Lesson #04 Starting with Photoshop - Part #3
Written By Darren

Photoshop is the most robust and flexible image editing program on the market today. With the numerous graphics designing tools available to you, the design limitations are next to nothing. So basically, if you can dream it, you can make it with Photoshop.

With that said, let's take a look at some of these tools that are readily accessible to you in the vertical toolbar. This tutorial will be a general overview of the toolbar and how to use it, while succeeding tutorials will be about some specific tools.

Because this toolbar is long, it can sometimes get in the way of you wanting to view everything. There's an option at the top of the bar to minimize the bar so that it's less obtrusive. All you have to do is double-click the very top of the toolbar, as shown, and it will shrink itself. To open it back up to its full size, just double-click the same spot.

The next spot down shows an eyeball picture which is part of the Adobe design/logo. Clicking on this launches a window about Adobe products, links and also allows you to automatically download and install new components such as Photoshop common files. You may want to click this once a month.

The next part is really where the real tools start. These are the tools you'll be using when designing your graphics. They are tools you'd see a regular artist use such as airbrushes, pencils, masking tools, erasers, text tools, color pickers, and much more. Each tool resides on its own button and the names of the tools can be viewed by just placing your mouse cursor over the button. Text will pop-up in a second or so with the name. However, there are more hidden tools under most of the buttons. If you see a button that has an arrow in the lower right corner, you can access additional tools by clicking and holding down that arrow.

Additional tools will expand out and you simply click on one of the addtional tools that you want to use. Do this with all of the buttons that have the arrow to see all of the tools you can access.

After the main tools, you'll see a space on the toolbar that shows two squares with different colors. If you place your mouse over the squares, it should say "Set Foreground Color" and "Set Background Color". These colors are used for fills, gradients, text and other items. The foreground color is the default color that is automatically picked when you select the typing tool, and for gradients, the foreground color is the starting color and the background color is the ending color. You can quickly flip these colors by clicking on the curved arrows shown on the button.

The next tool down is called "Quick Mask" tool. A mask is basically an editing tool which allows you to "mask out" a particular spot so it's not affected by editing.

Think of it as masking tape that you buy at a hardware store. You use the masking tape to cover up areas that you don't want affected by your painting. More will be discussed on masking and using this tool in upcoming tutorials.

Below the Quick Mask tool is a tool which allows you to change the viewing area on your screen. For instance, if you wanted to view your project fullscreen without all of the tools and Photoshop navigation, you can click on one of the buttons and it will display a different view.

The last item on the toolbar is simply a tool that opens and sends your current project to Adobe ImageReady. This is simply a shortcut which saves you from have to open the software from Windows. You can try it at your convenience.

As you can see, the toolbar contains most of the basic functions you will be using when designing a project. Don't be intimidated by all of the options, because you will most likely be using only about half of the tools repeatedly in Photoshop.

In the next tutorial, we'll move on to some of the tools and functions located in the top menu bar.