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.

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