Photoshop

So hi everyone!

Yeah I know, it's been months, but I'm gonna give this another try, let the graphic design online training begin. :)

So I'm gonna start this off by talking about the first steps you need to take to get photoshop started. :)

So Photoshop is a Graphic editing program, which allows you to alter/tamper with photos.

The first step in using photoshop is actually owning your very own photoshop, there are many different version of photoshop, like CS2,3,4,5 Element 8 and downwards, the list goes on.

Photoshop costs money and the more expensive the version is the more features it's packed with.

So whom would benefit from the extra features?

Well those would be the people who are actually gonna be working with the extra features.

Take for an example if a hobby photgrapher wants to touch up his photos and nothing more then he can easily get by with Element 7, while a graphics Designer working for a company or for hire would have to have the CS5.

So which version you buy depends on how your gonna be using it.

So once you have Photoshop legally installed the first thing you do is open up the program.

Now what you see after you launch the program depends on what version you have, for example in Photoshop 7 I am presented with a couple of options to chose from. Well for what I want to do, create a piece of art, I click Create.

Now I want to get up a empty space for me to work on, so I click File which can be found on the toolsbar at the top of the organizer, from there I go to New then Blank File, now once I've done that a new window opens up called "Editor", were gonna be using that window to make our images. :)
So the first thing we do is set the size off our images. So lets say I want my images to be 300x200 then I write 300 as the width and 200 as Height. A good rule of thump when creating something like a banner in photoshop is to make the width larger then the height.


Now congratulations you have your work space. So now your ready to start working on your image.

What you do next is up to what you want your end result to be.
So a little about the things you see around you

To the left you have all your tools, lined up, the must know tools for beginners would be:

The Eraser, Pen Tool, Type Tool, Smudge Tool and Paint Bucket tool.

Now under this you'll see two colours, probably black and white, note, the colour you have on top is the colour your working with. Let say the colour Blue is on top of white then that means that when I input text or draw something with the Pen tool then it's gonna be in the colour blue.

So you may ask what it the purpose of the colour underneath, well, when using the gradient tool and want to gradient between two colours you use that colour underneath to set the colour that you want the colour on top to gradient with/blend with..


To  your wright you'll see some effect and one of the most important things to learn about when working with Photoshop, the Layer Palette. Using the layers palette you can input a lot of effects and you can easily remove/edit a layer later on if you don't like that effect anymore.

So when adding something to your project make sure each edit or step has it's own layer, to create a new layer you hit the Create a New Layer button which can be found as the first button in the layer palette.

You can adjust the opacity of each layer to along with changing the way the layer appears over it's background.

So say you wanna open up a Images from your computer to work with then simply click File, then hit Open and locate your images and select it, once it has opened you can start editing it.

So like mentioned each Photoshop launches differently, like for example in CS4 you can set the size of your project right away instead of having to select Create and then having to go trough the Organizer..


So this was how to start up Photoshop and how to start a new project. I know people have found themselves a bit lost when using Photoshop for the first time, so I hope you found this to be useful and I will be going into more details on how each feature works and how you can use it for best results and how to upload brushes and downloaded font types. :)


So if you have any questions about what to do next then please let me know so the next tutorial I make can answer your question. Also I will be using screen shots in my tutorials, so if you check back on this tutorial in a couple of days I will have added in screen shots. ;D

First Blog

Hi, and welcome to my first attempt at a Blog ever.

So in this Blog I will be posting Tutorials on things that I know how to do, like Graphics Design, Using Photoshop, Setting up your own webpages, Create a Layout for that website, I'll also be posting info on Domain name registration and how to go about it, I'll also go into details on how to Register for a Server and I'll maybe even do some reviews on a couple of hosts and of course I'll be providing links to these webpages.

My main goal with this blog is to help as many people to be able to create their own webpages and master Photoshop so that they can have the Website of their dreams without having to pay a Arm and a Leg to get multiple people to set/create those things up for you, so it's basically a do it yourself Website Design Blog.

Even tho this is a how to blog, but for the inpatient people who don't want to put in the effort to be able to use Photoshop I will take a occasional Graphics Request for a small fee and if your luck and it's a really small easy request you might even get it for free. ;)


So since I thought of this blog last night I haven't gotten any tutorials ready just yet and the layout is being worked on, so in case you see this website before I have my custom template up then just ignore the irony off that. xD

So until the tutorials and the layout are ready this doesn't look like much, so to kill time I can post these "signatures" I have created, these are rather old, but I just cleaned out my computer and these were the once I found easily.

In this Blog I will be posting tutorials on how to create Signature/Banners/Tags like those, just in case your wondering, creating Signature/Banners/Tags are the best exercise you can get using Photoshop and getting familiar with it's features and special effects.

Also for those wondering if I can create Gimp tutorials, well I'm not that familiar with the new version of Gimp, I haven't used it in many years, so until further notice that's a negative on that question. My Photoshop tutorials can probably be used for every version of photoshop, but for those using the Elemental versions of Photoshop, you may find your self missing a feature or two that I'll be teaching you guys how to use, so it would be preferred that you not use that version if possible, so Photoshop CS3 or higher would be recommended but it's not a condition seeing how expensive those are. 

I will also post tutorials on how to add Brushes and how to Create Brushes in Photoshop, what special effects can be used and where you can find those, such as C4D's and Lenses.

Once in a while I'll even rate a Brush set that's useful and link to them, these could be smudges brushes, grunge brushes and so on...

I'll go into details on how to create depth on a images, how to add a light source, colour adjustment (also cool and warm colours and how to match those to get the best results), how to save your work, what is good quality and how to get it.

I'll also go into basic HTML and CSS coding just for the fun of it. ;)

My goal will be to teach you guys, online graphic design, and website design, so this blog will be filled with website design tutorials and photoshop tutorials. So this basically is an graphic design online training kinda blog. ;)


If you want to contact me then you can simply send me an email I'll be happy to answer all questions you have the best way I can.
simmio92@hotmail.com