Getting Started with Photoshop

Selecting Colors

Set foreground and background colors by clicking on the appropriate tile and choosing a color from the Color Picker, as demonstrated in the example below.

Color Picker Shortcuts
Press X if you want to switch the foreground and background colors. Press D if you want to revert to a black foreground and white background.

Eyedropper

The Eyedropper Tool (I) lets you sample another color from your image, and set this as the foreground color. In fact, it's actually possible to sample colors from anywhere in your display and even from other applications outside of Photoshop. Simply click inside the document window, then drag the cursor to the color you wish to sample. Click to select that color.

The Eyedropper Tool also allows you to set the background color. To do so, hold down the Alt key (Option key on a Mac) as you select colors using the eyedropper.

The Paint Brush, Pencil, Paint Bucket and any of the other painting or drawing tools can temporarily be turned into the Eyedropper Tool by holding down Alt (Option).

The Hand Tool

The Hand Tool (H) moves your canvas, which is handy (pardon the pun!) when you're zoomed in to an image, or have a very large document open.

What's even handier is the fact that you can invoke the Hand Tool while you're using any other tool (except the Text Tool) by holding down the spacebar. This is a neat way to position your image exactly where you want it without having to chop and change between tools to do so.

Other Useful Tasks and Shortcuts

Zooming

Zooming right into your image is the only way to make subtle changes at the pixel level. Use Ctrl + to zoom in and Ctrl - to zoom out. You can also zoom using the slider on the Navigator palette.

Making a Selection Using the Layers Palette

To select the pixels on a particular layer, press Ctrl (Command on a Mac) and click the thumbnail of the layer. This selection will also take into account the transparency of any pixels, so painting in the selection will recreate the transparency settings of the original layer. The example at the top of the next page shows a selection I made based on one of the text layers in my sunset document.

Making a Selection Using a Quick Mask

Quick Masks are one of those closely guarded trade secrets that professional designers use all the time, but beginners often are wary of trying because they seem complicated at first. Well, they're not!

A Quick Mask is an alternative way of making a selection. The usual way to use a Quick Mask is to go into Quick Mask Mode (Q) and, using a tool such as the Brush Tool, painting the things you don't want to select. This is called painting a "mask," and the resulting reverse-selection will display as the transparent red color that you can see in the example overleaf. You can edit this red layer -- honing the mask shape, for instance -- using the drawing and painting tools. Those alterations won't affect your image, though: they impact only on your final selection. Switching back to Standard Mode (Q) will complete your selection.

Why would we use this technique instead of those trusty selection tools that we've all come to depend on so heavily? Well, Quick Masks have a couple of advantages over the standard selection tools:

1. They allow you to control the level of transparency of your selection.


2. It's easier to color an object in, than it is to carefully draw a line around it.

Initially, it can be difficult to get your head around the fact that you aren't painting on your image: you're just painting the selection. But once you master that concept, you'll feel confident to be able to make a selection quickly on any shape, no matter how difficult it seems!

Quick Mask Options
I prefer to set Quick Mask Mode so that it lets me paint in the selected areas rather than the non-selected areas, as shown in this example. To alter your settings to do the same thing, double-click on the Quick Mask Mode icon and change the Color Indicates: option to Selected Areas.