Tutorials & Links

[Muderman24]

Photoshop Tools (Part 1)
This tutorial will explain the basic uses of the first 6 photoshop tools. Part 2 Coming Soon!....


1.Marquee Tool


The marquee tool is one of the most basic tools in Photoshop.Rectangular, Elliptical, Single Row, and Single Column.


Can be used and most popluar way to make Tech brushes, sigs,etc.. by making shapes and/or lines, some examples of what they can do



2.Move Tool


Basic use, just drag and drop images to move them, pretty self-explanatory should have no questions on this tool

3.Lasso Tool


The Lasso tool is very useful in extracting images from backgrounds. There are three types, Regular Lasso tool, the Polygonal Lasso tool, and Magnetic Lasso Tool.

Regular Lasso - is freehand – simply use it as if it were a pen and enclose the area of an image you want to edit. However, if you do not enclose an area completely, the program will automatically make a straight line between the beginning and end points of the lasso, this freehand styl may not be as precise as the other's.

Polygonal Lasso - very useful in creating custom shapes. All you have to do is click in one spot, then in another, and so on until you have the desired shape. However, in order for the selection to become active, the beginning and end points must coincide. You can always cancel a selection at any time by pressing Esc.Another note to make straight lines hold shift

Magnetic Lasso - It is controlled in a manner similar to that of the freehand Lasso tool. Just click on where you want to begin your selection and then you can select by freehand. However, there is one important discrepancy: the magnetic lasso tool automatically detects point of contrast and tends to try to go on to of those. This tendency can be tightly controlled with the options bar.

4.Magic Wand Tool


Get to know this tool and get to know it well, not only is it very important but can be a huge time saver in certain task..All it does is select any colors similar to the one clicked on; the amount of leniency in the use of the term “similar to” above is controlled by the Tolerance option. The higher the Tolerance, the greater the range of colors the tool will select. There are just a couple other options. Anti-Aliasing is the first one, which just smooths edge transition. The Contiguous checkbox determines the selectivity of the tool: if enabled, the tool will only select pixels in an area (the area’s boundaries are edges of contrast), while if disabled, the tool will select pixels in the entire image.The Use All Layers option lets you decide whether you want the tool to work on the active layer or on all the layers.

5.Crop Tool


The Crop tool is something you find very efficient. When you want to keep only part of an image and delete the rest, While this may seem ideal for image extraction, keep in mind that it can only select rectangular areas.

There are a couple of options, Width, Height, and Resolution. These options tell Photoshop what to do when you choose the area you want to crop the image to. If you fill in values for these three options, Photoshop will automatically stretch the cropped image to fit those dimensions/resolution. The Front Image button simply fills in values for the Width, Height, and Resolution identical to those for your original image.

6.Slice Tool


The Slice tool is used primarily in ImageReady, and it will be of little use in Photoshop to anybody who does not know HTML....Select the Slice tool, and make a selection for where you want the code to take effect. Switch to the Slice Selection tool and click on Slice Options in the options bar. The rest is self-explanatory. The Slice tool has a world of uses in ImageReady, but not much in photoshop