Photoshop Essence

Photoshop Essence is a guide to using Photoshop CS5, designed to get you started on your Photoshop project as quickly as possible, and produced entirely by the student consultants of WCTS' Multimedia Development Lab (MDL).

The guide is structured to take you step-by-step through each of the fundamental aspects of Photoshop CS5, starting with basics like opening and creating documents, continuing on to editing and manipulating images, and finally showing you how to save and/or prepare images for print. Follow the video tutorials on the Photoshop Essence Vimeo channel, or search for a specific topic in the index.

Get Started

• Creating a New Document
• Opening a Document
• General Tour of the Photoshop CS5 Interface

Your First Content

• The Brush Tool
• Shapes and Lines
• Adding and Editing Text
• Images from the Internet

Getting Around and Basic Manipulation of Content

• The History Palette
• Zooming in Photoshop
• Basic Cropping
• Re-sizing
• Basic Rotating

Selecting Content and Moving It

• Basic Selections
• Moving and Snapping
• Rulers and Guides

Layers ... and the Doors They Open for You

• Layers 101
• Layers 201
• Cropping Revisited
• The Free Transform Tool
• Resolution
• Combining Separate Documents into One Document
• Color Correction

Finishing Up

• Finishing Your Image: File Formats, Print, Online Readiness

Index