Lesson #05 Starting with Photoshop - Part #4
Written By Darren

So, now you should be feeling a bit more comfortable with at least looking at Photoshop and not getting sick to your stomach. We've gone over the work area a bit and also looked at some of the tools in the vertical tool bar. But, what about effects, cool drop shadows, flipping and bending the pictures, or the image settings? Where do we find all that? I'm glad you asked. Being that the number of tools and gizmos available in Photoshop, the lengthy discussion about the top menu bar will be done in two parts. Some of the menu items are very common, so I will touch on the items that are not so familiar.

As with most software these days, the first selection starting from the left is "File". You can open an existing file here or start a new one. One thing you may want to start becoming aware of are the keyboard shortcut commands shown next to many of the functions. Sometimes it's much easier and faster to type a keyboard shortcut instead of looking for the particular command in the menu.

You can quickly open the last few documents you were working on by selecting "Open Recent". The "Open As" command lets you open a file as a specific format. If it doesn't open, it may not be compatible with the format type you selected in the pop-up.

Your Save functions are basically the same as other programs with the exception of "Save for the Web". This gives you the ability to save your file in web compatible image formats such as jpg, gif, or png. You can also select the compression ratio in order to optimize your images. We will talk more about image compression in another tutorial.

The "Revert" function allows you to undo all of the work you've done all the way back to the last saved version. In other words, clicking Revert will take you back as far as the last time you saved the file.

The "Import" and "Export" commands may be familiar to you and they allow you to import files from such items as a scanner, digital camera, or other Twain devices. Export can send your paths to Illustrator for easy print editing of the particular image.

"Manage Workflow" is a useful tool when you're working with a group of designers on one project. It allows a collaborative effort, however, only one file can be worked on by a person at one time. There is much more info on this feature in the Photoshop Help section.

The "Automate" section has a pretty cool group of features such as "Batch", "Contact Sheet", "Web Photo Gallery", and "Droplets". The Batch processing allows you to handle repetitive taskes, such as applying an Action to several images and then saving them all to a certain directory, all at the click of a button. You can make contact sheets of several images. Contact sheets are a single image with little thumbnail versions of several images displayed.

You simply select the directory of images, choose your settings, and press "OK". The contact sheet will be placed in the directory. "Web Photo Gallery" will allow you to quickly make basic galleries such as those you'd use for a TGP (Thumbnail Gallery Post). However, you really don't have as much flexibility in your compression and layout, but this does give you a quick, down and dirty way of producing a basic gallery. Try practicing on this feature by putting about 15 images in a source directory and setting the destination directory, which must be different than the source directory.

Photoshop offers some other great automation functions such as changing multiple PDF files to PSD which can be useful for making thumbnail versions of the pdf files. I haven't really found other uses for this feature, so if you can think of anything else, I'd be glad to hear about it.

Picture Package is a fairly new feature that allows you to take one photo and place it several times on a page much like the photo studios do. This is neat if you have the kind of printer that prints photo paper and you want to send a bunch of photos of your mug to relatives. I've even tried this on one of my regular printers and it still came out decent.

There are many functions that will be helpful to you such as the automation features becasue as adult webmasters, our time is very valuable and "free time" is non-existent. By learning to use some of Photoshops less advertised features, such as automation and keyboard shortcuts, it can definitely make your life easier.

In the next tutorial, we'll continue our quest to learn more about the menu functions including some of the actual image editing tools.