Free PhotoshopTutorials: Basic Photoshop CS4

The Photoshop toolbox is located at the left side of the screen; it contains the tools you will use to edit your images. The default single column toolbox can be changed to a two-column toolbox by clicking on the double arrow at the upper left corner of the toolbox, click again to bring it back to its original state.



The first thing to know about tools is that, there are more than meet the eye. There are so many tools, that they all don’t fit in the toolbox, and so what Adobe has done is hid some tools behind others. If you see a tool with a black arrow-head at the lower-right corner of the tool icon, click and hold on that tool and you will see a list of related hidden tool icons.



To select one of those tools, you just move your cursor to one of the items in the fly-out menu and release. There is another way of selecting tools, and that is by using keyboard shortcuts. You don’t have to memorize each keyboard shortcut for each tool in the toolbox. In fact if you move your cursor over a tool for a few seconds, you will see a tooltip with the corresponding keyboard shortcut.



Using keyboard shortcuts will help you to become more efficient and more productive when working in Adobe Photoshop.

Whenever you select a tool in the toolbox, notice the tool option bar updates to become specific to the tool you have selected.



Sometimes, when you change the options in the tool options bar, they have a tendency to become sticky and retain the settings you have made to them the last time you used a specific tool. This can be annoying at times when you want it to go back to its original settings for another project. Or if there are different users who use the same computer and you want to revert to the tools default settings. Then you have to remember how to reset the tools option to their defaults. On Windows, Right-Click on the tool icon on the tool options bar, on a Mac Ctrl+Click on the tool icon on the tool options bar.



A menu will pop up with two listed options. Clicking on the Reset Tool will allow you to reset the options for the currently active tool, while clicking on Reset All Tools will reset the tool options for all tools in your toolbox. I recommend resetting all your tools between projects or if another user has just finished using the same machine. You don't need to memorize all the tools at this point as you will learn how to use each of them as we go along with future projects and tutorials.

In the previous versions of Adobe Photoshop, whenever you create or open a new document. You end up with a free floating window; this is ok but sometimes, you end up with so many free floating windows that some could be hidden below others and your workspace could get pretty messy. In Adobe Photoshop CS4, there’s a solution to that in a new feature called tabbed documents. If you open a several documents in Photoshop CS4, they do not float freely but instead they snap together in a single document window in a form of tabs.



To cycle through the documents, you can either click on the tabs or you can make use of a keyboard shortcut by pressing the Ctrl+~ in a PC or the Command+~ key on a Mac. Pressing Shift+Ctrl+~ or Shift+Command+~ goes the other way around. One thing to remember about the order of cycling through tabs is that, the documents are ordered in the order by which document is opened first and not on the order of their placement on the document window.

If you want to remove a document into its separate free floating window, there are two ways to do that. You can either drag the tab away from the tabbed document window and release, and it will float to its own free floating window,



Or, with the tab selected in the single document window, Go to the Window menu, select Arrange and then choose Float in Window.



You can also select Float All in Windows to release all documents in their own windows or, Hit Consolidate All to Tabs to bring them back into tabbed form.
If you don’t like the way Photoshop CS4’s behavior of arranging documents into tabs, you can always disable it by editing Photoshop’s preferences. On a Mac you access those by going to the Photoshop menu at the top of the screen, in a PC Its under the Edit menu, choosing Preferences, and then clicking on Interface.



In the Preferences dialog box, uncheck Open Documents as Tabs and Enable Floating Document Window Docking in the Panels & Documents section of the dialog box.



There is another related feature in Photoshop CS4, and that is the ability of viewing multiple documents in various layout arrangements. You can view the different layout arrangements by going to the application bar and selecting one of the layouts.



These layouts are useful if you want to compare one document to another, or move or copy a layer from one document to another. Feel free to experiment with what layout you are most comfortable with.
And that comprises our tutorial on working with document layouts.

Ok I promised this tutorial blog would be newbie friendly so I did include some basics for those who are just starting off with Photoshop CS4, This will be quick though so if you want more details about a certain tool or interface element you could always look it up from the photoshop help menu.


When you try to look at the interface of the new Adobe Photoshop CS4, you will be amazed of how intuitive and easy to use the tools offered by the software compared to its predecessors. At the left hand side of the window you will see the toolbox (1). It contains the tools you will use to edit your images. Above that is the tool options bar(2) which contains additional information about the current tool selected. At the right of the screen are one or more panels(3) that contain more commands and settings used to work with images. At the top of the screen is a set of menus(4) with drop-down options containing commands, many of which you will find duplicated o the right hand panels. You will notice some new interface elements that bring Adobe Photoshop CS4 in to line with the interface of other Adobe applications. One of which is the application bar(5). On a PC, the application bar is combined with the menu bar. On a Mac, the application bar is separate. It contains some commonly used tools such as the hand tool and the zoom tool, viewing modes and screen modes and some extra tools you will find useful later on when you start working on your projects. And lastly, the document window(6) is used to display open documents and some useful information about a file.

So that’s It for now, you’ll encounter more of these along the way as you work on the projects, and you’ll get the hang of finding your way through Adobe Photoshop CS4’s new improved user interface.