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Photoshop Fundamentals

by Olga Yiparaki

Introduction

Photoshop is a professional level image editing software by the Adobe company. Usually it comes in two basic editions:

• Photoshop elements - basic image editing tools edition (~ $100)
• Photoshop Creative Suite (CS) - complete professional tools edition (~ $1000)

Aside from the basic Adobe image editing tools that come with the software package there are smaller third party plug-ins to Photoshop that specialize in integrating the many existing and new or extended tools into a more integrated special purpose bundles. In addition to Photoshop, Adobe provides a variety of image, video, audio and PDF document manipulating software. To see all the available products visit the company's web site.

References

Although the Photoshop software has a very user friendly and intuitive GUI the amount of possible options and features that it provides cannot be easily learned by just experimenting with it. There are many ways for mastering the intricacies of Photoshop including:

• reading books, for example...
  • an all-around good into & tutorial: "Adobe Photoshop 6.0, Classroom in a Book" -- written by Adobe's staff
    (even though Adobe CS 7.0 is now available, this book is still excellent as an introduction)
  • for color correction and manipulation: "Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction" by Dan Margulis
  • for special effects: "Photoshop 6 Wow! Book" by Linnea Dayton & Jack Davis
  • for photo restoration: "Photoshop Restoration & Retouching" by Katrin Eisman
    (this book assumes you know how to use Photoshop already and it teaches you some wonderful advanced techniques)

• visiting some popular web pages like...
  • the official Adobe on-line tutorial page
  • PhotoshopCafe.com free on-line tutorials
  • About.com free course/tutorial pages
  • Laurie McCanna's free art site for tips/tutorials and other digital image resources
  • Google (or other search engines) to search the web for more links

• taking photoshop classes/courses/seminars through...
  • the local community college - Pima Community College
  • the Adobe company itself
  • the National Associations of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP)

Examples

Here are some examples of what can be done by Photoshop:

         [Original image 1]             [Restored image 1]

         [original image 2]             [Altered image 2]

GIMP the open source alternative to Photoshop

The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software under the GNU license for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

GIMP fairs well with Photoshop although it might not include, yet(!), all the capabilities that Photoshop has. It is conveniently available on our departmental Linux system. You can run it from the desktop application launcher Main Menu > Graphics > The GIMP or by typing gimp at the command line.

Information, documentation, tutorials, news, and all things GIMP-ish are available at the GIMP's home page.

Here is a nice screenshot of the GIMP GUI on the Windows platform.