Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Bauer is an award-winning photographer and contributing writer for Photoshop User and Layers magazines. He is best known as the Help Desk Director for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), but he has also authored or coauthored a dozen books on Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, computer graphics, and photography.

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Get to know Photoshop and start using the newest, coolest techniques!

Whether you're just learning Photoshop or want to take your skills up a notch, you've come to the right place. Photoshop CS4 has a few new tricks up its sleeve, and Photoshop expert Peter Bauer will show you how to use them. From the basics like getting your images into and out of Photoshop to enhancing, cropping, and color correction, it's all here!

• Basic training — if you're a beginner, check this section for details on how to get started, get around, and get familiar with all the parts

• Enhancements made easy — learn about tonality, how to tweak color to natural perfection, how to isolate areas of an image for correction, and more

• Fixing those common problems — red-eye, wrinkles, people and objects that don't belong in the photo, and others

• But is it art? — explore the painting functions, master the daunting Brushes panel, and add layer styles

• Feel the power — create on-screen presentations, contact sheets, and more

Open the book and find:

• Explanations of the menus, panels, tools, options, and shortcuts you need most

• Tips for taking advantage of the Camera Raw file format

• How to fine-tune your fixes with selection tools

• What you can do with filters

• Steps for creating composite images

• Options for adding text to an image

• How to streamline your workflow

Aus dem Klappentext

Get to know Photoshop and start using the newest, coolest techniques!

Whether you're just learning Photoshop or want to take your skills up a notch, you've come to the right place. Photoshop CS4 has a few new tricks up its sleeve, and Photoshop expert Peter Bauer will show you how to use them. From the basics like getting your images into and out of Photoshop to enhancing, cropping, and color correction, it's all here!

• Basic training — if you're a beginner, check this section for details on how to get started, get around, and get familiar with all the parts

• Enhancements made easy — learn about tonality, how to tweak color to natural perfection, how to isolate areas of an image for correction, and more

• Fixing those common problems — red-eye, wrinkles, people and objects that don't belong in the photo, and others

• But is it art? — explore the painting functions, master the daunting Brushes panel, and add layer styles

• Feel the power — create on-screen presentations, contact sheets, and more

Open the book and find:

• Explanations of the menus, panels, tools, options, and shortcuts you need most

• Tips for taking advantage of the Camera Raw file format

• How to fine-tune your fixes with selection tools

• What you can do with filters

• Steps for creating composite images

• Options for adding text to an image

• How to streamline your workflow

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Photoshop CS4 For Dummies

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

In This Chapter

* What Photoshop does very well, kind of well, and just sort of, well ...

* What you need to know to work with Photoshop

* What you need to know about installing Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is, without question, the leading image-editing program in the world. Photoshop has even become somewhat of a cultural icon. It's not uncommon to hear Photoshop used as a verb ("That picture is obviously Photoshopped!"), and you'll even see references to Photoshop in the daily comics and cartoon strips. And now you're part of this whole gigantic phenomenon called Photoshop.

Whether you're new to Photoshop, upgrading from Photoshop CS3 or earlier, or transitioning from Elements to the full version of Photoshop CS4 or Photoshop CS4 Extended, you're in for some treats. Photoshop CS4 has an intriguing new look that enables you to do more, and do it more easily, than ever. Before I take you on this journey through the intricacies of Photoshop, I want to introduce you to Photoshop in a more general way. In this chapter, I tell you what Photoshop is designed to do, what it can do (although not as capably as job-specific software), and what you can get it to do if you try really, really hard. I also review some basic computer operation concepts and point out a couple of places where Photoshop is a little different than most other programs. At the end of the chapter, I have a few tips for you on installing Photoshop to ensure that it runs properly.

Exploring Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop is used for an incredible range of projects, from editing and correcting digital photos to preparing images for magazines and newspapers to creating graphics for the Web. You can also find Photoshop in the forensics departments of law-enforcement agencies, scientific labs and research facilities, and dental and medical offices, as well as in classrooms, offices, studios, and homes around the world. As the Help Desk Director for the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), my team and I solve problems and provide solutions for Photoshop users from every corner of the computer graphics field and from every corner of the world. People are doing some pretty amazing things with Photoshop, many of which are so far from the program's original roots that it boggles the mind!

What Photoshop is designed to do

Adobe Photoshop is an image-editing program. It's designed to help you edit images - digital or digitized images, photographs, and otherwise. This is the core purpose of Photoshop. Over the years, Photoshop has grown and developed, adding features that supplement its basic operations. But at its heart, Photoshop is an image editor. At its most basic, Photoshop's workflow goes something like this: You take a picture, you edit the picture, and you print the picture (as illustrated in Figure 1-1).

Whether captured with a digital camera, scanned into the computer, or created from scratch in Photoshop, your artwork consists of tiny squares of color, which are picture elements called pixels. (Pixels and the nature of digital imaging are explored in depth in Chapter 2.) Photoshop is all about changing and adjusting the colors of those pixels - collectively, in groups, or one at a time - to make your artwork look precisely how you want it to look. (Photoshop, by the way, has no Good Taste or Quality Art filter. It's up to you to decide what suits your artistic or personal vision and what meets your professional requirements.) Some very common Photoshop image-editing tasks are shown in Figure 1-2: namely, correcting red-eye and minimizing wrinkles (both discussed in Chapter 9); and compositing images (see Chapter 10).

NEW FEATURE

New in Photoshop CS4 is the powerful ability to rotate the image on screen while you're working. Not rotate the image itself - Photoshop has had that capability for ages - but to rotate the appearance of the image in the work-space. This is especially handy when doing delicate masking and painting, enabling you to orient the image on screen to best suit your stroke. As you can see in Figure 1-3, while you're rotating, a red arrow indicates the image's true "up." Double-clicking the Rotate tool icon in the Toolbox restores the image's orientation. (This feature is not available on older computers with less powerful video cards.)

Over the past few updates, Photoshop has developed some rather powerful illustration capabilities to go with its digital-imaging power. Although Photoshop is still no substitute for Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop certainly can serve you well for smaller illustration projects. (Keep in mind that Photoshop is a raster art program - it works with pixels - and vector art-work is only simulated in Photoshop.) Photoshop also has a very capable brush engine, which makes it feasible to paint efficiently on your digital canvas. Figure 1-4 shows a comparison of raster artwork (the digital photo, left), vector artwork (the illustration, center), and digital painting (right). The three types of artwork can appear in a single image, too. (Simulating vector artwork with Photoshop's shape layers is presented in Chapter 11, and you can read about painting with Photoshop in Chapter 14.)

Photoshop CS4 includes some basic features for creating Web graphics, including slicing and animations (but Web work is best done in a true Web development program, such as Dreamweaver). Photoshop's companion program Adobe Bridge even includes the Output panel to help you create entire Web sites to display your artwork online and PDF presentations for on-screen display, complete with transition effects between slides. (Read about Bridge's Output panel's capabilities in Chapter 16.)

Other things you can do with Photoshop

Although Photoshop isn't a page layout or illustration program, you certainly can produce simple brochures, posters, greeting cards, and the like using only Photoshop. (See Figure 1-5.) One of the features that sets Photoshop apart from basic image editors is its powerful type engine, which can add, edit, format, and stylize text as capably as many word-processing programs. Photoshop even has a spell check feature - not bad for a program that's designed to work with photos, eh?

Even if you don't have the high-end video features found in Photoshop CS4 Extended, you can certainly supplement your video-editing program with Photoshop CS4 (even if Photoshop can't open and play movies you capture with your video camera). From Adobe Premiere (or other professional video programs), you can export a series of frames in the FilmStrip format, which you can open and edit in Photoshop.

If you don't have specialized software

Admittedly, Photoshop CS4 just plain can't do some things. It won't make you a good cup of coffee. It can't press your trousers. It doesn't vacuum under the couch. It isn't even a substitute for iTunes, Microsoft Excel, or Netscape Navigator - it just doesn't do those things.

However, there are a number of things for which Photoshop isn't designed that you can do in a pinch. If you don't have InDesign, you can still lay out the pages of a newsletter, magazine, or even a book, one page at a time. (With Bridge's Ouput panel, you can even generate a multipage PDF document from your individual pages.) If you don't have Dreamweaver or...