Getting Started in Photoshop

Photoshop deals with pictures in a very different way than Illustrator. Illustrator uses mathematical formulae to create pictures and is considered a vector program (think back to your Trigonometry class and then think of the handles on a path in Illustrator). Photoshop is a bitmap (or raster) program, and uses pixels (the little dots in pictures) to create pictures. If you blow up a picture in Photoshop, you will see the individual dots, or pixels that make up the picture. Each pixel can represent one of hundreds of colors.

The Photoshop workspace is similar to InDesign and Illustrator, made of the document window or Canvas, the Toolbox, Toolbar, Menus and Palettes.

Photoshop (like InDesign and Illustrator) is considered an open-ended application. As the software developed over time, new features build upon – rather than replace – existing features. As a result, there are often several ways to achieve the same result. For example, the Layer Menu (an original feature) and the Layers Palette/Panel (a newer feature) share many of the same options.

Making Selections

Making a selection in Photoshop involves selecting pixels rather than a vector object. Here's a couple of videos that will help paint a clearer picture:

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/making-selections.html

Control Panel

As in InDesign and Illustrator, the Control Panel changes with the tool you have selected. We will explore some of these, especially those associated with the selection tools, the Crop tool, and some of the painting tools.

Meet the Toolbox

One of the first things you notice about Photoshop is that its Tools are quite different from Illustrator or InDesign. Notice that they're arranged in groups.

Also, please note the Foreground/Background — the boxes at the bottom of the toolbox are not fill and stroke as in InDesign and Illustrator. They are Foreground (upper left, in this case black) and Background (lower right, in this case white). The Eyedropper Tool samples color and makes it the Foreground color (option+click with Eyedropper samples for the background color). The little curvy arrows to the upper right of the Fore/Background colors allow you to toggle between the two, switching the Foreground to the Background color and vice versa. The black and white box to the lower left reset the colors to black and white. Click on either box to get the Color Picker and a spectrum of colors to choose from.