By:  Adam Dachis

Photoshop is an incredibly powerful but also intimidating application. If you've wanted to start using Photoshop but didn't know where to start, we'll be teaching you the basics all week long.

The video above is your lesson. It's short considering how much it covers and long considering it's on the internet. In the video, we take a look at every tool in the toolbar, your palettes on the right side of the screen, and what you'll find in the menus. Below you'll find a reference for this lesson. Once the lessons are over, we'll provide everything all in one place and a downloadable PDF file containing references for each lesson.

Wait! I don't have Photoshop!

Are you not currently a Photoshop user? Adobe offers a Photoshop 30-day trial that you can download right now and it will provide you with plenty of time to learn how it works. If you don't want to eventually purchase Photoshop because it's too expensive, much of what we're going to discuss in these lessons will apply to not just to Photoshop but pretty much most of the standard photo-editing and design tools you'll find (Pixelmator is a great $30 alternative on the Mac, and GIMP is a free, open-source cross-platform option). We've chosen Photoshop because it's the most commonly used, but you're welcome to follow along using other software as well. Today's lesson is pretty Photoshop-specific, but as we move along you should be able to use other software to do most of what we discuss.

Ready? Let's get started.

The Toolbar

We're not going to take a look at every single tool but we are going to look at almost every one of them. While this overview will give you an idea of what each tool does, go find yourself a photo and start playing around with them.

Move Tool (Keyboard: V)

The move tool simply lets you move objects in a given layer around the Photoshop canvas. To use it, click anywhere on the canvas and drag. As you drag, the Photoshop layer will move with your mouse.

Marquee (Keyboard: M)

The marquee lets you select part of the canvas in a specific shape. By default you get a rectangular (or perfect square if you hold down shift while selecting), but you can also select in the shape of an ellipse (or a perfect circle if you hold down shift while selecting).

Lasso (Keyboard: L)

The lasso is a free-form selection tool that lets you drag around the canvas and select anything the lasso'd area covers. Within this tool you also have access to the polygonal lasso, which lets you create a selection by clicking around on the canvas and creating points, and the magnetic lasso, which works the same as the regular lasso but attempts to detect edges for you and automatically snap to them.

Magic Wand (Keyboard: W)

Clicking an area with the magic wand will tell Photoshop to select the spot you clicked on and anything around it that's similar. This tool can be used as a crude way to remove backgrounds from photos.

Crop Tool (Keyboard: C)

The crop tool is used to (surprise!) crop your pictures. You can specify the exact size and constrain the crop tool to those proportions, or you can just crop to any size you please.

Eyedropper (Keyboard: I)

The eyedropper tool lets you click on any part of the canvas and sample the color at that exact point. The eyedropper will change your foreground color to whatever color it sampled from the canvas.

Healing Brush (Keyboard: J)

The healing brush lets you sample part of the photograph and use it to paint over another part. Once you're finished, Photoshop will examine surrounding areas and try to blend what you painted in with the rest of the picture.

Paintbrush and Pencil (Keyboard: B)

The paintbrush is a tool that emulates a paintbrush and the pencil is a tool that emulates a pencil. The paintbrush, however, can be set to many different kinds of brushes. You can paint with standard paintbrush and airbrush styles, or even paint with leaves and other shapes as well.

Clone Stamp (Keyboard: S)

Like the healing brush, the clone stamp lets you sample part of the photograph and use it to paint over another part. With the clone stamp, however, that's it. Photoshop doesn't do anything beyond painting one area over a new area.

History Brush (Keyboard: Y)

The history brush lets you paint back in time. Photoshop keeps track of all the moves you make (well, 50 by default) and the history brush lets you paint the past back into the current photo. Say you brightened up the entire photo but you wanted to make a certain area look like it did before you brightened it, you can take the history brush and paint that area to bring back the previous darkness.

Eraser Tool (Keyboard: E)

The erase tool is almost identical to the paintbrush, except it erases instead of paints.

Paint Can and Gradient Tools (Keyboard: G)

The paint can tool lets you fill in a specific area with the current foreground color. The gradient tool will, by default, create a gradient that blends the foreground and background tool (though you can load and create preset gradients as well, some of which use than two colors).

Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge Tools (Keyboard: None)

All three of these tools act like paintbrushes, but each has a different impact on your picture. The blur tool will blur the area where you paint, the sharpen tool will sharpen it, and the smudge tool will smudge the area all around the canvas. The smudge tool is very useful in drawing for creating nicely blended colors or for creating wisps and smoke that you can add to your photos.

Burn, Dodge, and Sponge Tools (Keyboard: O)

The burn, dodge, and sponge tools are paintbrush-like tools that manipulate light and color intensity. The burn tool can make areas in your photo darker. The dodge tool can make them lighter. The sponge tool can saturate or desaturate color in the area you paint with it. These are all very useful tools for photo touch ups.

Pen Tool (Keyboard: P)

The pen tool is used for drawing vector graphics. It can also be used to create paths that can be used for various things that we'll discuss in a later lesson (although if you watch the video you can see a type path being created).

Type Tool (Keyboard: T)

The type tool lets you type horizontally. Tools hidden beneath the horizontal type tool will let you type vertically and also create horizontal and vertical text masks.

Path Tool (Keyboard: A)

The path tool lets you move any created paths around. It's like the move tool, but for paths.

Shape Tool (Keyboard: U)

The shape tool lets you create vector rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, polygons, lines, and custom shapes. These tools are very useful when designing or when creating shape masks for photos.

3D Tools

These are the 3D tools. We're not going to be dealing with 3D stuff in these lessons so all you really need to know is that these exist. If you're curious, this video will give you an idea of what these tools can do.

Hand Tool (Keyboard: H)

The hand tool allows you to click and drag around the Photoshop canvas. If the entire canvas currently fits on the screen, this tool won't do anything. This tool is for easily navigating around when you're zoomed in, or a picture is simple too big to fit on the screen at 100%.

Zoom Tool (Keyboard: Z)

The zoom tool lets you zoom in and out of the Photoshop canvas by clicking on a given area. By default, the zoom tool only zooms in. To zoom out, hold down the option key and use the zoom tool as you normally would.

Color Selection Tools (Keyboard: D for defaults, X to switch foreground and background colors)

These tools let you manage the colors you're using. The color on top is the foreground color and the color in back is the background color. The foreground color is what your brushes will use. The background color is what will be used if you delete something from the background or extend it (although now, Photoshop CS5 will give you the option for using your foreground color instead in some circumstances). The two smaller icons up top are shortcut functions. The left one, showing a black square on a white square, will set your foreground and background colors to the defaults (Keyboard: D). The double-headed curved arrow will swap your foreground and background color (Keyboard: X). Clicking on either the foreground or background color will bring up a color picker so you can set them to precisely the color you want.

Palettes

Palettes are the things that you see sitting over on the right side of your screen. They make it easy for you to navigate through your document, add adjustments, switch modes, and other things.

Layers

The layers palette lets you see all the layers in your document. As you start getting to know Photoshop, you'll find yourself in this palette more than any other. It'll let you organize and arrange your layers, set blending modes, set visibility and opacity of layers, group and merge layers, and a bunch of other neat things we'll learn about in future lessons.

Adjustments

Your adjustments panel is where you can easily create and edit adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are non-destructive image alterations that affect all the layers below them and can easily be turned on and off. Their most common use is for color correction (namely the Levels and Curves adjustments, but there are many different kinds of adjustments you can perform that can dramatically alter the look of your image.

Color Channels

The color channels palette will let you look at the specific colors that make up your picture. If you're in RGB mode you'll get red, green, and blue. These color channels will differ if you're in a different color space (such as CMYK or LAB). When you choose a specific color, you'll notice you'll be shown your image in different versions of black and white. This is because each color channel is simply a monochromatic images representing the light in each channel (e.g. the red channel is just a look at the red light in your photo). Switching between these different channels is useful for making color channel-specific touch ups, overall contrast enhancements, and also for converting your photo to black and white in a compelling way. This will be discussed in greater detail in a later lesson about color correction and photo enhancements.

Color Picker

This palette will let you easily alter your foreground and background colors using sliders.

Color Swatches

The color swatches palette is a set of pre-defined colors you can quickly choose from. You can load in several other pre-made swatch collections or create your own, too.

History

The history palette lets you go back in time to undo any previous alterations. The standard undo command (in the edit menu) will simply toggle between undoing and redoing the latest action performed on your image. The history panel is where you can go back much further (50 actions by default).

Text

The text palette, and the paragraph palette below it, let you make all sorts of adjustments to any text you create with the type tool. These options are very similar to what you'll find in a word processing, but you can also specify things like character width and spacing which are more useful in design.

Menus

Most of what you'll find in Photoshop's menus can be found using the previously discussed tools. Nonetheless, we're going to take a quick look at some notable items in each of the menus.

File

File, as usual, handles opening, saving, and closing operations. Towards the end of these lessons we'll be taking a look at your different saving options (namely Save for Web).

Edit

Edit, as usual, brings you copy, cut, and paste. In Photoshop, it's also where you transform layers and set your color spaces.

Image

Image brings you canvas and image adjustments, including destructive effects that you'll also find in your adjustments palette. Options in this menu are designed to affect the image as a whole, although many adjustments are applied to only a single layer.

Layer

Layer lets you do all of the things you can do in the layer palette with a few more options. This menu also lets you create adjustment layers and smart objects (a group of layers treated as a single object).

Select

While the marquee and lasso tools will be your main means of selecting things, the select menu can help you refine that selection or create entirely new selections based on certain criteria (such as color range and luminosity).

Filter

Filter brings you a wealth of built-in (and, if installed, third-party) Photoshop filters that can blur, sharpen, distort, and alter your image (or layers of the image) in many different and unique ways. The best way to get acquainted with these filters is to try them all. That can take a little time, but it's fun to play around with them and see what they do. We'll be getting into the specifics in subsequent lessons, but only looking at a few commonly useful filters.

Analysis

Analysis provides you with measurement tools. There will be times when you need them to make accurate alterations to your images. We will not be covering anything in this menu in these basic lessons.

3D

As previously noted, we're not covering 3D. If you decide to learn more about 3D later, you may want to explore this menu on your own at some point.

View

View provides you with various view options, lets you hide and show line guides you've created (see video for an example), and make Photoshop snap (or not snap) to corners, edges, and to the grid on the canvas. Viewing of this invisible grid can also be turned on and off in the View menu.

Window

Window lets you hide and show certain windows and palettes. You can also arrange your Photoshop windows and palettes however you want and save them as a window preset.

If, like most people, you haven’t “layered” since last winter and only “merge” at speeds of 60 mph and over, getting accustomed to the lingo and layout of Photoshop can be daunting. These nine free resources are good places to learn how to lasso, dodge, burn, paint, filter or do whatever else you need to in order to accomplish your desired photo editing task.

If we didn’t mention your favorite Photoshop tutorial, add it in the comments below and let us know how it helped you in your design endeavors.

1. Adobe Tutorials

For a thorough introduction to the basics of Photoshop, starting at the source might be your best bet. Adobe provides tutorial videos that include everything from basic tool tours to step-by-step instructions on how to create a panorama. The commentary is a little vanilla, but it gets the job done.

2. You Suck at Photoshop

Mix together a healthy amount of sarcasm, a handful of cuss words, a narrator apparently bitter about a recent divorce, and Adobe’s tutorials, and you get the more entertaining and appropriately named Photoshop guide: You Suck at Photoshop. Using creative examples (like how to Photoshop a “treacherous commitment band” wedding ring out of a photo), Donnie Hoyle gives step-by-step instructions for practical Photoshop tricks.

3. YouTube

If there’s a Photoshop feat you’re hoping to conquer, chances are there is a YouTube video that can help you. These ten videos will get you started.

4. Toolkit Tutorial

Photoshop icons can be mystifying to the uninitiated, but it’s much easier to figure out how to work in Photoshop if you start with an awareness of its basic tools. This tutorial teaches you what all those little Photoshop graphics mean and when to use each tool.

5. Keyboard Shortcut Cheat Sheet

Learning the keyboard shortcuts for the most frequent operations will save your time and your wrists. Print out a cheat sheet to keep by your computer for easy reference as you memorize.

6. Photoshop Forums

Sometimes it’s best to ask. If you have a question about Photoshop, find it in an existing thread or create your own on this forum.

7. Special Effect Tutorials

Bored with cropping and color correction? Jump into dramatic layouts and artistic effects — like “How to create a space girl photo manipulation” — on this site.

8. Free Brush Roundup

Like painters, Photoshop geeks choose different brushes to create different effects on photos. Brushes determine the shape of the line that the paint brush tool and eraser create. Experiment with the free brushes that are rounded up on this site. This tutorial will teach you how to install them, and this tutorial will help you “brush up” on potential designs using brushes.  

9. Troubleshooting Photoshop for Dummies

Like most large programs, Photoshop occasionally freezes, freaks out or otherwise ignores what you want it to do. Follow the steps in this free troubleshooting guide to fix the problem or to bail by shutting the program down.

These nine resources should have you on your way to being a Photoshop pro. Let us know which Photoshop tutorials and resources you recommend in the comments below.

Does Photoshop fascinates you but the road to master it seems difficult. Don’t worry,everything can be achieved by having a clear sense of purpose and direction. Its well said that beginning is half way done. Thus clearing your basics are utmost important to master this art. Photoshop can do wonders. So today we have come up with some Basic detailed guides to brush up our skills and thus making you confident enough to jump to advanced level with ease.

In this introductory chapter, which has been adapted from The Photoshop Anthology, 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks and Techniques, author will cover some of the basic tools and tasks that we’ll draw on in the later chapters.

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The Ultimate Guide To Cloning In Photoshop

This article introduces the several cloning tools available in Photoshop and goes over the proper usage and best practices of each.

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Photoshop Layers Essential Power Shortcuts

When it comes to getting the most out of Photoshop with the least amount of effort, there’s two things you absolutely need to know – how to use layers and how to get around inside Photoshop using keyboard shortcuts.

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A Comprehensive Introduction to the Type Tool

Who doesn’t know the Type Tool? This is maybe one of the most powerful and useful tools of Photoshop. We’ve all used it at least once, but do you know all its potential?

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The Lasso Tool

If you’re a more advanced Photoshop user, you’ll probably head straight for the Pen Tool, the tool of choice for making professional quality form-based selections.

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A Comprehensive Introduction to Photoshop Selection Techniques

Have you ever had difficulties making selections and thought there was a better way? Let’s review both quick solutions, and on the other side, comprehensive and details techniques for making selections.

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Layer Styles in Photoshop

Effects can be added to individual layers in Photoshop that automatically change as a layer is modified. The combination of effects on any given layer is called its Layer Style. We’ll teach you how to use and make your own layer styles in this tutorial.

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Photoshop’s Painting Tools

In Photoshop, the painting tools are used to paint strokes, and fill areas with color or with colors that blend together. Knowing how to use the paint tools is a must for any artist who wishes to use Photoshop.

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Installing And Managing Brushes And Other Presets

How to install new Photoshop Brushes and also discuss a few techniques that will help you keep your additions organized and safe.

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Photoshop’s Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide

The Pen Tool makes appearances across almost the entire Adobe product range. Its function and behavior varies depending on the application, but by mastering it youll find you work quicker, smoother and with better results. This guide will give you a comprehensive basis for working with the Pen Tool in Photoshop.

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Photoshop’s Filters

Filters are used to change the appearance of an image, layer or selection in Photoshop. In this tutorial, author will introduce you to some common filters, and show you how to use them.

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Mastering “Bevel and Emboss” – From Beginner to Pro

How to get the very best out of the “Bevel and Emboss” tool that Photoshop has to offer to make your designs look ultra realistic.

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Layer Masks

Layer Masks are a very powerful part of Photoshop.

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Photoshop Actions

We’ll look at what Photoshop actions are and what the difference is between an action and an action set. We’ll explore some of Photoshop’s Default Actions as well as the additional action sets that install for free with Photoshop.

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Create Your Own Photoshop Custom Shapes

Everything you need to know to create and work with custom shapes in Photoshop.

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