Quickie PS walk through

I am going to walk you through what I do and you will learn some basics that way.

After you have installed PS, or opened it, drag a test picture straight into the open PS. Or, open one from the File menu.

Notice that it isn't at full size. It should be at screensize view. At the top of the picture, in the little blue bar where the title is, you will see at what percentage of the original size that you are viewing.

First thing I do is crop. On the left hand side of PS, you should see a long, tall box with icons. Those are for the tools you will use. The crop tool is 3rd down on the left, below the thing that looks like a magnet. It looks like two triangles put together with a line through them. Hover your mouse over it and it will tell you it is the crop tool. Click it.

Now, that you are in crop mode, you will see that, below your main menu in PS, there are new options for crop; such as width, height, resolution.

I set my crop tool to do the same crop for all my pictures. I set the width and height to 5.25 inches and since I am putting pictures online, I set the pixels to 96 per inch. This is a good size for web work and is the same pixels that the "save for web" function has (more on that later). You can do what you want later- first, just try this size as an exercise.

Take your crop tool and place it in your picture. Click, hold and draw out the box. The box will be constrained to the size you set already. When you are done with the box, let go of the mouse. Don't worry if the box isn't exactly where you want it. You can move it around. Click, hold inside your box and move it, notice the icon turns to an arrow when you are moving the box. Notice the circle in the middle? Move the box to put the circle in the center of what you want to crop. When you are happy with the position, hit enter or the check box on the right on your crop tool bar. You just cropped to the size you wanted! Yay!

The box just shrank- Don't panic! Go up to the top where it says VIEW, click it. Scroll down to where it says Actual Pixels. Click it. Now your picture just got bigger, but your frame didn't. Go to the picture frame on the bottom right corner and drag the corner out until it fits your image or is bigger- you should have the whole image on the PS screen, now. (Just like most things in PS, there are more than one ways to do this- this is how I do it.)

Go to the top where it says, IMAGE and scroll down to Image Size. Just for your own information, the size you see is what your image is now. It should be 504 pixels and 5.25 inches at 96 pix per inch. Ok, that was just so you know where to find that info. Click ok. Back to work....

Take your time with this and don't be afraid because you can always undo whatever you do. I'll show you.... On the right hand side you should see some more boxes. One of them should be HISTORY. If you don't see it, go to the top to WINDOW and find HISTORY then click "show history". I can't remember the defaults of the program, but it should be up already- anyway, in the HISTORY section on your PS screen, you should see three things- your image thumbnail and under it- open and crop. Click "open". OH NO!!!! WHAT DID YOU DO! It is uncropped now! Quick, click "crop" below it..... that's better! Anytime you make a mistake, go to the last good thing you did in history and click it. You can also go to EDIT on the top and click undo for the last thing you did. I always use the history it is easier and I have more options to go back to.

Here is the magic!! Now that you feel a little more secure, go to IMAGE at the top, then Adjust, then Levels. This is the heart of what you want to do in PS. That graph you see is a histogram. It can get real complicated, but all we need to know is that you can grab the triangular knobs under it to change how the image looks. The one on the right is for white/light, the center is for gray/midtones and the black is for black/dark. I don't know what picture you are using, so I can't tell you how to start. If I have a dark background, I pull the black knob just a tiny bit to the center. Then I pull the white a little to the middle, then I slide the middle either left to get darker or right to get lighter. It's easy to get off track here. Sometimes if you move too much, the knobs will move together. If you get to a place where you can't undo the damage, just press cancel and reopen levels. Play around with this for a long time. When you are done, press ok.

Go to EDIT at the top. Scroll down to where it says Fade levels. If it isn't there, then you didn't go straight there after leaving Levels. This function is only available immediately after you do something. Click fade levels. Using the slider, you can decrease the amount of change you have made. This is actually VERY useful. I use it all the time, but remember- it only works on the last thing you did.

Go to IMAGE> Adjust> Brightness/contrast. See the sliders? Move the contrast slider about 5 points to the right. There is a check box there for preview. Check and uncheck it to see the changes. Adjust to your liking, but do this sparingly, too much is a very bad thing. I find that between 0-10 is good. Click OK when you are done. Now, if you want to, you can go back to EDIT> Fade brightness/contrast and adjust it again.

Now, we will use a text layer.

For text, click the tool on the left, in the right hand column that looks like a "T". Click it. You notice that you get a lot of options in the bar below your menu? This is where you can choose all the variables of your font. Choose a font, size and color (click the color box to open color choices) then click in your picture and write your name or whatever. If you want to change the size, font or color, highlight the text and make the changes. Click the text when you are done to undo the highlighting and see your changes. Move your cursor a little away from the text and it turns into an arrow with an X. With this, you can move the whole text. Just click/hold and drag. When you are done, click the big check mark on the right of the bar. If you find that you didn't like it or want to do something else, go into your history box and check the last thing- which should be brightness/contrast.

When you use the text tool, you are creating a layer. Somewhere near your History pallette there should be one that says Layers. If you don't see it go to WINDOW>Show layers. You should see that there is a locked background and a little box that has your text thumbnail. From here on out, whenever you want to mess with the text, you will have to select that text layer. Or, if you want to work on the background, select the background. Essentially, you have two images stacked on top of each other.

Time to sharpen- always do this last! Click on your background in the Layers dialog box to select it. Go to FILTERS, scroll down to Sharpen and select Unsharp Mask. You should now see a box with Amount, Radius and Threshhold. Sharpening can be a very dangerous tool. Too much is horrible! We are using an image with only 96 pixels per inch, so our Radius needs to be small. Move the Radius to between 2 or 3 pixels. Now, use the Amount slider and watch the changes in your photo. I don't bother much with Threshholds, but you can play with that slider, too. I usually leave it at zero. When you are satisfied with your changes, click OK. There should be a subtle sharpening. If you need more, go to the History and go back, then start again. (Remember you can always change the amount of change under EDIT, too.) Remember you are looking for subtle- too much sharpening looks terrible, even on a pic that needs it. I am assuming that you are using a picture that doesn't need too much sharpening. Even PS can't cure a very blurry picture.

Let's say you are done and happy with what you have. Now we need to pull the layers together. Go to the top menu to LAYER. Go to the bottom and click Flatten image. Now, your image is one layer again. Do not do this until you are completely satisfied with your text, because now you can't edit it. Any changes to the image will now affect the text, as well, because it is part of the image.

After you are happy with everything, you can also save this for the web, if you will be posting this online. Doing this will create a small size (the picture stays the same size, the weight of the picture get smaller; or, put another way the size of the file, not the picture) while preserving as much quality as possible. Go to FILE> Save for web. A new window will pop up. In settings choose jpeg. Choose High quality. Don't worry about the others. Now, look at the file size differences under each picture. Pretty substantial, huh? Click OK, when you are happy with the changes. Choose where to save it and how to name it. I usually put an x at the end of the name (before .jpg) or "web" so I know it has been saved for web and it will not overright my original file. After that, you are back to the original. You have a choice between saving this copy or not. What I do is, I end up with three files- the original, the adjusted jpeg and the web file. Go to FILE>save as. Name this copy something else and/or choose a different file type. Since my originals are TIFs, I save this copy as a jpeg. I save as maximum quality and baseline/standard. Click ok. Now you can close your file. Go to where your files are and see that you have 3 files.

Ok, this was my quickie walk through. You now know the basics of what I do. You should know enough and be confident enough to play around with some other things. Have fun with it, but I warn you- it is addictive!

If you have any questions, you know where to find me.