I've just about finished writing a book all about Photoshop. Granted, it's not for beginners, but it's pretty cool! You can look for it this summer (July/August 2006). It's called Best Practice: The Pros on Adobe Photoshop and should be available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon.

INTRODUCTION

Adobe Photoshop has been around for nearly 20 years, and was developed by Tom and John Knoll, brothers who had a passion for both technolgy and art. Originally intended as a way to view and edit images, it's become much more over time, and many illustrators, as well as photographers, embrace it as the state of the art software for bitmapped images. Adobe purchased the rights in 1989, and Photohop version 1 was introduced to the visual communications world in 1990.

Many improvements to the original application have been made, and Photoshop CS2, while remaining essentially an image making and editing program, is far more powerful in terms of providing a flexible work environment, including the ability to create alterations without damaging an original photo or piece of art.

NEW DOCUMENT

Before you can work in Photoshop, you need to either open an existing image, or create a new blank canvas. Opening an existing images is simply a matter of choosing Open from the file menu.

Choosing to create a new image (File -> New, or Command/Ctrl N) opens the New document dialog box where you can choose a canvas size from a variety of Presets, or to type in dimensions.

The issue of resolution is important; if the image you are creating is going to be used on the web, then 72 pixels per inch is fine. If, however, it's going to be used for print, the resolution should be set anywhere between 150 pixels per inch up to 350 pixels per inch. See the section on resolution for more about this piece.

Color Mode is where you determine whether to work in CMYK for an image that was going to be printed, or in RGB for images that will be displayed on a monitor (on a website, for instance). The truth is, working in RGB will keep your files size smaller and you can still use CMYK color values for painting and drawing. If the image will ultimately be used in a printed piece, you can safely change the color mode once the image is complete. Another benefit to using an RGB color space is that many of Photoshop's filters are not available to use in a CMYK image. Likewise, some of the other formats (like jpg and gif files) can't take advantage of them—but more about file formats later.

Background Contents refers to the color of the "canvas" you're creating. White is the default color, but you can choose from transparent, or any other color you might want. Note, however, that choosing a transparent background will only remain transparent if you save your file as a png—for the web. Any other format—like tiff (used most for print)—doesn't support transparent backgrounds.

THE WORK SPACE

The difference between Photoshop and its sister program, Illustrator, is in the work window. Where you can place bits of vector art around the artboard in Illustrator—imitating the original hands-on practice of working on a drawing table—Photoshop's image window is the exact size of the image, more like working on a canvas set up on an easel.

After that, there is a tool palette, and an options bar (across the top) that includes the palette well where you can dock palettes you use a lot, but don't want cluttering up your monitor. The options bar changes depending on what tool you're using. See the section on tools for how to use this terrific feature in detail.

A variety of palettes can be opened from the window menu and include a color palette, swatches, layers, channels, paths, character, history and actions paettes, to name some of the more useful ones.