Jakes Basic Adobe Photoshop Tutorial 1Chapter 1 So you’ve taken your photos, you’ve transferred them on to your computer, you want to share them with all your friends and family, but there’s one problem: you have no idea where to start. It’s not uncommon that some one new to the world of digital photography has no idea where to start. There are many things one could do to a digital photograph, and with the power of Adobe Photoshop, you can do almost anything. Photoshop is not a program for some one who gives up easily, it’s a demanding program with many ins-and-outs that would make one’s head spin. Although intimidating at first, Photoshop is not hard to navigate once you know the basics. We will begin first with opening your photos in Photoshop. First click on “File” at the top left-hand corner of the Photoshop window, and select open.
After you select open, go to the folder where your photo is, select it, and press open. The file you selected will then pop-up on the screen, and we can finally begin to make the necessary adjustments to our photos. Before we get in to other adjustments, such as touching-up the colours and contrast, there is one thing we should do: resize our photo. When a digital camera captures a photo, it’s stored in the camera’s memory card as a JPEG. Usually the JPEG is too large in size to be viewed without having to scroll around the page to see it all, and too big in file size to be sent through e-mail or uploaded to the internet. Now that we have our photo open, we can resize it. Resizing a photo is not a very time-consuming process once you know how to. To open the window that lets you resize a photo, go to “Image” at the top of the Photoshop window, and select “Image size.”
Once we have selected image size, a new window pops-up with the options to actually change the size of the photo. Pixels are the units of measurement primarily used in Photoshop to determine the size of any image, so that’s what we will be using.
In the Pixel Dimensions area, you can change the width and length of your photo. By changing on of those values, Photoshop will automatically change the other value that holds true to the image, so it does not turn out warped or disfigured. After you select your new photo dimensions, press OK to make the changes. If you feel that you’ve kept the image either too big or too small, you can take a step backwards by going to “Edit” and then to “Undo.” Once you have made your photo smaller, it’s now time to save your new resized photo to now be able to send it through an e-mail or put it up on the internet. To save your photo, you have to go to “File” then “Save as”. You should to go to “Save as” because it’s wise to save your resized photo as a different file, so you still have the original file if any adjustments need to be made later on.
After we’ve selected “Save as”, a new window opens and we can now save the file. You will notice that the file format, under where you type the name of your file, is set to JPEG automatically. If you wish to save it as another file type, click on the drop down menu arrow, and select your file type. If you just want your photo to be saved so you can e-mail it or put it on the internet, just keep it on JPEG. Once you’ve selected a file name, and clicked the “Save” button, a new window pops-up. Because you have saved this image as a JPEG, you now have to decide whether you want to compress it or not. By compressing an image, it makes the file size smaller, but compromises image quality by adding grain to your photo. To choose a size of compression to your photo, move the slider under “Image Options’” to either the left or right. By moving the slider to the left, it lowers the photo’s quality, compressing the image. If you move the slider to the right, it keeps the photo’s quality as is, and doesn’t change how it looks.
Instead of using the slider to determine the quality and compression, you can also use the drop down menu that is also under “Image Options.” The selections you can make are: low, medium, high, and maximum. To have the best quality and a larger file size, use the maximum selection, and to have the lowest quality and a lower file size, use the low selection.
Now that you have resized and saved your photo, you can e-mail it to all your family and friends, or put it up for anyone to see on the internet. There are hundreds of places you can upload your photos for free. Some of the more popular sites are: http://www.imageshack.us/ http://photobucket.com/ Both sites let you upload your photos after a simple, free, registration. I have personally used both sites to upload my images, and have never gotten spam from them, so both are safe, spyware and adware free sites. So it’s easy as that! Now that you know the basics, we can move on to bigger and better things!
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