Learn Photoshop in 30 days - Part 1 Photoshop Express Prabhas Joshi prabhas@desdevpro.com http://www.desdevpro.com 26 August 2009 Photoshop Tutorial This new series will teach you the essential basics of Photoshop CS3 in 30 short, easy to follow tutorials. You require no prior knowledge of the software. Familiarity with Windows is assumed. Creating basic documents Fire up photoshop. After the splash screen, we see the following default layout setup. 001_img1.jpg Today, I'll discuss with you about the top menu bar's File Menu. Goto the file menu > New... The 3 dots after the New indicate that it will bring up another dialog box 001_img2.gif We see that a dialog box comes up- this is the starting point of creating something good in Photoshop. 001_img3.gif We have to specify various things about our new document, but as a beginner- you should be concerned with these properties: Give a name to your document- I hate seeing that "Untitled Document" written in there. Document dimension: Width and height in pixels. For example, here If this is your first time in Photoshop, I would advise you to specify the width and height equal to your screen resolution [example : 1024X768 or 800X767 or 1200X800] - with this width and height, we can make a cool wallpaper background for your desktop. For Example, I have a screen resolution of: 1024X768, so I'll fill width=1024px and height=768px. Computer Resolution To know your computer resolution: Go onto your desktop screen: right-click and goto Properties: Settings Tab: There you'll see a slider bar: showing your screen resolution. The other thing that you might want to fill in is the resolution- I say you leave it to the default 72 px/inch. More on Resolution Image resolution describes what details an image holds. The higher the resolution the more image detail. More info... For the color field, put it to rgb. Color Formats A color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or color components. Some of them are: RGB CMYK LAB As for the option grayscale: This model allows you to work with only 256 different shades of gray with 0 as black and 255 as pure white- try it sometimes it's fun. More Info... Background Color, put it to White. If you want to know more, lemme tell you that you can choose your backgound color to almost nothing- but .... transparent- means nothing at all. After you choose all your options, it should look like this: 001_img4.gif Press OK and we are good to go. This opens up a new document- If your new document opens up in a floating window- expand it by pressing "f" repeatedly untill you get a nice full look shown below: 001_img5.gif Now, the next step that you want to know is to save your document. To do that- go to the: MenuBar..>..File..>Save option We see a dialog box like this coming up: 001_img6.jpg As shown in the figure, type in a fileName- you dont even need to do that- it's probably written there. Let the format be psd [which stands for photoshop document] for now. Other Picture Formats If you save any unsaved document for the first time- it'll save it as the psd format- If you work on some design or a project- it's the best format to work with as it supports all functionality of Photoshop such as layers, effects etc. However, if you want to display off your finished work, then you might want to use formats like "jpeg-Joint Photographic Experts Group" or maybe: .tiff for print work, banners, posters and .gif for web etc. When you distribute your design, never distribute the .psd file because it's like distributing the source code of your program- anyone can modify and rip it and use it. Click on save. Thats it- we are done. Now all of you know about how to open a new document and saving it. Thats it for today. See you tomorrow.