Lesson 1: Introduction to Photoshop CS4 (1)

The working environment

In this course, I use the Extended version of Photoshop CS4. If you use the standard version, that does not really matter. The extended version includes all features of Photoshop CS4, plus a number of specialized features such as support for 3D and video workflows, animation and image depth analysis.

When we open Photoshop, we get to see or feel something about the picture.

This is the default workspace in Photoshop CS4. A workspace is divided into several elements.

At the top of the workspace, we find the elements “menu bar” and “Application Bar”.

In the menu bar, we find all possible commands in Photoshop.

If we click one of these commands, it opens a drop-down menu with more commands.

A shortcut is listed next to some of these commands, clicking on these buttons on our keyboards will run this command. We point the mouse pointer over a command where there is a black arrow next to it, it opens a submenu (see second picture).

We find the “Application Bar” next to the “Menu bar”.

This comprises a switching button for setting the “Workspace”, a number of menus and other controls.

Below the menu bar we have the “Options Bar”.

Depending on the tool chosen in the “Toolbox”, this shows us the different possible options for the selected tool.

And on the right side of the workspace, we have several “panes”.

By clicking on the left or right double pointing arrows at the top of the panels, you can expand or collapse.

The toolbox

Here we find some of the tools available in Photoshop.


	Move		Pen
	Marquee		Horizontal text
	Lasso		Path Selection
	Wand		Rectangle
	Crop		3D Object Rotate
	Pipette		3D Camera Rotation
	Spot Healing Brush		Hand
	Paintbrush		Zoom
	Clone Stamp		1.Standard foreground and background colors 2.Switch Foreground and Background colors
	History Brush		Set Foreground and Background Color
	Eraser		Edit in quick mask mode
	Gradient
	Blur
	Dodge