Perkins - How to Do Everything Adobe Photoshop CS4

Chad Perkins

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As always, to Heefee and the kids.

Chad Perkins is an award-winning software trainer, an Adobe Certified Instructor in Photoshop, After Effects, Encore, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat, and is CompTIA CTT+ certified. Chad has authored multiple books on Photoshop and After Effects. He has trained or created art for such companies as Warner Brothers, Paramount, Nike, Sony, Lockheed Martin, Disney, and the United Way. Chad and his brother, Todd, broadcast the All Things Adobe podcast, which offers free tips in Adobe software: www.chadandtoddcast.com .

Wayne Palmer owns Palmer Multimedia Imaging. He is a Photoshop and Photoshop Elements beta tester and has worked with Photoshop since version 3.0. He has been a technical editor for numerous Photoshop books and co-authored Photoshop Restoration & Retouching, 3rd Edition. Wayne also teaches digital imaging and Photoshop classes at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

The team at McGraw-Hill Professional has been fantastic to work with. Thank you to Roger Stewart and Carly Stapleton, as well as to all of the editors who caught my mistakes. It was a really great experience to work with Wayne Palmer as my tech editor again. His expert eyes always saw concepts that I missed. Thanks to Matt Wagner for being such a great support and advocate. Thanks also to my Seminary kids, who dealt patiently with the fact that I was a zombie every morning for two months. An extra special thanks also to my family, who frequently must endure my tendency to overbook my schedule. And yet, through all of this, they see the light at the end of the tunnel more easily than I do.

Welcome to this book! Before we jump right in and start learning, I want to give you a heads up as to what you can expect going forward. If youre brand-new to Photoshop, or intimidated by Photoshop, have no fear. Well go from the ground up. Even if you arent quite sure what Photoshop does, or who uses it, or what jobs you can get with it, well catch you up to speed before you learn how to use it. Photoshop is not just for editing photographs anymore.

Well then look at the interface, which is the layout of the buttons, features, and workspace of Photoshop. At that point, youll feel comfortable enough to move on to the rest of the book, to actually start creating art.

If you have some prior experience with Photoshop, or if you are looking to use Photoshop for a specific purpose, feel free to jump around the book as you please. Ive tried to create this book so that you can learn about whatever interests you, without having to drudge through material that doesnt.

This book also takes a different focus than most Photoshop books do. Other Photoshop books tend to focus on photo editing, which is obviously a core part of what Photoshop does (hence the name). And we will cover a lot of information about image editing, of course. But well also focus a lot on the creative side of Photoshop. For those of you who like to scrapbook, paint, design, or just be artistic, well cover many tools for the job. Well even look briefly at using Photoshop for web graphics, 3D, mobile phones, and video.

Throughout this book, youll notice that my screenshots are of a Mac computer. Note that Photoshop is available for both Mac and PC, and it functions almost identically on both. The real difference that youll notice in this book is in the keyboard shortcuts. As well discuss, you can use combinations of keys to accomplish certain tasks in Photoshop much more quickly than you could otherwise. The keys usually used for this purpose are called