Viewing Photoshop’s Parts and Processes
In many respects, Photoshop CS2 is just another computer program — you launch the program, open files, save files, and quit the program quite normally. Many common functions have common keyboard shortcuts. You enlarge, shrink, minimize, and close windows as you do in other programs.
Reviewing basic computer operations
Chapter 3 looks at Photoshop-specific aspects of working with floating palettes, menus and submenus, and tools from the Options bar, but I want to take just a little time to review some fundamental computer concepts.
Launching Photoshop
You can launch Photoshop (start the program) by double-clicking an image file or through the Applications folder (Mac) or the Start menu (Windows) — and Mac users can drag the Photoshop program icon (the actual program itself) to the Dock to make it available for one-click startup. Figure 1-9 shows both the Dock and the Start menu. You’ll find the file named Adobe Photoshop CS2 inside the Adobe Photoshop CS2 folder, inside the main Applications folder. You can open a file in ImageReady either by launching the program directly or by
Figure 1-9:
Start Photoshop through the Start menu (Windows) or the Dock (Mac). Clicking the button at the bottom of the Toolbox in Photoshop. (Chapter 3 shows you the Photoshop interface and how to get around in the program.) Never open an image into Photoshop from removable media (CD, DVD, your digital camera or its Flash card, Zip disks, jump drives, and the like) or from a network drive. Always copy the file to a local hard drive, open from that drive, save back to the drive, and then copy the file to its next destination. You can open from internal hard drives or external hard drives, but to avoid losing your work (or the entire image file) because of a problem reading from or writing to removable media, always copy to a local hard drive.
Working with images
Within Photoshop, you work with individual image files. Each image is recorded on the hard drive in a specific file format. Photoshop opens just about any image consisting of pixels as well as some file formats that do not. (File formats are discussed in Chapter 2.) Remember that to change a file’s format, you open the file in Photoshop and use the Save As command to create a new file. And, although theoretically not always necessary on the Mac, I suggest that you always include the file extension at the end of the filename. If Photoshop won’t open an image, it might be in a file format that Photoshop can’t read. It cannot, for example, open an Excel spreadsheet or a Microsoft Word DOC file because those are not image formats — and Photoshop is, as you know, an image editing program. If you have a brand new digital camera and Photoshop won’t open its raw images, check for an update to the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in at
You will also find installation instructions for the update there.
Saving your files
You must use the Save or Save As command to preserve changes to your images. And after you save and close an image, those changes are irreversible. When working with an important image, consider these two tips:
Work on a copy of the image file. Unless you’re working with a digital photo in the raw format (discussed in Chapter 7), make a copy of your image file as a backup before changing it in Photoshop. That ensures that should something go horribly wrong, you can start over. (You never actually change a raw photo — Photoshop can’t rewrite the original file — so you are always, in effect, working on a copy.) Save your work as PSD, too. Especially if your image has layers, save it in Photoshop’s PSD file format (complete with all the layers) before
Using Save As to create a final copy in another format. If you don’t save a copy with layers, going back to make one little change can cost hours of work.
If you attempt to close an image or quit Photoshop without saving your work first, you will get a gentle reminder asking whether you want to save, close without saving, or cancel the close/quit (as shown in Figure 1-10).
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