Photoshop Basics: Understanding Files and Tools

Let's get started with the basics of Photoshop, navigating files, and how to do some basic things, and understand how Photoshop files work. I'm gonna go ahead and launch Photoshop. And if you've been using Photoshop,  you might have customized the interface and kind of move things around.

And the first thing I wanna do is just make sure that we're all looking at the same thing,  that the interface has elements in the same place. And so I'm gonna kind of reset my preferences and reset the interface here. So once I've got Photoshop open here,  I'm just gonna create a new file.

Doesn't even matter what the settings are here, just to have something open. And this interface here,  these panels can be moved around and customized. And it's possible that your interface does not look exactly like mine does.

And so all of these panels here,  which we'll be exploring as we learn Photoshop, are all something called a workspace. The arrangement, which panels we see, and where they are. And in the window menu,  this is where we can customize or reset our workspace.

So there are a variety of different pre-made workspaces. And most likely, you're probably in the Essentials unless you specifically switch to another one. But if we were in a different workspace here,  for this training,  we're gonna use the Essentials workspace.

And so I make sure that I choose that. And I'm gonna reset that workspace. And what resetting does is it just puts everything back to the way that the workspace was last saved.

And that's all I wanna cover for right now, so that if you ever pull out panels and maybe close them or anything,  those panels can be found under the window, and we'll be using these as we go through the training. But if you ever reset anything,  it's just nice to know that if you ever mess up your interface,  you wanna put it back and reset it,  that you can go into your workspace and reset that workspace. And all your panels come back up,  they get put back to where they normally are, and everything's kind of back to normal.

Now, we're also gonna be using some tools as we go through here. For example, here's a paintbrush which I can use to make some marks on my screen in this file here. And these tools, when I select the tool,  we'll see that this options bar up here at the top.

So this is our toolbar on the left. This is our options bar here at the top. You choose a tool and then you see the options for that particular tool.

So you choose what you wanna do and then you set the options for that particular tool. Now there's a preset right here next to the home button. And that preset is showing the current tool that you're in.

And as we practice things, as we try things out,  it's possible that your preferences might be different from mine. And if you ever want to reset your preferences for that particular tool,  to kind of go back to the factory standard so that if let's say you're experimenting with some settings,  you're not sure what something does,  it's always nice to know how can I reset back to factory standards. So you're not afraid to play with things as you learn here.

So let's say I go in,  I change some settings and do various things. If I ever wanna reset that individual tool,  I can go here and I can do a right click if I'm on Windows, or if you're on a Mac,  if you do have a right click, you can do the right click. If you don't have the right click kind of mouse,  you can also do a control click and that will bring up this menu.

Or if you are on a trackpad,  you can do a two finger click depending on how you have your trackpad set up. So I just go to this little icon here,  whatever that icon might be for that particular tool,  and I can right click or on the Mac control click,  and I can reset that individual tool just to reset that one and reset it to kind of factory standards. Or if I wanna just reset all my tools,  no matter which tool I'm in,  I can right click or on the Mac control click and say reset all the tools.

And that'll just reset all of the tools to their factory default settings. So this way you can experiment and try things out and not be afraid of breaking the program or anything. Also, there are some preferences as well that can be set and we're not gonna go into customizing those preferences,  but if you ever just wanna kind of reset Photoshop just completely and just restart over because maybe you've experimented and something's acting differently and you just wanna go back to factory defaults.

On the Mac, we go to our Photoshop menu and we go down to settings,  which depending on your system,  if it's possible, that might still say preferences over the years,  they kind of switch different preferences to settings. If you're on Windows, you'll go to edit and you'll go down to preferences down at the bottom. And then once you're in that sub menu,  you just go into the general.

And in here, there's a reset preferences on quit. So that means that when I click that and it just says, hey, are you sure you wanna do this? When I quit the next time,  so let's say I quit this application here,  I'm not gonna save changes to that file. The next time I restart Photoshop,  it's like the very first time I am starting Photoshop.

It's like I'm starting from scratch,  just reset the whole application. So this way, if you're experimenting, trying things out and you ever feel like you've kind of changed some weird setting or something,  you can reset this and go back to factory defaults. Also, if you're ever having weird bugs or problems,  that can also be a troubleshooting technique as well.

For some strange reason, every once in a while,  Adobe apps sometimes start to get buggy and often resetting preferences is a way to fix those bugs. And once you reset preferences,  then everything starts to work more normally again. If you ever do ever have any weird issues,  try resetting your preferences.

All right, so now I can actually open up a file. We can start to talk about some of the fundamental things here. I'm gonna open a file and I could do that by either clicking open button over here or I can go to file open here, either way.

If this is coming up, opening from Creative Cloud,  this is opening from your online storage. We're not gonna be using our online storage here. We're gonna be using our local files from our computer.

So I'm gonna switch to on your computer so I can see my computer here. And I'm gonna go to my class files that you have access to download in this course. I'm gonna go into that Photoshop class and I'm gonna sort in alphabetic order here so I can start with this first exercise 1A that we're gonna be working on.

Can open up that image. And I want to maybe zoom in and get a closer look at this image. So for navigating around your images,  there is a zoom tool over here on the left.

We can go here and we can drag left and right. We're not dragging up and down,  we're dragging left and right. Think of there's like a scrubber on your screen.

This thing is called scrubby zoom. If I drag left and right on my screen,  it's like I'm scrubbing in the image. There is an option to turn off scrubby zoom,  although I do like scrubby zoom myself.

And if you do turn off scrubby zoom,  when I drag over an area,  I would zoom directly into that area. But the reason I like scrubby zoom to stay on is that I can simply just drag left and right to get that exact zoom level that I'm looking for. If I want to zoom in on a particular pomegranate seed here,  I would drag to the right on that pomegranate seed to zoom into it.

Or I'd go to another seed and drag to the right on it to zoom in and out. So the thing that you're dragging on is the thing that you'll be zooming in or out of. Now, we can also zoom in and out with some menu choices or keyboard shortcuts.

For example, I can go back to view and say fit on screen to see everything. It makes it as big as possible to fit on my screen. We can also zoom in and out here as well.

And you can see the keyboard shortcuts,  which are the standard in all Adobe apps and pretty much every graphic design app that you're going to use,  which is command plus and minus on the Mac or CTRL PLUS (+) and minus on Windows. So you can choose it from the menu here to zoom in,  but you can also use the command plus and minus. And I would definitely recommend getting used to those keyboard shortcuts because they work universally in pretty much every design app that you'll ever use.

And when we think about the keyboard shortcuts,  the plus and minus are right next to the zero key. So that fit on screen where we often want to zoom out and see everything and have it fit to the screen,  it's right next to the plus and minus. So you've got the zero plus and minus all right there lined up.

So you can zoom in with the command or CTRL PLUS (+),  zoom out with the control or command minus,  and then the command zero on the Mac or control zero on Windows would zoom out to see the whole thing. Now I'm going to zoom in a little bit more on this area and I want to navigate around and while I can use the scroll bars,  I don't find the scroll bars to be the best way to navigate around. In fact, I find the hand tool much more efficient.

So over here we have a hand tool in the toolbar and can simply drag anywhere on your screen to navigate around. Now that's something we do all the time. So while there is a hand tool,  most of the time you're probably gonna be working in some other tool.

So you might have another tool selected and you want to still scroll,  but you don't feel like switching tools,  scrolling, then switching back,  trying to remember which tool you were in. So most of the time when I'm using that hand tool,  I'm actually using it by simply holding the space bar. So I can hold that space bar on my keyboard and as I drag, I am temporarily using that hand tool.

And then when I let go of the space bar,  I am simply back in the tool that I started in. It doesn't actually show you the switching,  it just shows you with the cursor. So hold that space bar, drag around,  navigate to where you want in any direction.

And then when you let go of the space bar,  you're still back to doing what you were doing previously to that. All right, now I'm gonna zoom back out,  show the whole thing on screen, say fit on screen. And let's talk about layers for a moment.

Now in the layers panel,  notice that there is one layer for our background. Photoshop is a pixel based layer or raster based kind of program. When we think about pixels or raster based programs,  raster simply means convert to grid.

And pixels are really just a square block,  a grid of blocks. If I zoom in, I'm gonna use my zoom tool and zoom way in. Notice that this is really just a grid of little individual pixels, right? It's a raster based image, a grid based image.

Each little block is an individual color. So I'm just gonna use my selection tool here just to highlight this. So each one, each little individual pixel is a little square block of one color.

And each little block can only have one color in that. And a layer is a set of pixels. I can have additional layers on top,  but if I just have one layer, this one layer here,  which is one individual color next to another color,  which normally they're so small,  you don't even notice them.

You know, if you zoom out here,  they get so small that you don't notice them. You have to really zoom in to notice those,  but that is how all of these images are made of many, many little teeny color, little pixels. Right now, I just have one layer here with this background,  which means that if I change the color of these pixels,  it can only remember one color.

So let's say I use my paintbrush. And with my paintbrush,  I can choose up here in my options bar where I set the options for the selected tool. I can go up here and I can choose a brush size.

So I can make a bigger brush,  can come out here and see how big the circle is. I can also choose to make it a harder or softer brush,  which you can see in the preview there. If I go with a hard edge brush here,  it's going to make a hard edge.

And if I go with a softer edge,  it'll do something like so. But the point here is that the pixels that I'm changing are the pixels in this current layer. That means that I permanently changed those colors.

And if I zoom in,  we can see that now those little squares are black. They do not remember their original color. So as long as I have this one layer,  if I were to save this file, close it and come back,  I could never get those original pixels back.

Now, luckily I've not saved and closed this file. So there is a temporary history. I can see that over here.

There's a little icon that I can open up my history panel. But if you didn't know that icon there,  all of these panels over here on the right can be found in the window menu. They're alphabetically listed here.

So I can go to history. History is like multiple undos. If I make this history panel taller so I can see,  these are all the things that I've done since I've opened up the file.

And there is a limited number of history steps that you can have that is controlled by how much memory you have and what your preferences are set to. We'll get to changing that in just a second. But let's say I go back here and I go back to a step before I've done those brush marks.

It is something that it can remember as long as I have these history states. Now, going back in history,  it's basically like saying undo. If I go to this last step here and I say undo,  and I say undo, and I say undo,  and I keep going back,  see, I'm just going back in the history.

So you can go to history panel and change it,  or you can simply use undo. So undo will go back in history and redo will go forward in your history. Or you can go to your history panel and do that.

Now this history will not be kept when you close the file. If you save and close,  this will be always blank just when you open up the file. This is the only thing that will be there.

If you have done something and it's a destructive change,  meaning a permanent change where you've destroyed or remove some original data,  like the colors that are originally there,  and you change into black,  you're never gonna get that back. So normally speaking, whenever possible,  we try not to work on just one layer,  permanently changing that layer. There are some things we have to do where we do that,  but most of the time,  if it's possible to work on a separate layer,  we try to work on a separate layer.

So I'm gonna go back to before I've done those brush marks,  and instead I'm gonna create a new layer here. So I'm gonna click the new layer down here at the bottom,  a little plus, and now I have a new layer. Think of this layer as a sheet of glass.

Whereas the original layer, that's more like a canvas,  like a solid white painting canvas that normally if you erase,  you just erase to the white of the canvas. But this new layer here is like a sheet of glass. It's transparent.

I can see through to the underlying layer,  the thing that's behind it. But if you have a photograph behind glass and then you paint on the glass,  you can always take the painted glass away and behind it, you still have the original photo untouched because you were painting on the glass. That's how this is working.

If I use my paintbrush now and I paint,  I am not actually changing the underlying pixels. It now has a second place to put those pixels. So this is my paint marks.

If I double click on that,  I can change my name of my layer and say paint marks. And now I can hide and show and see that it does actually remember the original pixels that were behind that. When we go to make changes,  we always wanna be thinking in Photoshop about what layer am I working on? It is a layer oriented program.

We really wanna keep that in mind. And if you're not used to Photoshop and working in Photoshop,  this is a new thing for you to build a habit on is always keep an eye on your layers panel. And before you do a task,  check out, do I need to create a layer? Am I on the right layer? So be very layer centric in your thinking.

As we go through,  we're always gonna be focused on what layer are we on before we do something. And so for example, if I choose the wrong layer,  I'm still making my marks on the wrong layer,  even though there's another layer I can make my marks on. If I simply select the wrong one,  I am replacing those pixels.

And if I saved and closed my file,  it wouldn't matter that I had another layer that I could have used. I unfortunately didn't use it. So luckily I still have the file open so I can go back to before I did that brush tool.

And then I could do it on the correct layer. I could select the right layer and make that mark. And now that's done on a separate layer.

I can use my move tool, for example,  and I can move those marks around and see how they're not actually in the background layer. They're a separate layer. And if I wanna really just get rid of them and I don't want them at all,  I can simply trash it,  drag it to the trash.

Now the trash is a permanent thing. It's not a place you can go and pull something out of the trash. Once you've trashed it,  that's basically just deleting that layer.

And it's like you never did that work whatsoever. Now, before I get too far,  I did mention that the history states,  there is a certain number of history states. You can customize that in your settings or preferences,  which remember if you're on Windows is under edit preferences or here on the Mac.

And there is some performance preferences. If I go into performance here,  I can control how many history states. And by default, you get 50 history states.

So it's not unlimited undos,  but it remembers the last 50 things that you've done. If you've done 60 things,  it forgets the first of those things that you did. It always has the last 50.

So the most recent things that you've done. You can increase that and have more history states,  but it does depend on how much your computer has in terms of RAM, how big your files are. By default, Photoshop takes up 70% of your RAM.

And so if you have a lot of RAM on your computer,  that could be a lot of RAM,  which is plenty of state place to store a lot of history states. So also if you are gonna be running other applications at the same time as Photoshop,  Photoshop takes up 70% of your computer's RAM by default. Now, other apps such as Adobe InDesign and Illustrator,  they do not have a set amount of RAM.

Those are dynamically allocated by the operating system. There are some programs such as Photoshop,  Adobe Premiere and After Effects,  those programs that are more RAM hungry,  meaning they want more RAM,  where you actually have to designate how much RAM they take. This is kind of an old, old in concept where now modern apps normally dynamically allocate RAM,  but those programs like Photoshop that want more RAM,  they wanna actually hold on to a certain amount of RAM.

If you were going to have a lot of other apps open at the same time as Photoshop,  and you might actually want to lower that so that you have more RAM left over for InDesign,  Illustrator, your email application,  Spotify if you're playing music and having many other applications running at the same time,  your web browser, your email, all of those sorts of things. You know, I have 40 something gigs of RAM in this computer and I don't need all of that for my images. I'm not generally dealing with images that are that large.

So I can actually go with less RAM and then I can have more RAM left over for other applications. So just something to think about if you are dealing with really large images and you don't have a lot of RAM on your computer,  then you might wanna just leave it as that default. This setting here only takes effects once you restart Photoshop.

So you would have to set that setting, hit okay. And then the next time you quit and relaunch Photoshop,  that's when that RAM setting would take effect. All right, so let's do one kind of practical thing here with this file.

I'm gonna fit on screen here so we can see the whole thing. Let's say I wanted to get rid of some of these pomegranate seeds. I could paint white,  but I don't wanna permanently get rid of it.

So let's say I create a new layer and I'm gonna call this remove seeds. And then if I paint using my paintbrush,  I'm gonna choose to paint with a,  let's say a hard edge brush so I can see where I'm painting and a size that's about the size of a pomegranate,  maybe not quite the full size,  but somewhere around there. I think that's a good size.

And then the color here, we've got two colors. We got a foreground color and a background color. By default, those should be black and white.

If they are some other color,  maybe you've clicked on one of the colors and chosen a color. It might be a different color,  which by the way, that's how you actually would change the color is to click on it. And then you can choose the color that you want here in this little slider.

And then over here, you can choose how light or dark or saturated or desaturated you want. If you just want white or black,  just drag all the way into the corner,  drag all the way into the corner. Don't just click because you'll get close to white or black,  but not quite fully.

You have to drag all the way there. But if you just want pure white and black,  actually the easiest way is there's a button here called default colors. And the default colors here is default foreground and background colors.

When you click on it,  that sets you to pure black and pure white. And the one that's in front, the foreground color,  that's what you're gonna paint with. If I hit this little flip button here,  this little arrow,  that will flip between the foreground and background colors.

If you have these two colors loaded up,  white and black,  you can switch between those two and whichever one is in front,  that's what you're gonna paint with. So I'm gonna make sure that white is in front. And that way, when I paint,  it will paint away white, right? Now I'm just covering over, see? So to make this a little more apparent here,  if I paint with black,  all I'm doing here is I'm just painting a color over it.

I'm hiding over the thing,  but I'm working what we call non-destructively,  meaning I can change my mind. So I'm creating new pixels,  white pixels,  painting over something so I don't see the original pixels. If I hide the original layer,  the background layer,  notice I see white.

This checkerboard,  that checkerboard indicates transparency. I can see through to something. So the white we see is solid white.

Now, if I were to want to bring one of those pomegranate seeds back,  I could use my eraser tool. So over here, I have an eraser tool to erase. And if you are on a regular layer,  like this remove seeds,  this new layer that I created,  it's kind of like a sheet of glass.

And so when you erase on there,  and notice how small my eraser is, by the way,  it's really small. That's because each tool has their own setting. So the paintbrush had its own size.

The eraser has its own size. Anytime you switch tools,  you have to think,  what are the settings for that tool? So I switch tools. I then set the settings for that particular tool,  such as the size,  and that'll vary from tool to tool.

And I can choose the right size. And then when I drag here,  I'm erasing those white pixels. And look at that,  the pomegranate seed comes back.

If I hide the original layer here,  notice as I erase,  see how we're erasing to transparency. So I'm getting rid of that white paint that I made on that layer,  and therefore I can see through. So the top layer is in front or closer to us.

So they kind of take like a 3D thing of front to back,  and they take the thing that's in front,  the thing that's closer,  and they put that on top. So it's called the background because in back it's behind something,  and it's on the bottom of the layers panel. When you're using something like the eraser tool,  you have to think about what kind of layer you're on.

If you're on a regular transparent layer,  it'll simply be erasing the things that you made. However, if you're on the background layer,  background layers cannot be transparent. They are solid layers.

If I try to use my eraser,  the only thing it can erase to is something solid. That would actually be your background color. Think of this as there's a background layer.

So what is the color of your background? Well, if your background color is black,  you'll be erasing to that. So see how you erase the black. If you're, that's only if you're on the background layer.

So, because the background layer can't be transparent as long as it's a background layer. That doesn't mean we have to keep a background layer. In fact, the thing that's locked are the transparent pixels.

If I click this little lock over here,  I can unlock it. And that becomes a regular layer that is capable about being transparent. And now notice how the eraser,  which I did not change in the settings,  now notice how it erases to transparency.

So I can see through. If you were to take this into another program,  as long as you're saving it in the right file format,  then you could see through this file to see transparently through to something else behind this in that other program. If you're taking into, let's say Illustrator or InDesign or Premiere or After Effects,  you'd be able to see through it.

And now, if you ever want your background layer back,  you can choose that layer and say,  hey, this is a layer. I want it to turn it back into a new background from this layer. You don't have to have a background layer,  but a lot of times when you open up a file,  by default, you will have that background.

And it is a solid layer that cannot be transparent. Whereas all the rest of the layers,  they can be transparent. One more concept here before you try this out yourself is the idea of copying and pasting.

Now I've been painting these things and what if we wanna copy and paste? So let's say I select an area. I'm gonna use my selection tool here. We'll talk about these various different selection tools as time goes on.

But let's say I use my rectangle marquee and I choose an area that I wanna copy. Before I actually copy it,  I have to think about what pixels am I copying? I'm copying the pixels from the current layer. If I'm on this layer and I try to copy,  it's gonna say, hey, there was nothing there.

It's empty because that layer is empty. Don't go by what you see. Go by what layer you're on.

See, if I hide the original layer,  see there was nothing on that remove seeds layer. There is however, something on the background layer. So you can make your selection,  but you then second have to think about what layer are you on? Remember I said, this is a layer centric program.

So every time before you do something,  let's say I wanna copy, before I copy,  I need to make sure that I have the right layer selected. It'll copy pixels from this layer. Now when I copy, now it works.

Now I can make a new version of this by pasting. And when you paste, it'll paste it above the current layer. So notice it creates a new layer here.

And if I hide the original layer, see, it did make a copy. You don't see it because the position is exactly the same right now. So I'm gonna call this my new seed.

If I use my move tool, I can move that around and look at how I made a new seed. When we copy and paste,  Photoshop automatically creates new layers so that it's pasting non-destructively. If you don't want that to be there,  let's say I drag that to the trash.

I can get rid of that copy because it was a separate layer. That would be very different than copying onto the same layer. Let's say I just get rid of all these other layers and we just focus on this one layer.

If I were to copy and paint onto this same layer by using something like our clone stamp,  over here there is different tools that we can choose from. There are some healing tools,  which we'll talk about in the next exercise. Then there are also some cloning tools.

Let's just talk about cloning because cloning is basically copying. You make a clone of something,  you make a copy of something. If I use the clone stamp,  I will literally copy and paint.

It's like copy and paste, but it's two steps. First, just like you say copy and then paste,  we're gonna copy and then paint by choosing which brush size I want first. Let me just make sure I have a big enough brush size.

By the way, if I'm changing my brush size and I wanna do so visually out here,  instead of dragging and then checking and then dragging and then checking,  you can use your square bracket keys. That's the left square bracket or right square bracket keys. And notice how that changes the brush size.

The bracket keys that I'm talking about, by the way,  let me just put a little text here on screen just so you can see this. I'm talking about the left square bracket or the right square bracket. Let me just make this bigger here so you can see this.

These are the bracket keys that I'm talking about. Okay, so we got the left square bracket and the right square bracket. So those are the keys that I'm talking about.

So I can be in my clone stamp. And instead of manually changing my brush size here,  I can be using my left and right square brackets here. Right square bracket makes it bigger.

Left square bracket makes it smaller. And this is a two-step process. And if you forget the keystrokes,  actually, when you click, it's gonna say,  hey, you can't just go ahead and start painting.

The first step is you need to copy. You need to define the source of the clone. So on the Mac, that's option click.

On Windows, it would be ALT click. So first step is to option click or ALT click on Windows. That's the copy.

Now, when you go somewhere else, oh, look at that. It's in your cursor here. Now we can paint by just dragging to paint.

Let me show you again. So here, if I option click or ALT click on Windows,  I'm copying that part of the pomegranate. And as I start to drag, see how it's copying and painting.

So this can be useful when not just making copies of things,  but to retouch away things you don't like. Let me undo this. I'm gonna zoom in on this.

So I'm gonna use my zoom tool to zoom in. Maybe I don't like this little bit of white. And I think some of this color would be good there.

I could use my clone stamp with a very small brush using my left square bracket here to make it smaller. I could option or ALT click on some color that I think belongs there. And then I could come over here and I could paint that color in.

And I'm essentially copying and painting. And look, it actually did take this little highlight there and copy and paint that. Maybe I don't like that.

I could option click on some of this without the highlights and paint that away. Now, if I grab something that's the wrong color,  of course, that won't look good when I put it into that area. So I have to option click or ALT click on something good and then paint it in.

And I might need to get a little something from over here,  option or ALT click there. But you can kind of make up things by taking and copying and painting pixels. But notice how all of that happens on the same layer.

If you copy and paste onto a new layer,  it creates a new copy. So this change that I've just made is a destructive change that I'm working on here. So maybe I would have wanted to maybe duplicate the layer before I created this.

We're gonna take a look at that in the next exercise when we talk more about retouching. But the main point here was just for us to get familiar with kind of how layers work,  thinking about what layer we're working on before we go to do something. So this is a new habit you have to build of maybe choose what you're gonna do,  make sure you're on the right layer and then do whatever it is that you want to do.

So to try this out yourself,  in the workbook, there's gonna be an exercise that you can go through. So, make sure if you have not already downloaded the workbook that goes with this training,  make sure you grab the workbook. And in that workbook, there's a table of contents.

You can actually click on any of these to jump to that exercise, or you can scroll through to the page. But there'll be a big exercise 1A on the top right corner for this particular exercise. It's gonna walk you through step-by-step all the things that I kind of just showed you,  keyboard shortcuts and things,  letting you try this out yourself.

And just make sure you get to the first page of that exercise 1A, and then go through all of those if you wanna try this out yourself. In the next exercise, we'll come back,  we'll talk about the next exercise. We'll just go back and forth.

I'll do a video explaining how something works, and then there'll be an exercise in the book for you to practice this yourself. So have fun doing Exercise 1A and getting started with Photoshop.