Photoshop 6 for Windows Bible- P4 ppsx

What’s Up with Photoshop 6? What Is Photoshop? Adobe Photoshop is the most popular image-editing applica- tion available for use on Macintosh and Windows-based com- puters. Despite hefty competition over the years from a diverse variety of programs ranging in price from virtually free to a few thousand dollars each, Adobe once reported that Photoshop’s sales account for more than 80 percent of the image-editing market, with the number still rising. This makes Photoshop four times more popular than all its competitors combined. Where professional image editing is concerned, Photoshop’s not just the market leader, it’s the only game in town. Photoshop’s historically lopsided sales advantage provides Adobe with a clear incentive to reinvest in Photoshop and regu- larly enhance —even overhaul — its capabilities. Meanwhile, other vendors have had to devote smaller resources to playing catch-up. Although competitors have historically provided some interesting and sometimes amazing capabilities, the sums of their parts have typically fallen well short of Photoshop’s. As a result, Photoshop rides a self-perpetuating wave of indus- try predominance. It hasn’t always been the best image editor, nor was it the earliest. But its deceptively straightforward interface combined with a few terrific core functions made it a hit from the moment of its first release. More than a decade later — thanks to substantial capital injections and highly cre- ative programming on the part of Adobe’s staff and Photoshop originator Thomas Knoll — it has evolved into the most popu- lar program of its kind. If you’re already familiar with Photoshop and you just want to scope out its new capabilities, skip to the section “Fast Track to Version 6.” 6 Photoshop 6 1 1 CHAPTER ✦✦✦✦ In This Chapter An introduction to Photoshop The difference between painting and drawing programs How Photoshop fits into the bigger design scheme The many uses of Photoshop The new features in Photoshop 6 ✦✦✦✦ 4 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 Image-Editing Theory Like any image editor, Photoshop enables you to alter photographs and other scanned artwork. You can retouch an image, apply special effects, swap details between photos, introduce text and logos, adjust color balance, and even add color to a grayscale scan. Photoshop also provides the tools you need to create images from scratch. These tools are fully compatible with pressure-sensitive tablets, so you can create naturalistic images that look for all the world like watercolors and oils. Bitmaps versus objects Image editors fall into the larger software category of painting programs. In a paint- ing program, you draw a line, and the application converts it to tiny square dots called pixels. The painting itself is called a bitmapped image, but bitmap and image are equally acceptable terms. Photoshop uses the term bitmap exclusively to mean a black-and-white image, the logic being that each pixel conforms to one bit of data, 0 or 1 (off or on). In order to avoid awkward syllabic mergers such as pix-map — and because forcing a distinc- tion between a painting with exactly two colors and one with anywhere from four to 16 million colors is entirely arbitrary — I use the term bitmap more broadly to mean any image composed of a fixed number of pixels, regardless of the number of colors involved. What about other graphics applications, such as Adobe Illustrator? Illustrator, Macromedia FreeHand, CorelDraw, and others fall into a different category of soft- ware called drawing programs. Drawings comprise objects, which are independent, mathematically defined lines and shapes. For this reason, drawing programs are sometimes said to be object-oriented. Some folks prefer the term vector-based, but I shy away from it because vector implies the physical components direction and magnitude, which generally are associated with straight lines. Besides, my prefer- ence suggests an air of romance, as in, “One day, I’m going to shake off the dust of this three-horse town and pursue a life of romantic adventure in the Object Orient!” Photoshop 6 introduces object-oriented layers, which permit you to add high- resolution text and shapes to your photographic images, all inside a single piece of artwork. In that regard, the program has become a kind of painting and drawing hybrid. These features don’t altogether take the place of a drawing program, they merely help to make Photoshop that much more flexible and capable. The ups and downs of painting Painting programs and drawing programs each have their strengths and weaknesses. The strength of a painting program is that it offers an extremely straightforward approach to creating images. For example, although many of Photoshop’s features 6 Photoshop 6 Note 5 Chapter 1 ✦ What’s Up with Photoshop 6? are complex—exceedingly complex on occasion — its core painting tools are as easy to use as a pencil. You alternately draw and erase until you reach a desired effect, just as you’ve been doing since grade school. (Of course, for all I know, you’ve been using computers since grade school. If you’re pushing 20, you probably managed to log in many happy hours on paint programs in your formative years. Then again, if you’re under 20, you’re still in your formative years. Shucks, we’re all in our forma- tive years. Wrinkles, expanding tummies, falling arches, longer nose hairs . . . if that’s not a new form, I don’t know what is.) In addition to being simple to use, each of Photoshop’s core painting tools is fully customizable. It’s as if you have access to an infinite variety of crayons, colored pen- cils, pastels, airbrushes, watercolors, and so on, all of which are entirely erasable. Doodling on the phone book was never so much fun. The downside of a painting program is that it limits your resolution options. Because bitmaps contain a fixed number of pixels, the resolution of an image—the number of pixels per inch — is dependent upon the size at which the image is printed, as demonstrated in Figure 1-1. Print the image small, and the pixels become tiny, which increases resolution; print the image large, and the pixels grow, which decreases res- olution. An image that fills up a low-resolution screen (640 × 480 pixels) prints with smooth color transitions when reduced to, say, the size of a business card. But if you print that same image so it fills an 8 1 ⁄ 2-by-11-inch page, you’ll probably be able to dis- tinguish individual pixels, which means you can see jagged edges and blocky transi- tions. The only way to remedy this problem is to increase the number of pixels in the image, which increases the size of the file on disk. Figure 1-1: When printed small, a painting appears relatively smooth (left). But when printed large, it appears jagged (right). 6 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 Bear in mind that this is a very simplified explanation of how images work. For a more complete description that includes techniques for maximizing image perfor- mance, refer to “How Images Work” at the outset of Chapter 3. The downs and ups of drawing Painting programs provide tools reminiscent of traditional art tools. A drawing pro- gram, on the other hand, features tools that have no real-world counterparts. The process of drawing might more aptly be termed constructing, because you actually build lines and shapes point by point and stack them on top of each other to create a finished image. Each object is independently editable — one of the few structural advantages of an object-oriented approach— but you’re still faced with the task of building your artwork one chunk at a time. Nevertheless, because a drawing program defines lines, shapes, and text as mathe- matical equations, these objects automatically conform to the full resolution of the output device, whether it’s a laser printer, imagesetter, or film recorder. The drawing program sends the math to the printer and the printer renders the math to paper or film. In other words, the printer converts the drawing program’s equations to printer pixels. Your printer offers far more pixels than your screen—a 300-dots-per-inch (dpi) laser printer, for example, offers 300 pixels per inch (dots equal pixels), whereas most screens offer 72 pixels per inch. So the printed drawing appears smooth and sharply focused regardless of the size at which you print it, as shown in Figure 1-2. Figure 1-2: Small or large, a drawing prints smooth, but it’s a pain to create. This one took more than an hour out of my day, and, as you can see, I didn’t even bother with the letters around the perimeter of the design. Another advantage of drawings is that they take up relatively little room on disk. The file size of a drawing depends on the quantity and complexity of the objects the Cross- Reference 7 Chapter 1 ✦ What’s Up with Photoshop 6? drawing contains. Thus, the file size has almost nothing to do with the size of the printed image, which is just the opposite of the way bitmapped images work. A thumbnail drawing of a garden that contains hundreds of leaves and petals con- sumes several times more disk space than a poster-sized drawing that contains three rectangles. When to use Photoshop Thanks to their specialized methods, painting programs and drawing programs fulfill distinct and divergent purposes. Photoshop and other painting programs are best suited to creating and editing the following kinds of artwork: ✦ Scanned photos, including photographic collages and embellishments that originate from scans ✦ Images captured with any type of digital camera ✦ Still frames scanned from videotape or film ✦ Realistic artwork that relies on the play between naturalistic highlights, midranges, and shadows ✦ Impressionistic-type artwork and other images created for purely personal or aesthetic purposes ✦ Logos and other display type featuring soft edges, reflections, or tapering shadows ✦ Special effects that require the use of filters and color enhancements you simply can’t achieve in a drawing program When to use a drawing program You’re probably better off using Illustrator, CorelDraw, or some other drawing pro- gram if you’re interested in creating more stylized artwork, such as the following: ✦ Poster art and other high-contrast graphics that heighten the appearance of reality ✦ Architectural plans, product designs, or other precise line drawings ✦ Business graphics, such as charts and other “infographics” that reflect data or show how things work ✦ Traditional logos and text effects that require crisp, ultrasmooth edges ✦ Brochures, flyers, and other single-page documents that mingle artwork, logos, and standard-sized text (such as the text you’re reading now) 8 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 If you’re serious about computer graphics, you should own at least one painting program and one drawing program. If I had to rely exclusively on two graphics applications, I would probably choose Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe has done a fine job of establishing symmetry between the two programs, so that they share common interface elements and keyboard shortcuts. Learn one and the other makes a lot more sense. For those who are interested, I write a cradle-to-grave guide to Illustrator called Real World Illustrator, published by Peachpit Press. (Occasionally a reader asks me why I didn’t write IDG Books’ Illustrator Bible, perhaps hoping for a salacious insight into the publishing world. Sadly, the reason is mundane: I already had a signed con- tract with Peachpit when IDG offered the Bible to me. Fortunately for IDG Books and the industry at large, a talented first-time author named Ted Alspach stepped in. Adobe has since snatched up Ted and made him the Illustrator 9 product manager. As IDG likes to say, that’ll teach me to go writing books for other publishers.) I’m also the host of a handful of video training series, including Total Photoshop and Total Illustrator, both produced by Total Training (www.totaltraining.com). The Computer Design Scheme If your aspirations go beyond image editing into the larger world of computer- assisted design, you’ll soon learn that Photoshop is just one cog in a mighty wheel of programs used to create artwork, printed documents, and presentations. The natural-media paint program Corel Painter emulates real-world tools such as charcoal, chalk, felt-tip markers, calligraphic pen nibs, and camel-hair brushes as deftly as a synthesizer mimics a thunderstorm. Three-dimensional drawing applica- tions enable you to create hyper-realistic objects with depth, lighting, shadows, sur- face textures, reflections, refractions — you name it. These applications can import images created in Photoshop as well as export images you can then enhance and adjust with Photoshop. Page-layout programs such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress let you integrate images into newsletters, reports, books (such as this one), and just about any other kind of document you can imagine. If you prefer to transfer your message to slides, you can use Microsoft PowerPoint to add impact to your images through the use of charts and diagrams. Or publish an electronic document to the Web using Adobe Acrobat. With Adobe Premiere and After Effects, you can merge images with video sequences recorded in the QuickTime format. You even can edit individual frames in Premiere movies with Photoshop. Macromedia’s Director Shockwave Studio makes it possible to combine images with animation, QuickTime movies, and sound to create multime- dia presentations you can show on screen or record on videotape. Cross- Reference 9 Chapter 1 ✦ What’s Up with Photoshop 6? Finally, you can publish your images over the World Wide Web. You can code HTML and JavaScript in any word processor, or mock up pages in a page editor such as Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. You can even integrate images into simple GIF animations using any number of shareware programs available over the Internet. In fact, the Web is single-handedly breathing new life and respectabil- ity into low-resolution images, as I explore in Chapter 19. Photoshop Scenarios All the programs I mentioned previously are well-known industry standards. But they also cost money — sometimes lots of money —and they take time to learn. The number of programs you decide to purchase and how you use them is up to you. The following list outlines a few specific ways to use Photoshop alone and in tandem with other products: ✦ After scanning and adjusting an image inside Photoshop, use InDesign or QuarkXPress to place the image into your monthly newsletter and then print the document from the page-layout program. ✦ After putting the finishing touches on a lovely tropical vista inside Photoshop, import the image for use as an eye-catching background inside PowerPoint. Then save the document as a self-running screen presentation or print it to overhead transparencies or slides from the presentation program. ✦ Capture an on-screen image by pressing the Print Screen key or using a screen capture utility. Then create a new image in Photoshop and paste the screen image from the Clipboard. That’s how the screens in this book were produced. ✦ If you want to annotate the image, import it into Illustrator or CorelDraw, add arrows and labels as desired, and print it from the drawing program. ✦ Paint an original image inside Photoshop using a pressure-sensitive tablet. Use the image as artwork in a document created in a page-layout program or print it directly from Photoshop. ✦ Snap a photo with a digital photograph. As I write this, the best midrange cameras come from Olympus, Nikon, and Kodak. Correct the focus and bright- ness in Photoshop (as explained in Chapters 10 and 17). Then add the photo to your personal Web site or print it out from a color printer. ✦ Scan a surface texture such as wood or marble into Photoshop and edit it to create a fluid repeating pattern (as explained in Chapter 7). Import the image for use as a texture map in a three-dimensional drawing program. Render the 3D graphic to an image file, open the image inside Photoshop, and retouch as needed. ✦ Create a repeating pattern, save it as a BMP file, and apply it to the Windows desktop using the Display control panel. 10 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 ✦ Take a problematic drawing that keeps generating errors and save it as an EPS file. Then open the file inside Photoshop to render it as a high-resolution bitmap. Place the image in a document created in a page-layout program or print it directly from Photoshop. ✦ Start an illustration in a drawing program and save it as an EPS file. Open the file in Photoshop and use the program’s unique tools to add textures and tones that are difficult or impossible to create in a vector-based drawing program. ✦ Record a QuickTime movie in Premiere and export it to the FilmStrip format. Open the file inside Photoshop and edit it one frame at a time by drawing on the frame or applying filters. Finally, open the altered FilmStrip file in Premiere and convert it back to the QuickTime format. Obviously, few folks have the money to buy all these products and even fewer have the energy or inclination to implement every one of these ideas. But quite honestly, these are just a handful of projects I can list off the top of my head. There must be hundreds of uses for Photoshop that involve no outside applications whatsoever. In fact, so far as I’ve been able to figure, there’s no end to the number of design jobs you can handle in whole or in part using Photoshop. Photoshop is a versatile and essential product for any designer or artist who owns a personal computer. Simply put, this is the software around which virtually every other computer-graphics program revolves. I, for one, wouldn’t remove Photoshop from my hard drive for a thousand bucks. (Of course, that’s not to say I’m not will- ing to consider higher offers. For $1,500, I’d gladly swap it to a Jaz cartridge.) Fast Track to Version 6 If it seems like you’ve been using Photoshop for the better part of your professional career and you’re itching to put a leash around the program’s neck and take it for a walk, the following list explains all. Here I’ve compiled a few of the most prominent features that are new to Photoshop 6, in rough order of importance. I also point you to the chapter where you can sniff around for more information: ✦ Object-oriented type (Chapter 15): Every update to Photoshop features some kind of improvement to type, but somehow it’s never quite perfect. Now it is. In Photoshop 6, type is fully editable, it outputs at the full resolution of your printer, and it wraps automatically from one line to the next. In other words, type finally works the way you’d expect! You can even apply leading, tracking, paragraph spacing, justification, and hyphenation, just as in QuarkXPress and Illustrator. The only feature missing is support for tabs. 6 Photoshop 6 11 Chapter 1 ✦ What’s Up with Photoshop 6? ✦ High-resolution lines and shapes (Chapter 14): Can you name a graphics pro- gram that’s nearly 10 years old and can’t draw a rectangle? If you guessed Photo- shop 5.5, stick a gold star on your forehead. But don’t guess Photoshop 6. It can draw not only rectangles, but also ovals, polygons, and custom shapes. Like text, Photoshop renders these vector shapes at the full resolution of the printer. What’s more, you can fill them with gradients, patterns, and photographic images. ✦ Revamped color management (Chapter 16): Photoshop 5 introduced profile- based color management; Photoshop 6 makes it better. For one thing, Adobe has made a serious effort to standardize color management across both Photoshop and Illustrator 9, so you can get the two programs to match more easily. Second, you can work in multiple color environments at a time, so that one RGB image is calibrated for the Web and another for your printer. CMS remains highly complex, but its ability to deliver reliable color is downright extraordinary. ✦ Layers sets (Chapter 12): This seemingly minor feature makes a big difference in the way you work. Photoshop 6 lets you organize layers into folders called sets, great for making sense of complex compositions. You can also assign col- ors to both layers and sets in the Layers palette, wonderful for identifying lay- ers at a glance. Sets are also powerful grouping tools, permitting you to move, transform, blend, and mask several layers at once. ✦ Custom layer styles (Chapter 14): Photoshop 6 has revamped layer effects such as drop shadow, glow, and bevel; as well as added new ones such as satin and stroke. As before, you can access all effects from a single dialog box, but you can also hide, show, and edit individual effects from the Layers palette. Best of all, you can save a combination of settings as a custom style available from the Styles palette. From then on, it takes just one click to apply a bunch of effects at once. ✦ Advanced blending (Chapter 13): Double-click a layer in the Layers palette to bring up the revised and vastly more complicated Blend Options dialog box. In addition to allowing you to blend and hide portions of a layer, you can blend a layer’s pixels independently of drop shadows, glows, and other effects. You can also hide the layer in one or more color channels and control how a layer inter- acts with one or several layers below. ✦ Preset manager (Chapter 5): Photoshop 6 introduces a whole new category of preference settings called presets. These include predefined brushes, color swatches, and gradients, all of which you could create in Photoshop 5.5 and earlier. But they also include patterns (you used to be limited to one), layer styles, and object-oriented shapes. While presets aren’t as easy to use as they should be, they make it possible to organize a variety of image attributes at the same time. 12 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 ✦ Options bar (Chapter 2): The old Options and Brushes palettes are gone, replaced by the horizontal Options bar under the menu bar. The bar makes many features more accessible than before, and even offers a few options that were previously available only by choosing a command or pressing a key on the keyboard. As you’d expect, the Options bar changes to accommodate the active tool or operation. ✦ Liquify command (Chapter 11): Distortions have long been a weak spot in Photoshop. You could tug an image by one of four corner points, but aside from simple perspective effects, there was little you could do. Photoshop 6 adds the Liquify command, which permits you to paint and erase distortions inside a separate window. While you can’t zoom or scroll the image —both significant disadvantages — the command provides a wide variety of tools and a lightning-fast preview. ✦ Text warping (Chapter 15): Artists have long requested that Photoshop add text on a curve, a common function inside Illustrator and other object-ori- ented programs. Instead, we get something that is at once worse and better. The Warp Text option lets you arc, wave, bulge, and twirl type, while keeping it 100 percent editable. Unlike true text on a curve, you can’t draw custom paths and position the type on the path. However, you can apply an array of dazzling distortions that fall well outside the capabilities of Illustrator. My biggest complaint: You can’t warp shapes or images. My one question: Why the heck not? ✦ Image slicing (Chapter 19): Because Photoshop is a pixel-based program and the World Wide Web is a pixel-based environment, most Web artists mock up pages inside Photoshop. Before you can incorporate text, buttons, and other links, you have to split up the page into lots of smaller images that you later reassemble with HTML. Photoshop’s slicing tools automate this process, per- mitting you to break a composition into pieces and even generate the neces- sary HTML table automatically. You still have to adjust the code, but it’s a heck of a time saver. ✦ Position printed images (Chapter 18): As I hasten to remind folks, I don’t work for Adobe and I have nothing to do with the creation of Photoshop. In the inter- est of remaining a relatively unbiased outsider, I’m not even part of the Alpha Team, a small cluster of five or six elite users who test each version of the pro- gram a year or more before it comes out. However, I do occasionally have a direct impact on the program, and this, dear readers, is my big addition to Photoshop 6. I remember the meeting like it was yesterday. I said something like, “Gee, fellas, every time you print an image from Photoshop, it just gets plopped onto the middle of the page.” One of the programmers asked, “Pardon me, did you say something?” To which I rejoined, “Well, I’d like to have control over positioning it. Like, maybe move it to the upper left corner or something. You know, if it’s not, like, a big hassle or anything.” Then someone said, “Oh, dry up, McClelland.” Someone else said, “I’ll have the salmon,” and everyone ordered lunch. Now whenever you choose File ➪ Print Options, think of me and that fateful day I breathed new life into a tired old program. [...]... previously saved it in Photoshop with the thumbnails option enabled Sadly, thumbnails don’t work in the other direction Because Windows doesn’t recognize the resource fork, Photoshop for Windows can’t save a Macintosh-style thumbnail And because Photoshop on the Mac relies on Apple’s QuickTime to interpret thumbnails, it can’t see data-fork thumbnails Dang Previewing outside Photoshop Tip Under Windows 95 and... file at the bottom of the Open dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-5 In Version 6, Photoshop displays thumbnails for any files saved in the native format (PSD) If you’re running Windows 98 or Windows 2000, the operating system may generate thumbnails for files saved in other formats To generate thumbnails when saving images in Photoshop, press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+2 to display the Saving Files panel of the Preferences... but Windows programs can’t even see the resource fork, much less translate it Fortunately for all, both versions of Photoshop can save Windows thumbnails On the Mac, the Saving Files panel of the Preferences dialog box contains a check box called Windows Thumbnail When turned on, a thumbnail is added to the data fork of the file, which translates to Windows fully intact Chapter 3 ✦ Image Fundamentals... — I mean, I just said Photoshop 5 was better — but their argument has some merit Photoshop 6 is what we in the business like to call Seriously Good Software A big upgrade means big work for me Nevertheless, I’ve risen to the challenge, making every effort to document the new features with clarity and in their proper context Just remember to keep an eye peeled for the Photoshop 6 icon and you’ll be over... the format you saved in doesn’t support — layers, alpha channels, and so forth If you want to save a copy of the image that retains all those features, click Yes Photoshop displays a modified version of the Save dialog box and selects the Photoshop native format for you Give your image a name and proceed as usual Photoshop Tip You also can issue the Save As command by pressing Ctrl+Shift+S As for the... automatically Photoshop ✦ When you open an image, Photoshop may display a dialog box telling you that the color profile of the image doesn’t match the default color profile you’ve established You have the option of converting the image to the default profile or leaving well enough alone See Chapter 16 for help with this issue Viewing the thumbnail 6 To help you assess an image before you open it, Photoshop. .. or the free Acrobat Reader ✦ Save layers to TIFF and PDF formats (Chapter 3): Photoshop 6 supports more than a dozen standardized file formats However, prior to Version 6, the only format that supported layers was the native Photoshop (PSD) format Now you can save layers with TIFF and PDF documents As I write this, Photoshop is the only program that can read layered TIFF and PDF files, but other programs... image for the printer and for the screen Opening and saving images in Version 6 Exploring JPEG, GIF, PDF, and dozens of other file formats Rendering objectoriented EPS images Saving TIFF files with layers and image pyramids Annotating images with text and audio comments Changing the number of pixels in an image Using the updated crop tool and Crop command ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ 68 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 Size... a 64 0 × 480-pixel image would consume an entire 13-inch screen If you want the image to share the page with text and other elements, the image needs to be smaller than that A typical screen image varies from as small as 16 × 16 pixels for icons and buttons to 320 × 240 pixels for a stand-alone photograph Naturally, these are merely guidelines You can create images at any size you like For more information... dialog box opens, click the Photoshop Image tab to look at your image, as shown in Figure 3 -6 Again, you must have saved a thumbnail preview along with the image for this feature to work 79 80 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 Figure 3 -6: Under Windows 95 and later, you can preview files saved in the native psd format from the Properties dialog box You can also see a tiny thumbnail in the General panel . offers an extremely straightforward approach to creating images. For example, although many of Photoshop s features 6 Photoshop 6 Note 5 Chapter 1 ✦ What’s Up with Photoshop 6? are complex—exceedingly. PDF formats (Chapter 3): Photoshop 6 supports more than a dozen standardized file formats. However, prior to Version 6, the only format that supported layers was the native Photoshop (PSD) format first convert it to a decimal. For example, 100 percent is 1.0, 64 percent is 0 .64 , and 5 percent is 0.05. Note 6 Photoshop 6 Caution 70 Part I ✦ Welcome to Photoshop 6 Figure 3-2: Turn off the Resample