes, you'll see that the image quality degrades quite a bit. Do the same with the Contrast slider.

These tools work together to improve the sharpness and lighting of the image. It takes some trial and error to find out what works best, but it can help you improve the quality of an image. You'll find similar slider controls on many of the filters and adjustments. Hit OK once you're happy with the adjustments, and remember that you can use the Undo command to go back to the old version.

Adding Text
Finally, let's add a description to the image. It could be a person's name, a date or a location. Click the letter T on the main toolbar to bring up the Type tool. Next, look at the bottom of the main toolbar. You'll see two squares of color. The one on top indicates the foreground color, the one behind it is the background color. When you select drawing tools or the Type tool, whatever color is in the top box is the color that will be used.

Click on the top color box once to bring up the Color Picker. This can be used in many ways, from typing in the hexadecimal value of a Web color to manually setting numerical values for red, blue and green or cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

Since we don't need to match a specific color, we'll use the slider, which appears next to the main color box. As you drag your mouse up and down the slider control, you'll see the color in the picker box change. The small circle in the color picker box indicates the exact color that you've chosen. You can click anywhere in the box to choose a different color from your current options. Colors at the top of the box have more white in them, colors at the bottom have more black. Colors on the right-hand side are more saturated than those on the left.

Pick a color that will be visible on your image and click OK. Now click anywhere in your image and start typing. Once your words are typed, highlight them with the mouse. Just beneath the top menu in Photoshop, you'll see controls for text, including font, font style and size. You can use these to change the appearance of your text. You can even change the color by clicking the color box in this menu bar.

Once you like the look of the text, you can move it anywhere you want in the image by clicking the Move tool, which is at the top of the main toolbar (it looks like a large arrow next to smaller directional arrows). Move the text to where you want it.

Saving a JPEG
The final step is to save the image as a JPEG, which can be posted on the Web. Simply clicking Save will save the image as a Photoshop file, which can only be opened by other versions of Photoshop.

Before we can save the image, we need to get rid of any layers. When you added text, you automatically created a new layer in the image, with your original photo now serving as the background. If you open the Layers window, accessible under Window in the main menu, you'll be able to see the different layers. Clicking the eye icon in the Layers window makes the individual layers invisible.

Click Layers in the main menu, then click Flatten Image. You'll see the layers disappear. Now you're ready to save the image as a JPEG and move on to other Photoshop projects.