Introduction to Photoshop

I have used photoshop before during my art GCSE, but some of the techniques I used to make this document were unfamilar to me, such as the Feathering Tool and also the Zoom Tool.

To set up the file on Photoshop, I clicked 'File' and then 'New', this then opened up a pop up screen which had all the sizing that you can edit. I changed the width to 800 pixels and the height to 1000 pixels, which changed the resolution but then I edited it to 72 pixels. I did this to make sure that the file wasn't so big and didn't take up a large amount of space as it wasn't especially important.

Using Photoshop can be quite confusing when it is first used, but once you get the hang of remembering where the tools are, it couldn't be easier. The Polygon Lasso Tool was very useful when I wanted to crop backgrounds out of certain images. This tool is situated on the left hand side and is the third button down. It looks like a lasso. Once you have gone round your image, to delete the back ground, you can either press Select-Inverse-Delete or if you want to delete the content within the highlighted area, you can simply just press the delete button. To scale images (make them bigger/smaller) go to Edit at the very top of the desktop page, a drop down will appear, then click Transform and Scale. To make sure your image stays in proportion, when you scale the image, hold down Shift. This will make the image stay in the correct proportion rather than being too wide or too long. The Zoom Tool was extremely useful when I wanted to edit in very fine detail. This tool is situated on the land hand side and near the bottom. It looks like a magnifying glass. Next you left click on the image to zoom in and when you want to zoom out you left click again whilst holding Alt.
Always remember to save you photoshop file as a psd (photoshop file) unless intended to go on a blog of some sort, then you want to save it as a JPEG file, so the image isn't in separate layers.