Photoshop basics

Instructions on Photoshop and basics

Link: ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-u-OYz2qaU&safe=active

• Rectangular marquee tool: This is the default selection setting. You can make a selection of any rectangular size and shape.
• Elliptical marquee tool: This tool, available when you click and hold down on the selection tool region of the tool bar, selects elliptical spaces. To select a round area, hold the shift key while clicking and dragging.
• Single row: This tool will select a 1pixel region that is as wide as your image. Very useful for trimming edges and making straight lines.
• Single column: The tool will select a 1pixel region that is as tall as your image. Also very useful for trimming edges and making straight lines.
• Lasso tool, which allows you to draw a selection by dragging the cursor freehand. The selection will close itself.
• Polygon Lasso tool, which creates a selection composed of straight lines that can be as short as one pixel. The selection grows with each additional click. This tool is especially useful for cutting out objects in an image to place on new backgrounds.
• Magnetic Polygon Lasso tool works a little like a combination of the other two lasso tool. As you drag, the selection maps to natural borders in the image. This is a useful tool when dealing with well-defined and high-contrast images.A note about lasso tool options: When extracting part of an image from its background, the result will be choppy and rough around the edges unless you adjust the feather value in the options bar. This fades the edges you create and can smooth the region into its new background.
• Magic Wand Tool
  The magic wand tool is similar to the magnetic polygon lasso tool except that rather than dragging to make a selection, you click in a region and a selection appears around similar colored pixels. You can control how similar pixels must be to be included in the selection by altering the tolerance value.
  This tool is useful for selecting monochromatic regions or pieces of high-contrast images.
• Adding New Layers:OK, as I said earlier, you can think of the layers as clear pages overlaying each other. The layers pane provides a good visualization of this concept because the layers appear in the layers pane as they are organized in the document. To demonstrate this, we'll add a new layer and type a little on it.
• Selecting Layers:Select the Type tool (which I'll detail shortly) and type a little. You can see that the type appears on top of the image (i'll explain more about type a little later) . Now, we'll use these two layers to learn how to use the layers pane.

• Paintbrush tool
  I had you use the paintbrush tool a little bit to demonstrate how selections work; now I'm going to tell you how to use it. Make a selection and choose the tool from the toolbar. 
  
  
  Pencil Tool
  The Pencil tool works much like the Paintbrush, but draws a distinct line rather than a feathery painted one. Click and hold the paintbrush icon to reveal the pencil.
  
  
  Eraser Tool
  The eraser tool works much like the Paintbrush and Pencil, but rather than fill the selected region with a color, it actually removes whatever is in the selection and reveals the background. This is a very useful tool for cleaning up images with rough edges.