Some Basic Tutorials

1. Working with Images

Cropping

Download this image or open any image in your Photoshop. Select the Crop Tool  (Press 'C' to Select or Select it with your Mouse) and draw a selection on your image as shown below. (To make a selection click and drag with your mouse)

Make a selection
After you made your selection press Enter

Result

Cropping images is actually that easy in Photoshop, just select the area you want to keep and press Enter on your keyboard, and you are done. You can also press on the Move Tool  instead of pressing Enter on your keyboard, it will prompt you a window similar to the one shown below. If you are satisfied with your selection just press on the Crop button and your image will be cropped.

Copying & Pasting

Download this image or open any image in your Photoshop. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool  (M) and make a selection on the image as shown below.

Make a selection and press Ctrl + C or go to Edit > Copy

Presss Ctrl + N to open a new window or go to File > New and press OK

And now press Ctrl + V to paste the copied image or go to File > Paste







Whenever you make a selection on the image and copy that area, Photoshop automatically saves the dimensions of that selection in its memory. Thus when you open a new window, dimensions of the image will already be in the Width and Height fields.

Image Adjustment

I will not explain how to adjust images in this section, but will point out the tools that is used for image adjustment. You can find related tutorials for image adjustment in the Photoshop Tutorials section.

Go to Image > Adjustments. You will see the menu as shown below.

Go ahead and try some of the effects on your image, try to change the Brightness/Contrast, Auto Color...etc. Sometimes using Photoshop's pre-defined Image Adjustment options will solve your problem, try using Auto Levels, Auto Contrastor Auto Color on your photos before you proceed with other options.

2.Working with Texts

Open a new window Ctrl + N (choose a bigger dimensions for the window; width 400 and height 300) and press OK
Select the Horizontal Type Tool  (T) and click on the window that you just opened and type something.

If you want to make changes to your text, highlight it and change the properties from Options Panel

After you are done making changes click on the Move Tool (V)  and by clicking on your text position it on the top left corner of the window.

Note: When working with Texts it's important to click on Move Tool (V) after you are done typing. Many newbies make this mistake of not clicking on Move Tool or on any other tool than the Text Tool and are literally stuck in the Photoshop.

To move your text from one place to another choose the Move Tool and just click on your text with your mouse and without releasing your mouse move the text to the desired place.

There is another way to change the properties of the Text, in addition to the Options Panel we have discussed and that is by using Character Panel. If you don't see the Character Panel go to Windows > Character to bring up the Character Panel.

Below is the Character Panel screenshot, if you change any of the properties in this window it will be reflected on your text. However for it to be effective you need to be on the correct layer, otherwise you will not see any changes on the text.Layers will be our next discussion.

3. Working with Layers

Photoshop uses "Layers" for managing multiple (separate) objects in the same file, to open your Layers Panel go toWindow > Layers. If you have used other image editing programs that use the same "Layers" concept. Then this should be familiar to you. If you haven't then it's an easy concept to understand, just think of the Layers as a "Stack of Books" on the floor, and imagine yourself as looking at this stack of books from top.
Firstly, when you look at this stack from top, you will be able to see the cover of the first book which is on top of all the other books without a problem, however when you try to see the cover of the second book that is below the first book, you will notice that most of it are not visible to you. Because it's being blocked by the first book. And when you look at the third book's cover it will be even more hidden from your eyes. So think of Layers in Photoshop as a Stack of Books, one layer representing one book or level in the stack.

Layer that is on top

As you can see from the image above, the blue circle is located on the Top Layer, I have named the Layer as "Circle", and red rectangle is on second layer, I have named this layer as "Rectangle". As we have discussed earlier, book that is on top of the stack will cover the layers below. Thus you see the Circle covering Rectangle. And our background is a white color which is visible from the sides of the circle and rectangle.


Changing layer positions
Here I have moved Red Rectangle to Top, as you see now Red Rectangle is on top and it covers the Circle. To move the particular layer just click on it with your mouse and while still holding your mouse move it up or down. Or you can click on the Layer that you want to move and use shortcut keys on your keyboard to move it up ( Ctrl+] ) and down ( Ctrl=[ ).

What is Active Layer
Active layer is the layer which you are working on, for example from the image below we can see that the Active Layer is the Rectangle Layer - active layer will always be highlighted (selected).

Note: And if you want to move particular object you should select it's respective layer first, then only you can move it. Otherwise you will end up moving something else.

The "Eye" icon on the left of the layers means that the layers are currently visible, if you toggle them off then the object will also dissappear (will become invisible) from our window.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have deselected/removed the eye icon from the layer Rectangle. We still can see the rectangle in the Layers Panel but it is not visible on our image - we can only see the blue circle.

4. Saving for Web (as JPG or GIF)

After you have completed your work I believe you would want to save it as .jpg or .gif (or any other format that Photoshop supports)
To save your image for web go to File > Save for Web or press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S and you will see an identical window like this one below.

From here you can change the image type to JPG, GIF, PNG and WBMP. You can change the quality of the image as well, the higher the quality the bigger the size will be,

Note: Take the size into account when saving big images for web usage. Because, the higher is the quality of the image the bigger the size will be. And as you know big images will load very slow on internet.