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    Photoshop CS3 Bible
    Photoshop CS3 Bible
    Photoshop CS3 Bible
    Ebook1,948 pages19 hours

    Photoshop CS3 Bible

    By Laurie A. Ulrich and Abigail Perkiss

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    About this ebook

    Get the book you need to succeed in any Photoshop endeavor -- Photoshop CS3 Bible. In this totally updated edition to the international bestseller, the authors show you how to master every aspect of Photoshop -- from image-editing basics to new techniques for working with camera raw images. You'll learn how to retouch, color correct, manipulate, and combine images using Photoshop. You'll discover how to create cutting-edge special effects for digital or film-based images, and use them on the Web or in print. And you'll find out how to use the File Browser, histogram palette, Lens Blur, Match Color, the color replacement tool, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more. The authors' easy and approachable writing style demystifies even the most complex Photoshop tasks. Order today and master Photoshop CS3.

    Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateJun 24, 2011
    ISBN9781118079294
    Photoshop CS3 Bible

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      Book preview

      Photoshop CS3 Bible - Laurie A. Ulrich

      Chapter 1: Welcome to Photoshop CS3

      In This Chapter

      Introducing Photoshop

      Understanding how image editing works

      Knowing the difference between pixels and vectors

      Touring the new features in Photoshop CS3

      Getting to know the enhancements and changes

      Photoshop has been around long enough that the name has become a verb in our cultural lexicon (You can tell THAT’S been Photoshopped!). But simply because a term gets bandied about in general parlance doesn’t mean everyone knows what Photoshop truly is or does. Granted, you may be one of the many graphics professionals who have been using this program for years. But you may just as likely be one of the greater majority who, while having a general idea of Photoshop’s capabilities, has little or no experience using it—and with this book have decided to change all that.

      As you move forward and get to What’s New in Photoshop CS3, the playing field should level out, and as you move through the rest of the book, no matter what level of user you are now, you’ll find a great deal of new and useful information throughout.

      So what exactly is Photoshop and what does it do? Adobe Photoshop—Photoshop is the name of the software, Adobe Systems is the name of the company that develops and sells it—is a professional-level image-editing application. It allows you to create images from whole cloth or, more likely, modify scanned artwork and digital photographs. Photoshop is available for use on computers equipped with either Microsoft Windows or Apple’s Macintosh operating system.

      Of course, Photoshop isn’t just an image-editing application. It’s the most powerful, most ubiquitous image-editing application in the world. Despite hefty competition, where professional image editing is concerned, Photoshop’s not just the market leader—it’s the only game in town—and as you’ll discover (or you may already know), that status is well deserved.

      Such a lack of competition is rarely a good thing, because stagnation can often result. But in Photoshop’s case, the historically lopsided sales advantage has provided Adobe with a clear incentive to reinvest in Photoshop and regularly enhance, and even overhaul, its capabilities. Photoshop CS3 is no exception, and in fact, it may be one of the most significant upgrades in the past few years.

      It’s as if each new version of Photoshop is competing with its own previous versions for the hearts and minds of the digital art community. Meanwhile, other vendors have had to devote smaller resources to playing catch-up. Some, such as Jasc Software, with its Windows-only Paint Shop Pro, have hung in there and remained commercially viable. But such success stories are few and far between. Although competitors have provided some interesting and sometimes amazing capabilities, the sums of their parts have—more often than not—fallen well short of Photoshop’s.

      As a result, Photoshop rides a self-perpetuating wave of market leadership. It wasn’t always the best image editor, nor was it the first. But its deceptively straightforward interface combined with a few terrific core functions made it a hit from the moment of its first release. More than a dozen years later—thanks to substantial capital injections from Adobe and highly creative programming on the parts of Photoshop’s engineering staff and its originator, Thomas Knoll—Photoshop has evolved into the most popular program of its kind.

      Image-Editing Concepts

      Like any image editor, Photoshop enables you to alter photographs and other scanned artwork. You can retouch an image, apply special effects, swap details between photos, introduce text and logos, adjust color balance, and sharpen the details—to name just a few of your options. Photoshop also provides everything you need to create artwork from scratch. These tools are fully compatible with pressure-sensitive tablets, so you are not limited to creating only those images that you can successfully draw with a mouse.

      Raster versus vector

      Graphics programs tend to fall into two broad categories: painting programs and drawing programs. While these terms are nice, it’s better to think of graphics programs in terms of the type of images they produce: raster images or vector images.

      Raster images

      A raster image creates a picture on your screen by mapping color values to a rectangular grid of pixels (short for picture elements). As with all computer data, the color or grayscale values are stored in bits. The bits correspond to the grid of pixels, and this is where the term bitmap comes from. If you look at the code behind an image, it represents a map of all the bits devoted to the individual pixels—left to right, top to bottom.

      For example, JPEG, GIF, and PNG files are all raster (bitmap) graphic filetypes. By dragging one of these filetypes to a text editor capable or rendering hex code, you get a window into what that map of bits looks like, as shown in Figure 1.1.

      Figure 1.1

      The code underlying a GIF file shows you the map of the bits that make up the image.

      The code underlying a GIF file shows you the map of the bits that make up the image.

      Raster images contain a fixed number of pixels, which makes them resolution-dependent. This means when you attempt to enlarge them, they pixelate—a fancy way of saying they become all jagged looking. Figure 1.2 gives an example.

      Figure 1.2

      At its original size, the JPEG on the left is sharp and clear. After being enlarged by 500 percent (on the right), the image becomes pixelated.

      At its original size, the JPEG on the left is sharp and clear. After being enlarged by 500 percent (on the right), the image becomes pixelated.

      Vector images

      A vector image creates a picture using mathematical statements. Instead of mapping out data bits to specific pixels, a vector image describes the geometric properties (points, lines, curves, and polygons) that need to be constructed to render the image. For example, if a vector image contains a circle, the data in the file keeps track of the circle’s radius, where the center point is, and any stroke or fill colors to be used.

      Vector files are not resolution dependent. If you increase the dimensions, the objects described by the mathematical statement are simply redefined. In the case of our circle example, instead of trying to enlarge pixels, the vector file simply changes the radius value—and viola! You get a larger circle that’s just as clear the second time around. Figure 1.3 provides a demonstration.

      While painting programs have been traditionally raster-centric and drawing programs vector-centic, Photoshop bridges the gap quite nicely, providing many of the best features of both. In addition to its wealth of image-editing and organic-painting capabilities, Photoshop permits you to add vector-based text and shapes to your photographic images. These features may not altogether take the place of a drawing program (though Photoshop keeps incorporating many of the vector tools found in Adobe’s drawing program Illustrator), but they help to make Photoshop an increasingly flexible and dynamic image-creation environment.

      Figure 1.3

      This image, originally created in Adobe Illustrator, and opened here in Photoshop CS3, looks just as good regardless of the size it’s resampled to.

      This image, originally created in Adobe Illustrator, and opened here in Photoshop CS3, looks just as good regardless of the size it’s resampled to.note

      You should realize that even when working with vectors, everything you see onscreen is in a rasterized state—because monitors (for the most part) are raster output devices. Printers, on the other hand, are where the benefit of vector imagery is seen most clearly—literally and figuratively. This explains why you tend to find print designers singing the praises of applications like Adobe Illustrator (a vector image editor) and Web graphic designers (who design for a monitor-based experience) siding with Photoshop.

      The ups and downs of painting

      As you might expect, painting programs and drawing programs have their own strengths and weaknesses. The strength of a painting program is that it offers a straightforward approach to creating images. For example, although many of Photoshop’s features are complex—some of them extremely so—its core painting tools are as easy to use and familiar as a pencil. You alternately draw and erase until you reach a desired effect, just as you’ve been doing since childhood with pencil and paper.

      In addition to being simple to use, each of Photoshop’s main painting tools—include paint brushes, pencils, and erasers—is fully customizable. It’s as if you have access to an infinite variety of crayons, colored pencils, pastels, airbrushes, watercolors, and so on, all of which are erasable—and even the eraser is customizable, so you can erase in any one of hundreds of ways. The simplicity and customization potential make these tools fun to use, and you’ll find yourself creating artwork that you might never have had the time or patience to attempt manually. Of course, if you still find you’re more facile with a pencil and paper (or ink and paper or any other artist’s medium, for that matter), you can always scan the manual drawing/painting into Photoshop and then use Photoshop’s tools to enhance and edit it—zooming in very close for fine adjustments, which you could never do to the same extent if you remained in the manual world.

      Because painting programs rely on pixels, they are ideally suited to electronic photography. Whether captured with a scanner or digital camera, an electronic photograph is composed of thousands or even tens of millions of colored pixels. A drawing program such as Illustrator may let you import such a photograph and apply very simple edits, but Photoshop gives you complete control over every pixel, entire collections of pixels, or independent elements of pixels. If you just leaf quickly through this book, you’ll see that a photograph can become anything, and the options for what you can do to a photo are virtually unlimited.

      The downside of paintings and electronic photos is that they are ultimately finite in scale. Because a bitmap contains a fixed number of pixels, the resolution of an image—the number of pixels in an inch, a centimeter, or some other defined space—changes with respect to the size at which the image is printed. Print the image small, and the pixels become tiny, which increases the resolution of the image. Like the millions of cells in your body, tiny pixels become too small to see and thus blend together to form a cohesive whole, as in the first image in Figure 1.2. Print the image large, and the pixels grow, which decreases the resolution. Large pixels are like cells viewed through a microscope; once you can distinguish them independently, the image falls apart, as in the second example in the figure. The results are jagged edges and blocky transitions. The only way to remedy this problem is to increase the number of pixels in the image, which increases the size of the file.

      cross_ref

      Remember, this is a very basic explanation of how images work. For a more complete description that includes techniques for maximizing image resolution and quality, check out Chapter 3.

      The downs and ups of drawing

      A better way to describe the process of creating a vector-based drawing might be constructing. Why? Because you actually build each of the lines and shapes, point by point, and stack them on top of each other to create a finished image. Each of these objects is independently editable—one of the main advantages of an object-oriented approach—but you’re still faced with the task of building your artwork one chunk at a time.

      Because a drawing program defines lines, shapes, and text as mathematical equations, these objects automatically conform to the full resolution of the output device, whether it’s a laser printer, an image setter, or a film recorder. The drawing program sends the math to the printer and the printer renders the math to paper or film. In other words, the printer converts the drawing program’s equations to printer pixels. Your printer offers far more pixels than your screen—a 600-dots-per-inch (dpi) laser printer, for example, offers 600 pixels per inch (dots equal pixels), whereas most screens are limited to 150 pixels per inch or fewer. So the printed drawing appears smooth and sharply focused regardless of the size at which you print it.

      Another advantage of drawings is that they take up relatively little space on a hard drive. The file size of a drawing depends on the quantity and complexity of the objects the drawing contains. Thus, the file size has almost nothing to do with the size of the printed image, which is just the opposite of the way bitmapped images work. A thumbnail drawing of a garden that contains hundreds of leaves and petals consumes several times more space than a poster-sized drawing made up of three rectangles.

      When to use Photoshop

      Because of their specialized tools and methods, painting programs and drawing programs fulfill distinct and divergent purposes. Photoshop and other painting programs are best suited to creating and editing the following kinds of artwork:

      • Scanned photos, including photographic collages and embellishments that originate from scans

      • Images captured with any type of digital camera

      • Still frames captured from videotape or film

      • Realistic artwork that relies on the play among naturalistic highlights, midranges, and shadows

      • Impressionistic artwork and other images created for purely personal or aesthetic purposes

      • Logos and other display type featuring soft edges, reflections, or tapering shadows

      • Special effects that require the use of filters and color enhancements that you simply can’t achieve in a drawing program

      When to use a drawing program

      You’re probably better off using Illustrator or some other drawing program if you’re interested in creating more stylized artwork, such as the following:

      • Architectural plans, product designs, or other precise line drawings

      • Business graphics, such as graphs, charts, and diagrams that reflect data or show how things work

      • Traditional logos and text effects that require crisp, ultra-smooth edges

      • Brochures, flyers, and other single-page documents that mingle artwork, logos, and body-copy text (such as the text you’re reading now)

      If you’re serious about computer graphics, you should own at least one painting program and one drawing program. This enables you to create and edit images that are best suited to each of the different program types, potentially mixing and mingling the content you create and/or edit in each program for projects that require, for example, photographic content as well as crisp line art. For simplicity’s sake, you may consider owning both Photoshop and Illustrator, so that you can benefit from the products’ common elements—similar menus, commands, buttons, and common keyboard shortcuts. The key, though, is to have tools that suit your needs and work the way you think. Of course, as you’ll learn later, another of Photoshop’s benefits is that you can customize it to work the way you do, making it a highly effective tool for just about anyone.

      What’s New in Photoshop CS3

      If you used Photoshop CS2 or CS, you’ll notice some big changes in Photoshop CS3 right away. There are big changes to the toolbox layout and the way palettes (those boxes of tools and settings on the workspace) look and interact—with you and the tools you’re using at any given time. So the look and feel of Photoshop has changed with the release of CS3, and you’ll spot that immediately.

      What you may not realize immediately are many of the feature changes and enhancements. These you won’t find until you start working with a particular tool or fire up a particular command via a menu or keyboard shortcut. Some of them may take you weeks to find, just based on which features you typically use when you sit down to work with Photoshop. Some you may never find on your own, if they reside in feature areas that you never, ever use.

      That’s the neat thing about Photoshop, too. It’s so vast that you can use it and love it and be really productive with it without ever using certain parts of it. It’s like living in a big state or province: All the things you ever need are probably right there near your house, and you may never need to venture very far for anything. Of course, the adventurous among you will feel compelled to poke around and play with features you may not need on a daily basis, and hopefully this book will encourage that sort of pioneer spirit.

      To give you an idea of the magnitude of the upgrade that CS3 represents, this section includes a list of just some of the new and enhanced features. You’ll find a chapter number reference (though some features are mentioned in more than one chapter), along with a description of the new/enhanced feature and how you’ll benefit from it. Remember, there are many changes, both large and small (and each person’s idea of large versus small may vary), so this isn’t everything:

      • New toolbox layout (Chapter 2): The toolbox can now be displayed in a single vertical column of tools, or the old two-column arrangement many of us have come to know and love. Of course, the tools themselves look the same and those that are grouped under a single button location are in those same groupings, so you won’t be struggling to figure out where things are. The idea behind this change is to simplify access to the tools, making grabbing a particular tool with the mouse easier. You’re less likely to click the tool’s neighbor when the only neighbors are above and below, not side by side as well.

      • No ImageReady button on the toolbox (Chapters 19 and 20): ImageReady is gone. Now, now, wipe those tears and keep reading. While the application is gone, its features are not. They’re now housed completely within Photoshop. We’ve seen many of ImageReady’s tools for animation migrate to Photoshop in the previous two versions, but the assimilation is now complete. Between the new Timeline palette (a version of the Animation palette, both of which are discussed later) and the Save for Web dialog box, there’s nothing you did with ImageReady that you can’t do within Photoshop.

      • Changed palettes (Chapter 2): The palettes are in roughly the same spots as they were in CS2, but their connection to the workspace has changed. The palettes are affixed to the right side of the workspace as part of a static dock and can be collapsed and expanded individually, in groups, or you can choose to expand the dock so that all the palettes and palette groups are displayed at the same time. You can still separate a particular palette from the dock and drag it anywhere onscreen, though, so don’t think you can’t bring your tools with you when you go to work, because you can. You also can drag the one or two palettes you need with you and collapse the rest to make as much room for your image as needed. You’ll also notice tabs on the left side of the palette dock (when the palettes are in their default arrangement, with just one column of palettes visible). You can click the tabs to display different palettes and palette groups, providing yet another way to get at the palette you need, when you need it.

      • The Analysis menu (Chapter 3): Now you can really control how your image measurements are made—visually, by you, using the displayed rulers, or with measurement features implemented within your image. Through the Analysis menu, you can set up a measurement scale, set data points within your image, measure elements within your image, customize your rulers and counting tools, and apply scale markers. For those images where the distance between points A and B is important, and where you need to determine for yourself where points A and B are, this development is a big benefit.

      • The Animation/Timeline palette (Chapter 19): The ability to create animations and movies, with tools that will remind some of you of Macromedia’s Flash application (now that Adobe and Macromedia are one and the same), are housed in the new Timeline palette, which is part of the Animation palette. You’ll use this palette for many of the things you used to do in ImageReady, and in Photoshop CS2 with the Animation palette that premiered with that version of the software. In addition to creating animations and movies, you also can use this timeline to view video frame by frame, and with the enhanced Clone tool (described below), you can clone between frames in a video.

      • The Clone Source palette (Chapter 7): You can plot up to five clone sources, from locations within one or more images, and after setting them, use this new palette to switch between them when using the Clone Stamp. The palette also allows you to set offsets, horizontal and vertical scale, angles, overlay, and opacity for the cloned content from each clone source.

      • The Measure Tool (Chapter 3): Used along with the new Measurement Scale command, you can set a measurement scale by dragging within your image. You also can drag to measure any distance within the image, and the value appears in the Info palette. Measurements made with this tool (and the Measurement Scale command) find their way into the Measurement Log palette, which is also new.

      • The Measurement Log palette (Chapter 3): Keep track of your measurements (made with the new Measurement tool) with this palette, through which you can also track your measurements, use measurements from one image in another, select all stored measurements, or delete them.

      • Smart Filters (Chapter 10): If you’ve turned any layer in your image into a Smart Object (or opened an image as a Smart Object), your filters are applied as Smart Filters. What’s so smart about them? They appear, after you apply them, in the Layers palette, where you can turn them on and off and delete them entirely. This makes filtering something much more flexible than ever, because filters can be applied and then un-applied later—without having to rely on the History Palette or Undo to get rid of their effects.

      • More support for video (Chapter 19): Photoshop CS3 supports new formats and allows you to import and expert image sequences and frames. You also can take advantage of expanded QuickTime export capabilities, which include exporting to Flash Video (FLV). Layered video is now also supported in the Timeline palette, and you can work with them in grayscale, RGB, CMYK, and Lab document modes, at 16-bit, as well as 32-bit depth.

      This list covers just some of the big changes you’ll find in CS3—there are lots of smaller changes throughout, many applying to existing tools. For example, you’ll find enhancements to the Brightness/Contrast dialog box and improvements in the selection tools, in terms of the addition of a Refine Edge option that allows you to do just that—clean up the edges of a selection. You’ll find support for creating graphics for use on handheld devices in the new version of the Save for Web dialog box (now called the Save for Web and Devices dialog box), and of course, the Bridge has changed, too—in many ways for the better.

      Summary

      Photoshop CS3 is a major upgrade, made up of significant interface changes and several big changes and enhancements throughout the application. This chapter’s goal has been to familiarize you with what to expect from CS3 and where you can find coverage of the new features throughout this book. You’re now ready to move forward and focus, chapter by chapter, on exploring Photoshop CS3—the features that have always been part of Photoshop but may be new to you, and the new and changed features that will be new for everyone. See you in Chapter 2!

      Chapter 2: Photoshop Inside Out

      In This Chapter

      Getting comfortable with the Photoshop workspace

      Finding your old and some new favorite tools

      Customizing tools

      Saving and managing tool presets

      Zooming in on your images

      Scrolling from the keyboard

      Navigating the workspace

      Using Photoshop’s Preferences to make yourself at home

      Despite the sometimes enigmatic quality of computers and software, we can count on certain things in just about any computer application—toolbars, menus, keyboard shortcuts (some of them common to many applications), and dialog boxes that appear when the toolbar buttons and menu commands are used. All these common features do two things: They help us feel more comfortable with different applications, which shortens our overall learning curve, and they help us devote our time to the features that vary by application—the things that make each application unique.

      You’ll find all the aforementioned familiar features in Photoshop, which should put you at ease. At first glance, the workspace—the default arrangement of the Toolbox, menu bar, and a handful of palettes—looks simple enough, and in fact, Photoshop can be simple to use. Upon further inspection, of course, you’ll find that Photoshop has much more going on than many applications. Photoshop has lots of palettes, some unique menus, and options bars. Photoshop CS3 also continues to offer the Bridge, which premiered in CS2, which provides a separate application workspace for file management. Add to that the fact that some of the dialog boxes can be a little intimidating to a new user, and you may wonder if you can really learn to use it all—but don’t worry; you can.

      For new users, the Photoshop workspace can seem like lots to absorb, but absorb it you will, and through this chapter, you get more comfortable with the program, its tools, menus, and the process of navigating it all. If you’re not new to Photoshop, this chapter shows you some new features Adobe has added to the workspace, and you may even discover some things that aren’t new to Photoshop but that are new to you.

      The aforementioned Bridge—that name is a trifle dramatic, but fear not—is covered in Chapter 3, where its role as an image file management tool is thoroughly discussed. In Chapter 20, you see the Bridge used to print and publish various multiple-image creations. For now, though, let’s fire up Photoshop CS3 and start poking around!

      Diving in with the Splash Screen

      Shortly after you launch Photoshop, the splash screen appears. A splash screen is not a phenomenon unique to Photoshop—many applications have one. The splash screen’s role is to announce the application’s launch, maybe offer some marketing information (here, it’s simply the name of the software and a cool graphic to assure you that you’re in the right place to create cool graphics), and to explain the launching process by showing the names of plug-in modules as they load and listing the various initialization procedures. In Photoshop, the splash also lists the names of Photoshop’s developers, going all the way back (note the first names in the list) to the beginning, when Photoshop 1.0 was just a baby.

      tip

      If you’re a Windows user, you can access the splash screen at any time by choosing Help⇒About Photoshop. On the Mac, choose About Photoshop from the Photoshop menu. After a few seconds, the list of programmers and copyright statements at the bottom of the screen starts to scroll. Press Alt (Option on the Mac) to make the list scroll more quickly. To make the splash screen go away, just click it or press the Esc key.

      note

      If you’ve ever tried to launch Photoshop on a networked computer while another computer on the network is already running a copy of Photoshop using the same serial number, you’re familiar with the message Could not initialize Photoshop because So-and-So is already running a copy of Adobe Photoshop with this serial number. There are two important things to note here: One is that you can work around this by simply detaching the second computer from the network before you launch Photoshop. After the application is open, re-network the computer, and you’ll be up and running. And the other important thing to note is that with Mac OS X, this network problem doesn’t occur.

      Using the Photoshop Workspace

      After the launch process is complete, the Photoshop workspace appears in the foreground. Figure 2.1 shows the Photoshop CS3 workspace as it appears for a Windows user when an image is open and the default palettes are visible. You’ll use the Window menu to select additional palettes to view, or use the techniques discussed later in this chapter for displaying, minimizing, and closing palettes. Figure 2.2 shows the same scenario as it appears on a Mac running Mac OS X.

      Many of the elements that make up the Photoshop workspace are familiar to people who are acquainted with the Windows or Macintosh operating system environments. For example, the menu bar lives at the top of the workspace (as it lives at the top of the window for virtually all applications) and provides access to menus and commands. Even the way the menus work should be comfortable to users of both operating systems. At the top of the window, you have a title bar, and you can drag the title bar to move the application window (assuming it’s not already maximized). In either operating system, you have scroll bars in your windows if there’s more to be seen than will fit in the window at its current size.

      These other Photoshop workspace features may be less familiar:

      • Image window: Photoshop lets you open multiple images at one time—you can open them simultaneously from the Open dialog box, or one at a time, over the course of a work session. The nice thing is that each open image resides in its own window. On the Mac, click the green zoom button in the upper-left corner of the title bar to resize the window to fit the image. Also worth noting are the special boxes in the lower-left corner of the image window (see Figure 2.2). The magnification box tells you the current view size, and the Info palette can tell you important things about image size and computer resources.

      Figure 2.1

      The Photoshop CS3 workspace as it looks for a user running Windows

      • Status bar: In each image window, you find the Status bar, which provides running commentary on the active tool and image. (If your image is maximized, it appears above the Windows taskbar.) The left end of the Status bar features the magnification box (type a new number into the box and that becomes the zoom percentage), an Open icon, the current size of the image file, and a right-pointing triangle that displays a list of additional information you can choose to see in the Status bar. This list includes the default information about the document size, the document profile, dimensions, measurement scale, scratch sizes, efficiency, timing, the name of the active tool, and the option to preview an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image at 32-bit exposure. To access these options, click the aforementioned triangle and select Show from the resulting pop-up menu.

      cross_ref

      For complete information on the magnification box, read the section Navigating in Photoshop later in this chapter.

      Figure 2.2

      The Photoshop CS3 workspace as it looks on a Mac.

      • Toolbox: The Toolbox, which is somewhat changed in CS3, gives you access to all of Photoshop’s tools. Each tool is represented by an icon, and the icons are activated with a single click or the press of a keyboard shortcut (single characters, such as V for the Move tool, or B for the paintbrush). Some tools share a single spot in the Toolbox, and to access the hidden tools (as only one tool can be displayed in a spot at once), you can use keyboard shortcuts or your mouse to get at them. Once activated, you can use a tool by clicking or dragging with it inside the image window. When you click on any tool, observe the Options bar, across the top of the workspace, below the menus. The Options bar changes with each tool selected, offering choices for how the active tool operates.

      The bottom five buttons on the Toolbox (at the bottom of the last section of tools) contain controls for changing your foreground and background paint colors, entering and exiting the quick mask mode, and changing the screen area available for image display. In CS2, there was also a button for launching ImageReady, but as we’ve discussed, that application is gone, its powers absorbed and assimilated into Photoshop, so there is no ImageReady button on the Toolbox anymore.

      • Palettes: Photoshop CS3 offers a total of 21 palettes, not including the Toolbox and the Options bar, which are technically palettes as well. Each palette is part of the larger palette dock, which is a fixed part of the workspace that resides on the right side of the workspace. You can separate palettes from the dock and make them float, which means that the palette becomes independent of the image window and of other palettes. Palettes can be grouped together or dragged apart to float separately according to your needs—you may want a specific palette or group of palettes on hand for a particular image and have no need for some of the default palettes at all. Photoshop makes it easy to customize the workspace, as you find later on in this chapter and as you work through the rest of the book. To see the whole list of palettes, click your Window menu.

      The Info palette

      The Info palette, one of the default palettes that are displayed when Photoshop is opened for the first time, is Photoshop’s way of keeping you informed of important things. It provides one-stop shopping for all your image information needs. These important things include the size of the image, the tool that’s in use, where your image is on the page (if it were to be printed), how much memory you’re using—lots of stuff you may or may not want to know at any given time. You don’t have to display the Info palette if you don’t want to (it’s displayed in Figure 2.3), or you may be thrilled that it’s there and feel anxious when you can’t see it—but it’s there if you need it. The following sections explain all the useful things it can tell you.

      Figure 2.3

      Click the palette menu button to display the Info Palette Options dialog box, which shows the info you can choose to see.

      Click the palette menu button to display the Info Palette Options dialog box, which shows the info you can choose to see.

      Document size

      By default, the Info palette contains two numbers divided by a slash. The first number is the size of the base image in memory. The second number takes into account any additional layers in your image. If you’re interested in how the values are calculated, here goes:

      Photoshop calculates the first value by multiplying the height and width of the image (both in pixels) by the bit depth of the image, which is the size of each pixel in memory. Consider a typical, full-color, 640×480-pixel image. A full-color image takes up 24 bits of memory per pixel (which is why it’s called a 24-bit image). There are 8 bits in a byte, so 24 bits translates to 3 bytes. Multiply that by the number of pixels, and you get 640×480×3 = 921,600 bytes. Because there are 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte, 921,600 bytes is exactly 900K. Try it yourself—open a 640×480-pixel RGB image, and you’ll see that the first number in the Info palette reads 900K. Now you know why.

      It’s the second value—the one that factors in the layers—that represents the real amount of memory that Photoshop needs. If the image contains one layer only, the numbers before and after the slash are the same. Otherwise, Photoshop measures the opaque pixels in each layer and adds approximately 1 byte of overhead per pixel to calculate the transparency. The second number also grows to accommodate paths, masks, spot-color channels, undoable operations, and miscellaneous data required by the image cache.

      Of course, it’s not necessary that you be able to predict these values, which is a good thing, because predicting the second value is virtually impossible. Photoshop asks no help when calculating the values in the information, but you should know what’s going on as you start adding layers to an image. The larger the preview numbers grow, the more work Photoshop has to do and the slower it’s likely to perform, depending on your system configuration—memory, processor, available hard-drive space, and so on.

      Image position

      If you want to position a picture precisely on a page before printing, use the Print command in the File menu (see Chapter 20 for details). New to Photoshop CS3, the Print command contains not only options for determining how your image will print, but a preview of the print job as well. This combines the Print and Print with Preview commands from CS2 into a single command.

      tip

      Speaking of Info, for more information, you can Ctrl-click (Ô-click on the Mac) the status bar’s display of the document size to see the tile sizes. Photoshop uses tiles to calculate pixel manipulations. If you confine your work to a single tile, it probably will go faster than if you allow a little to run over into a second tile.

      To see a pop-up menu of other information the Info palette can provide, click the Info palette’s palette menu to display a pop-up menu of display options. The first option—Document Sizes—is selected by default. This option displays the image-size values described in the preceding section. You find out what information the other choices provide in the next few sections.

      Image color

      If you work regularly with many different color modes, you may find the Document Profile option quite useful. When you select this option, the name of the current color mode (such as RGB 8bpc) appears in the Info palette.

      cross_ref

      For more information on color profiles, see Chapter 17, where you can find everything you need to know about color profiles—how to apply them and what they do.

      Document measurements

      Choosing to view Document Dimensions gives you a quick readout of the width-by-height measurements of your document. The unit of measurement is set in the Units & Rulers panel of Photoshop’s Preferences dialog box, and conveniently enough, you learn more about setting such preferences later on in this chapter.

      Memory consumption and availability

      When you select Scratch Sizes, Photoshop changes the values in the Info palette to represent memory consumption and availability. The first value is the amount of room required to hold the currently open images in RAM. The second value indicates the total amount of RAM that Photoshop has to work with. For the program to run at top efficiency, the first number must be smaller than the second.

      In earlier versions of Photoshop, the number before the slash was generally equal to between three and five times the size of all open images, including layers. Since we have had the ability to undo multiple levels (going back multiple states through the History palette), however, this value can grow to more than 100 times as big as any one image. This is because Photoshop has to store each operation in memory on the off chance that you may want to undo to a previous point in time. For each and every action, Photoshop nudges the first value upward until you reach the ceiling of undoable operations.

      The second value is simply equal to the amount of memory available to your images after the Photoshop application itself has loaded. For example, suppose Photoshop has 100MB of RAM at its disposal. The code that makes up the Photoshop application consumes about 15MB, so that leaves 85MB to hold and edit images.

      If the second value is bigger than the first, all is happiness and Photoshop is running as fast as your particular brand of computer permits. But if the first value is larger, Photoshop has to dig into its supply of virtual memory, a disk-bound adjunct to RAM. Virtual memory makes Photoshop run more slowly because the program must swap portions of the image on and off your hard drive. The simple fact is, hard drives have moving parts and RAM does not. That means disk-bound virtual memory is slower than real memory.

      To increase the size of the value after the slash, you have to get more RAM to your images in one of the following ways:

      • Purchase more RAM. Installing an adequate supply of memory is the single best way to make Photoshop run more quickly. Not sure how? Consult your manufacturer, or get help from the company from whom you buy the RAM.

      • Quit other applications so that only Photoshop is running.

      • Quit Photoshop, and remove any filters you don’t need from the Plug-Ins folder (which resides in the same folder as the Photoshop application). But don’t throw the filters away! Just move them to a location outside the Plug-Ins folder so they don’t load into RAM when you launch Photoshop.

      • Choose Performance in the Preferences submenu, and increase the Memory Usage value as explained later in this chapter.

      Operating efficiency

      When you select the Efficiency option, Photoshop lists the amount of time it spends running operations in RAM compared with swapping data back and forth between the hard drive. A value of 100 percent is the best-case scenario. It means Photoshop never has to rely on scratch files. Low values indicate higher reliance on the hard drive and, as a result, slower operations. Adobe recommends that if the value falls below 75 percent, you should either assign more memory to Photoshop or purchase more RAM for your computer.

      The Efficiency option is a reality check. If it seems Photoshop is dragging its feet, and you hear it writing to your hard drive a little too often, you can refer to the Efficiency rating to see whether performance is as bad as you suspect. Keep in mind that hearing Photoshop occasionally write to disk is not cause for concern. All versions of Photoshop since 3.0 automatically copy open images to a disk buffer in case using virtual memory is later warranted. In fact, this is the reason Adobe added the Efficiency option to Version 3.0.1—to quash fears that a few sparks from your hard drive indicated anything less than peak performance.

      Photoshop operations timing

      If you select Timing, the Info palette tells how long Photoshop took to perform the last operation (including background tasks, such as transferring an image to the system Clipboard). Adobe may have added this option to help testing facilities run their Photoshop tests. But built-in timing helps you as well.

      For example, suppose you’re trying to decide whether to purchase a new computer. You read a magazine article detailing the newest super-fast system. You can run the same filters with the same settings on your computer and see how much slower your results are, all without picking up a stopwatch.

      Measurement Scale

      New to Photoshop CS3, the Measurement Scale option for the Info palette shows the status of the currently set Measurement Scale. You can set this using the Set Measurement Scale command in the Analysis menu. You learn more about this command and all the other ways the new Measurement Scale feature is used in Chapter 3. If you haven’t set a custom scale for the open image, the Info palette doesn’t display anything pertaining to this. After you have set a scale, however, the status of what you set appears in the next-to-last position.

      The active tool

      Select the Current Tool option, and Photoshop displays the name of the active tool. Why do you need information on what seems to be so obvious? Of course you know which tool you’re using, right? Adobe’s intention is not to insult your intelligence or short-term memory with redundant information, but to remind you which tool is active, especially if something you’ve selected has changed the active tool. For example, if you choose Analysis⇒Measurement Scale, the active tool changes to Ruler, regardless of what you were using before issuing the command. The active tool returns to the one you were using as soon as the Measurement Scale dialog box closes, but you see the switch reflected in the Info palette while the dialog box is open. Of course, you may find that having all this information displayed in the Info palette is of limited use. Maybe you only want to see Timing or Efficiency information and you choose to use the Status bar to show you the Document size. Whatever you want to see, however, you can customize the palette quickly, making it provide just what interests you in any given image.

      The tools

      When multiple tools share a single Toolbox slot, you select the tool you want from a menu-style list, as shown in Figure 2.4. A tiny triangle in the lower-right corner of a Toolbox button indicates that multiple tools share that button. You can click the triangle and then click the name of the tool you want to use. Or, to do the job with one less click, just drag from the icon onto the name of the tool and then release the mouse button.

      Figure 2.4

      Drag from any tool icon with a triangle to display a pop-up menu of alternate tools.

      Drag from any tool icon with a triangle to display a pop-up menu of alternate tools.tip

      You can cycle between the tools in the pop-up menu by Alt-clicking (Win) or Option-clicking (Mac) a tool icon. Pressing the key that appears to the right of the tool names also does the trick—however, depending on a tool setting that you establish in the Preferences dialog box, you may need to press Shift (see the section General preferences).

      Also, when you position your cursor over a tool, Photoshop tells you the name of the tool and how to select it from the keyboard. If you find the tool tips irritating, see the section General preferences to find out how to turn them off.

      Each tool has been cataloged in the following list, with tool icons, quick summaries, and the chapter (if any) to which you can refer for more information. There’s no need to read the list word for word; instead, just use it as a reference to get acquainted with the program or specific tools with which you may be unfamiliar. Unless otherwise noted, each of the following descriptions tells how to use the tool in the image window. For example, if an item says drag, you click the tool’s icon to select the tool, and then click and drag in the image window; you don’t drag on the tool icon itself. Of course, you probably knew that!

      Move (Chapter 8): Drag to move a selection or layer. In fact, the Move tool is the exclusive means for moving and cloning portions of an image. You also can Ctrl-drag (Win) or Ô-drag (Mac) selections with any tools except the Shape, Path, and Slicing tools, but only because Ctrl (Ô on the Mac) temporarily accesses the Move tool.

      Rectangular marquee (Chapter 8): Drag with this tool to enclose a portion of the image in a rectangular marquee, which is a pattern of moving dash marks indicating the boundary of a selection.

      Shift-drag to add to a selection; Alt-drag (Win) or Option-drag (Mac) to delete from a selection. The same goes for the other marquee tools, as well as the lassos and the Magic Wand. As an alternative to using these time-honored shortcuts, you can click mode icons in the Options bar to change the behavior of the selection tools.

      Elliptical Marquee (Chapter 8): Drag with the Elliptical Marquee tool to enclose a portion of the window in an elliptical marquee.

      Single-Row Marquee (Chapter 8): Click with the Single-Row Marquee tool to select an entire horizontal row of pixels that stretches all the way across the image. You also can drag with the tool to position the selection. You rarely need the Single-Row Marquee, but when you do, here it is.

      Single-Column Marquee (Chapter 8): Same as the Single-Row Marquee, except the Single-Column Marquee tool selects an entire vertical column of pixels. Again, not a particularly useful tool.

      Lasso (Chapter 8): Drag with the Lasso tool to select a free-form portion of the image. You also can Alt-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) with the Lasso to create a straight-sided selection outline.

      Polygonal Lasso (Chapter 8): Click hither and yon with this tool to draw a straight-sided selection outline (just like Alt-clicking or Option-clicking with the standard lasso). Each click sets a corner point in the selection.

      Magnetic Lasso (Chapter 8): As you drag with the Magnetic Lasso tool, the selection outline automatically sticks to the edge of the foreground image. Bear in mind, however, that Photoshop’s idea of an edge may not jibe with yours. Like any automated tool, the Magnetic Lasso sometimes works wonders, and other times it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

      tip

      The Magnetic Lasso automatically lays down points as you drag. If you don’t like a point and want to get rid of it, press Backspace (Win) or Delete (Mac).

      Quick Selection Tool (Chapter 8): This selection tool allows you to paint a selection, sampling pixels on one or all layers as you drag the mouse. It shares a spot in the Toolbox with the Magic Wand because it also works by sampling pixels, and that process is customized with the Options bar and the Refine Edge dialog box, which allows you to control the selection process as it pertains to the edges of the selection.

      newfeature

      The Quick Selection Tool is new in Photoshop CS3.

      Magic Wand (Chapter 8): Click with the Magic Wand tool to select a contiguous area of similarly colored pixels. To select noncontiguous areas, click in one area and then Shift+click in another. Deselect the Contiguous tool option, and click once to select similar colors throughout the image.

      Crop (Chapter 3): Drag with the Crop tool to enclose the portion of the image you want to retain in a rectangular boundary. Photoshop tints areas outside the boundary to help you better see which image areas will go and which will stay when you apply the crop. The crop boundary sports several square handles that you can drag to resize the cropped area. Drag outside the boundary to rotate it; drag inside to move it. Press Enter or Return to apply the crop or Esc to cancel.

      Slice (Chapter 20): The Slice tool and its companion, the Slice Select tool, come into play when you’re creating Web graphics. You can cut images into rectangular sections—known as slices—so you can apply Web effects, such as links, rollovers, and animations, to different areas of the same image. Drag with the Slice Tool to define the area that you want to turn into a slice.

      Slice Select (Chapter 20): If you don’t get the boundary of your slice right the first time, click the slice with this tool and drag one of the side or corner handles that appear. Or drag inside the boundary to relocate it.

      Press Ctrl (Win) or Ô (Mac) when the Slice tool is active to temporarily access the Slice Select tool, and vice versa.

      Spot Healing Brush (Chapter 7): This tool is new to Photoshop CS2 and works similarly to the Healing Brush—it clones other content over offending material and makes it match the new surroundings. It’s different from the Healing Brush in that it is simpler to use, fixes one spot at a time, and is best used for small problems—small stains, cuts, scratches, or small items in the image itself that you want to eradicate.

      Healing Brush (Chapter 7): The Clone Stamp tool (also known to longtime Photoshop users as the Rubber Stamp tool) has always seemed like a miracle worker when removing unwanted elements from images. Although excellent results were possible, you still had to be careful that the texture and shading of the cloned area matched the area you were replacing. Although the Healing Brush tool seems at first use just like the Clone Stamp tool, its special healing process lets you clone details from one area without obscuring the texture and shading of the other.

      Patch (Chapter 7): Similar to the Healing Brush, the Patch tool lets you use the same healing technology by making selections and dragging them to new locations. It’s generally useful for healing larger areas of the image.

      Red Eye Removal (Chapter 7): Click the offending demonic pool of red, yellow, or green, and based on your Options bar settings, remove the glow in favor of a dark pupil. This isn’t the cure-all for red-eye (or the yellow-eye or green-eye you get when photographing animals’ eyes), and you may find that it still pays to remove red-eye manually, using one or more of Photoshop’s other painting tools, but for a quick fix, this certainly lives up to its name.

      Brush (Chapter 5): Drag with the Brush tool to paint soft lines. If you’re thinking that sounds kind of dull, wait until you learn about the multitude of settings available to you in the Brushes palette.

      Pencil (Chapter 5): Drag with the Pencil tool to paint jagged, hard-edged lines. Its main purpose is to clean up individual pixels when you want to zoom in and really tidy up an edge or create details to augment the existing pixels’ impact on the image.

      Color Replacement (Chapter 5): Hailing from Photoshop’s younger sibling, Photoshop Elements, the Color Replacement tool lets you paint over an existing color in the image to replace it with the foreground color. Its main reason for existence is to make it easy to fix red-eye—but now that there is also a tool specifically for that purpose, you may have to find another reason to use it.

      Clone Stamp (Chapter 7): Greatly enhanced in Photoshop CS3, this tool copies one portion of the image onto another. Alt-click (Win) or Option-click (Mac) the part of your image you want to clone, and then drag to clone that area to another portion of the image. The enhancement comes in the form of a new palette, called Clone Source, which allows you to set up to five clone sources and customize their size, position, and impact on the image.

      Pattern Stamp (Chapter 6): The Pattern Stamp tool lets you paint with a pattern. Either choose a preset pattern (several come with Photoshop) or define your own pattern using Edit⇒Define Pattern command. Either way, after your pattern is selected and your brush settings established (for size, among other settings you learn about in Chapter 7), you can paint to your pattern-loving heart’s content.

      History Brush (Chapter 7): The History Brush reverts portions of the image to any of a handful of previous states throughout the recent history of the image. To specify the state that you want to revert to, click in the first column of the History palette. It’s like an undo brush but way, way better.

      Art History Brush (Chapter 7): Like the History Brush, the Art History Brush paints with pixels from a previous image state. But with this brush, you get a variety of brush options that create different artistic effects.

      Eraser (Chapter 7): Drag with the Eraser tool to paint in the background color or erase areas in a layer to reveal the layers below. Alt-drag (Win) or Option-drag (Mac) to switch to the Erase to History mode, which reverts the image to a previous state just as if you were using the History Brush.

      Background Eraser (Chapter 9): The Background Eraser rubs away the background from an image as you drag along the border between the background and foreground. If you don’t wield this tool carefully, though, you wind up erasing both background and foreground.

      Magic Eraser (Chapter 9): The Magic Eraser came from the same gene pool that produced the Magic Wand. When you click with the Magic Wand, Photoshop selects a range of similarly colored pixels; click with the Magic Eraser, and you erase instead of select.

      Gradient (Chapter 6): Drag with this tool to fill a selection with a gradual transition of colors, commonly called a gradient. You can click the gradient icon in the Toolbox and select a gradient style from the Options bar.

      Paint Bucket (Chapter 6): Click with the Paint Bucket tool to fill a contiguous area of similarly colored pixels with the foreground color or a predefined pattern.

      Blur (Chapter 5): Drag with the Blur tool to diffuse the contrast between neighboring pixels, which blurs the focus of the image. You also can Alt-drag (Win) or Option-drag (Mac) to sharpen the image.

      Sharpen (Chapter 5): Drag with this tool to increase the contrast between pixels, which sharpens the focus. Alt-drag (Win) or Option-drag (Mac) when this tool is active to blur the image.

      Smudge (Chapter 5): The Smudge tool works just as its name implies; drag with the tool to smear colors inside the image.

      Dodge (Chapter 5): Drag with the Dodge tool to lighten pixels in the image. Alt-drag (Win) or Option-drag (Mac) to darken the image.

      Burn (Chapter 5): Drag with the Burn tool to darken pixels. Press Alt (Win) or Option (Mac) to temporarily access the Dodge tool and lighten pixels.

      Sponge (Chapter 5): Drag with the Sponge tool to decrease the amount of saturation in an image so the colors appear more drab and eventually gray. You also can increase color saturation by changing the Mode setting in the Options bar from Desaturate to Saturate.

      Path Selection (Chapter 8): Click anywhere inside a path to select the entire path. If you click inside a path that contains multiple subpaths, Photoshop selects the subpath under the tool cursor. Shift+click to select additional paths or subpaths. You also use this tool and the Direct Selection tool, described next, to select and manipulate lines and shapes drawn with the shape tools.

      Direct Selection (Chapter 8): To select and edit a segment in a selected path or shape, click it or drag over it with this tool. Press Shift while using the tool to select additional segments. Or Alt-click (Option-click on the Mac) inside a path or shape to select and edit the entire object.

      Horizontal Type (Chapter 16): Also known simply as the Type tool, click with this tool to add vector text to your image.

      Vertical Type (Chapter 16): The Vertical Type tool behaves just like the Horizontal Type tool, except that your text is oriented vertically in the image.

      Horizontal Type Mask (Chapter 16): As you might expect, this tool creates horizontal type. The twist is that the type appears not directly in the image but rather as a mask, with an active selection around the shapes of the letters.

      Vertical Type Mask (Chapter 16): Combine the verticality of the Vertical Type tool with the maskiness of the Horizontal Type Mask tool, and you have—what else?—the Vertical Type Mask tool. Use it to create an active selection of vertically oriented text.

      Pen (Chapter 8): Click and drag with the Pen tool to set points in the image window. Photoshop draws an editable path outline—much like a path in Illustrator—that you can convert to a selection outline or stroke with color.

      Freeform Pen (Chapter 8): Drag with this tool to draw freehand paths or vector masks. Photoshop automatically adds points along the path as it sees fit. If you select the Magnetic option in the Options bar, the Freeform Pen morphs into the Magnetic Pen. Deselect the option to return to the Freeform Pen.

      Add Anchor Point (Chapter 8): To insert a point in a path, click a path segment with this tool.

      Delete Anchor Point (Chapter 8): Click a point to remove it without interrupting the outline of the path. Photoshop automatically draws a new segment between the neighboring points.

      Convert Point (Chapter 8): Points in a path come in different varieties, some indicating corners and others indicating smooth arcs. The Convert Point tool enables you to change one kind

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