Introduction
Adobe Photoshop, or simply Photoshop, is a graphics design and image enhancement program developed and published by Adobe Systems that runs seamlessly on the Windows and Macintosh platforms. Major designers, as well as casual users turn to Photoshop for its proven ability to create special effects and image composites; however, Photoshop's ability to manipulate digital images, restore old photographs, as well as create digital artwork from scratch, has made Photoshop the undisputed leader in the digital industry and the industry standard for graphics professionals.
Photoshop works primarily with raster documents which means images are composed of pixels. A pixel is a unit of image information. Imagine there's a wall made of bricks. Each brick represents a pixel in an image. Documents opened in Photoshop have a specific resolution.. The resolution of the image represents how many pixels the image contains. Since pixels (like the bricks in a wall) represents information, the more pixels a document contains, the more information Photoshop has to manipulate or enhance the image.
Once the image is opened in Photoshop, the designer can manipulate the image thousands of ways, everything from color correction, reducing dust and scratches in an old image, to removing a tree, or adding a missing friend.
The Photoshop CS3 window
Optimizing Photoshop CS3
Assuming you have successfully installed Photoshop in your computer, it means your desktop passed the program's physical requirements. Now we need to configure Photoshop to run it more efficient.
Photoshop requires a tremendous amount of your computer resources. If you'll be working on large documents, a poorly optimized Photoshop is equal to long wait times and it can trigger you computer to crash. That's the bad news. The good news is, Photoshop can be configured to run more efficiently. Go to Edit > Preferences > Performance tab. The Preferences dialog box should pop up and Performance category is highlighted in left. For older versions of Photoshop, go to Edit > Preferences tab. Of all the preferences, General, Plug-ins and Scratch Disks, and Memory & Image Cache, contain options that help increase the performance of Photoshop.
First, History states control the number of undos available. You can set it from 0 to 1000. Increasing this number also allows Photoshop to increase it's RAM memory usage and can decrease the overall performance of the program. You should lower the number of history states when you're experiencing slow performance problems.
Second, add scratch disks. If your hard drive has large available space on it, utilize this preference. Scratch disks are additional hard drives assigned to Photoshop. Assigning additional scratch disks allows Photoshop to divide the processing load and increase its performance.
Last, Photoshop operates in RAM memory. In order to run it efficiently, Photoshop needs five times the size of the opened document in the available memory. Therefore, the more RAM memory you can assign, the more efficient Photoshop will operate especially on large documents.
Familiarize yourself with Photoshop Tools
Photoshop has a lot of editing tools to offer which gives you tremendous control over any designing problems that may occur. There are many ways to accomplish a task, you can choose what suits best for you and your current project. For example, you need to create a selection on an image. A very popular way is to use the Lasso tools but you can still use the Quick Selection tool, Magic Wand tool, and Quick Mask Mode tool to name a few.
When you work on a document, it's important to know what tools are available, and how they will help you in achieving your design goals. Photoshop has consolidated similar tools under one button. To access multiple tools, click and hold on any toolbar button that has a small black triangle, located in the lower-right corner of the tool button. Accessing a tool doesn't necessary mean to click on that tool. All of Photoshop's tools can be accessed through a shortcut key. For example, to access the Selection tool, press "V" key. Pressing "W" key will switch to Magic Wand tool. If a tool has more than one option, such as Lasso tool, holding the "Shift" key along with the tool's shortcut lets you cycle through the tool's other options. Pretty neat eh~?! We'll have more of this shortcuts on other tutorials.
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