Introducing Adobe Photoshop

Available Files

The following files are available for download:

Download Exercise Files

Adobe Photoshop is a program that focuses on designing graphics, editing images, and creating digital works of art. From retouching old photographs to making digital paintings, Photoshop offers a wide range of tools to help in nearly any image editing task. To help you become more familiar with Photoshop, the projects in this course will walk you through some common editing tasks. The first project will focus on editing some photos of a dog named Angelica, and will give you the opportunity to practice some basic photo retouching techniques. The second project involves creating a composite photo that takes a little girl from one image and adds her to a beach photograph.

Making sure you’re using the most current version of Photoshop

This course was written using Adobe Photoshop 2022, and has been updated for Photoshop 2024. While you’ll be able to complete many of the exercises in this course using older versions of Photoshop, some of the exercises use tools and features introduced in newer versions of Photoshop. If you are working with Photoshop 2023 or older, you’ll want to update Photoshop to the latest version in order to follow along with the content.

The following instructions will walk you through how to update the Adobe Creative Cloud program you're working with if it’s out of date. To check for updates, you'll need to open Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop, which is separate from the Adobe application you're working with.

Open Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop.

The Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop app will open:

Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop application. On the left side of the screen is the navigation bar, where we can access all the apps in Creative Cloud and check for updates. The main section of the screen currently shows a list of installed applications.

Here, we can see what applications we have installed and which of them need to be updated. If there are updates available for any of the installed applications, a blue circle with a number in it will appear to the right of Updates in the navigation on the left side of the screen.

To see which Adobe Creative Cloud applications need to be updated, in the navigation on the left side of the window,
Click

Any applications with updates will be listed underneath the New Updates heading, similar to the image below:

Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app showing the Updates list, indicating that Illustrator has an update that needs installing.

To update an application, to the right of the application’s name and update description,
Click
To continue the update process, if necessary,
Click

The selected application will then start downloading and applying the update. This may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the update being downloaded and your internet connection speed. When the update is finished, the application will disappear from the New Updates list and appear under the Updated Recently heading, as seen in the following screenshot:

Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app displaying the list of recently updated apps. Illustrator is at the top of this list, as it is the most recently updated app.

Exploring the Photoshop interface

Before we get started with the first project, let’s take some time to familiarize ourselves with the Photoshop interface. To do this, we’ll open Photoshop and open the first file we’ll be working with, a photograph of a dog.

NOTE: The following steps assume you have downloaded and extracted the exercise files to your computer’s desktop. If this isn’t the case, navigate to the location where you extracted the exercise files instead of the desktop.

Open Adobe Photoshop.
To open the file Angelica Bubbles.jpg, in the Menu bar,
Click File, Click Open…
To navigate to the Desktop, in the left-hand side of the Open dialog box,
Click
To open the appropriate folder, on the Desktop,
Double-Click the Photoshop Basics folder
To open the file,
Double-Click Angelica Bubbles.jpg

Now that we have a file open, let’s take a look at the interface. If you’ve used other programs in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, the interface may look familiar to you, as many of Adobe’s graphic design programs share similar interface elements.

The following video shows the Photoshop interface in detail. If you’d rather have a text-based introduction to Photoshop, scroll past the video for an introduction to the various interface elements.

Watch this video to learn more about the Photoshop interface.

Description of the video:

[music] In this video, I’ll be introducing you to the different elements of the Adobe Photoshop interface. For today’s demonstration, I’ll be using Adobe Photoshop CC 2022 - if you’re using a different version of Photoshop, your interface may look slightly different, but all the interface elements I point out today will be in roughly the same locations. The Photoshop interface is composed of various panels in different locations on the screen. These panels contain a wide array of tools and features that we can use to create and edit artwork. We’ll start on the left side of the screen, with the Tools panel. The Tools panel contains all of the various tools used to complete tasks in Photoshop, including selection tools, healing tools, brush tools, shape tools, and more. To activate a tool in the Tools panel, click on its icon. Each tool has a keyboard shortcut as well - to see the keyboard shortcut for a specific tool, hover your mouse cursor over the tool and a tooltip will appear with the shortcut. You may notice that many tools in the Tools panel have a little triangle in the lower right corner of the tool’s icon. This indicates that there are multiple tools stacked together - to access the other tools, click and hold on the tool. A menu will appear, displaying the other tools in the stack - click on the desired tool in the menu to activate it. The Options Bar is located across the top of the screen underneath the Menu bar. The Options Bar is context-sensitive - in other words, it changes based on what tool we have selected in the Tools panel. Different options will appear that are specific to the tool we’re working with. [silence] On the right side of the screen, we have the Panel dock. This is where the majority of the panels we’ll work with are located. The panels here are collected into groups - to switch between panels in a group, simply click on the panel’s tab to display it. To collapse a section of the panel dock, in the upper right corner of the section of the panel dock you want to collapse, click the Collapse to Icons icon - it looks like two arrows pointing to the right. The panels will collapse to icons, and then clicking on a panel’s icon will make the panel appear. When the panels are collapsed, the icon changes to the Expand Panels icon, which looks like two arrows pointing to the left. Click on it to expand the panels again. If you’re looking for a specific panel, or accidentally closed a panel, you can open it by going to the Window menu. All of the panels available in Photoshop are accessible here. The panels displayed here are part of the Essentials workspace. Photoshop has a collection of workspaces available that collect panels focusing on specific types of tasks, such as creating artwork for print or the web. To switch workspaces, in the upper right corner of the Photoshop interface, click on the Workspace switcher icon, and in the menu that appears, click on the desired workspace. The document window, located in the center of the Photoshop interface, displays the file that you’re working on. We can have multiple files open at the same time. To switch between files, click on the file’s tab at the top of the document window. Now that you’ve been introduced to the Photoshop interface, you’re ready to start working in Photoshop. [music]

The following diagram points out the main pieces of the Photoshop interface:

Diagram of the Photoshop interface, with the main interface elements highlighted with red boxes. Each interface element is outlined in detail in the following section.

To learn more about the various interface elements, expand the appropriate accordion fold below:

The Tools panel is located on the left side of the Photoshop window, and contains all the tools necessary to create and edit graphics in Photoshop.

There are two ways to activate a tool in the Tools panel – you can either click on the tool's icon or use the tool's keyboard shortcut. To find out the keyboard shortcut for a specific tool, hover over the tool and a tooltip will appear with the keyboard shortcut displayed after the tool's name, as shown in the following screenshot:

Tooltip for the Brush tool, with a graphic demonstrating what the tool does at the top of the tooltip. Underneath the graphic is the text Brush Tool, with the letter B in a square indicating the keyboard shortcut for the Brush tool.

NOTE: To turn off Rich Tooltips, like the one shown in the previous image, in the Menu bar, Click Edit, Point Preferences, Click Tools, then uncheck the box next to Show Rich Tooltips.

The Options bar (sometimes referred to as the control panel) is located at the top of the Photoshop window, underneath the Menu bar. The Options bar is context-sensitive, meaning that the contents of the Options bar will change based on the selected tool. For example, the following image shows the available options for the Brush tool:

When the Rectangular Marquee tool is active, a different set of options is visible in the Options bar, as shown in the next image.

The panel dock is located on the right side of the Photoshop window, and contains the majority of the panels needed for working with an image. Each individual panel will provide tools, functions, or other options for editing an image. The panels are collected into groups – to switch between panels, click on the desired panel's tab to display it.

There are more panels available than what's showing in the Panel dock. All of the available panels are located in the Window menu, and clicking on a panel's name in the Window menu will open the panel in the Photoshop workspace.

Photoshop has a collection of workspaces available that collect panels and other interface elements that focus on specific types of tasks, such as editing photos or creating graphics for the web. These workspaces are available through the workspace switcher located in the top right corner of the Photoshop window, and can also be accessed through the Window menu.

The document window is located in the middle of the Photoshop window, and displays the file that you are working on. Multiple files can be open at the same time – you can switch between the open files by clicking on the document tabs at the top of the document window.

Each document's tab displays some information about the open file, including the file's name, zoom level, and even the specific layer selected, as shown in the following image:

The document tab shown here shows that we have the file beach.psd open, and we're viewing the image at 100%. Additionally, we see that the active layer is girl on rock, and the color mode of the image is RGB. (For more information on color modes in Photoshop, visit the Adobe Help page Understanding Photoshop color modes.)

The bottom of the document window gives us additional information about the file we're working with:

Information displayed at the bottom of the document window, described in more detail in the following paragraph.

The previous image shows more information about the file beach.psd. Specifically, it shows that the zoom level is 100%, and the dimensions of the image are 2204 pixels by 1273 pixels, and the resolution of the image is 72 pixels per inch. (We'll learn more about image resolution later on in the course, but if you're curious to learn more now, visit the Adobe Help page Photoshop image size and resolution.)

Changing and resetting workspaces

The instructions for the course were written using the default version of the Essentials workspace in Photoshop. If you are using a different workspace, or have modified the Essentials workspace, you'll need to change to the default version of the Essentials workspace. The following instructions will walk you through changing and resetting your workspace, if necessary.

To switch to the Essentials workspace, in the Menu bar,
Click Window, Point Workspace, Click Essentials (Default)
To reset the Essentials workspace back to its default settings, in the Menu bar,
Click Window, Point Workspace, Click Reset Essentials

Saving as a .PSD file

Before we start editing the file, let's save it as a PSD (Photoshop Document) file. Saving the image as a PSD will allow us to come back and make edits to the Photoshop-specific elements in the file, such as filters and layer styles. Plus, this ensures we have a copy of the original file available, in case we want to try editing it in different ways. We’ll save the file in this format until we’re ready to export it for print or web use.

To save the file, in the Menu bar,
Click File, Click Save As…
If necessary, to indicate you want to save the file on your computer,
Click

NOTE: To prevent this window from appearing every time you save a file, in the lower left corner of the dialog box, Click the checkbox next to Don't show again.

To change the name of the file, in the File name field,
Press & Drag across the file name, type: Angelica edit
To change the file type, in the Save as type drop-down menu,
Click , Click Photoshop (*.PSD, *.PDD, *.PSDT)
To finish saving the file, in the bottom right corner of the Save As dialog box,
Click

Now we're ready to start editing the photo.

Introducing Adobe Photoshop

Available Files

Making sure you’re using the most current version of Photoshop

Instructions for updating Adobe Creative Cloud applications

Exploring the Photoshop interface

Step 1. Open Photoshop, then open the file Angelica Bubbles.jpg.

Tools panel

Options bar

Panel dock

Workspaces and workspace switcher

Document window

Changing and resetting workspaces

Step 1. If necessary, switch to the Essentials workspace and reset the workspace to its default settings.

Saving as a .PSD file

Step 2. Save the file as Angelica edit.psd.