Joesph Till asked:




Photoshop skills relates to the knowledge of using the tools and techniques of Photoshop to get maximum benefits and achieve best output. Once we master the techniques of using the daily use tools of Photoshop we can get started and gradually learn other high end Photoshop skills which can result in optimizing our output quality. Photoshop is such a powerful application that even very expert and continuous users tend to find more and more new techniques to improve their photography.

The most popular Photoshop skills necessary for quality enhancement of imaging are:

Making an optimum selection: This is one of the most fundamental Photoshop skills which is necessary for controlling part of the image requiring adjustment. Photoshop offers various tools for making selections in its applications for editing of images. Since Photoshop offers various tools to do the selection, choosing the most suitable tool is also a challenging task. Professionals use different set of tools for a single selection to get optimum results. Feathering and adjusting selections for sharper edges relates to pixel adjustments over the edges to make it more suitable to the eyes.

Adjusting color and Tone of the Image: This is a basic Photoshop skill which will give a totally improved look to your image. To interpret the color perfectly in a photograph we need to see the strong black and white in the images. Levels can be used to set black and whit in photographs. It is recommended to use adjustments layer to adjust photographs as it leaves the original photograph unchanged for future reference. After adjusting the blacks and whites in photograph you have to fix the midtone using the curves adjustment option. These few simple adjustments improve the color quality of the photo a lot.

Removing imperfections: With the help and use of retouching tools such as Rubber Stamp, clone tool and the handy spot healing brush all imperfections such as an unwanted object or a spot can easily be removed from the photograph. Learning this Photoshop skill will make one master of the photographic art.

Sharpening the image: The images clicked from a digital camera needs sharpening as they tend to get soft while converting from analog to digital. Although there is a sharpening feature inbuilt in the camera but additional selective sharpening is also required to get the best results. The unsharp mask option of Photoshop provides the best tool for sharpening of images. There are options for controlling the intensity and scope of sharpening. Sharpening of Images must be done after making other adjustments and after resizing the image for final output because size of the image is very important for its resolution quality.

Photoshop skill is a skill which is not very common and many people are not master of this skill. So having Photoshop skill can put one above competition in a scenario requiring artistic background. Photoshop skill can be put to work to earn money or even livelihood for families as this is in great demand in today’s world. It needs practice for mastering Photoshop skills.



Edit Your Digital Photos Using Photoshop.

In the following tutorial you will learn about the overall scope of Adobe Photoshop CS3. This program is used mostly to manipulate images. People that do web development, graphic design, and photography will probably prefer the use of this program to edit their images.

Once you have grasped this basic knowledge of the software, you will be able to dive into Adobe Photoshop and quite possibly Adobe Fireworks, which works in a similar way. Adobe Fireworks is just a little simpler and has less features. Adobe Fireworks was originated as Macromedia Fireworks. Enough of the chit-chat, lets get down to business!

When you first enter the Adobe Photoshop environment you will see a plethora of features and plug-ins to mess with. Fortunately, with a little training from me you won’t have to be confused by these things. Go to the top left of the screen and select file/new.

Now you should see the picture above. This is the basic variables that you are able to change when you start a new file. You can change the name of Photoshop document to whatever you please. This is best suited when you are trying to organize stuff during your Adobe Photoshop training sessions on the web. The preset window lets you select what type of paper size, resolution, and color mode that you would like to have to start out with. Of course most will just go with custom so that they can personalize their specific project. Most of the time, the project you are working on won’t fit into a category. Adobe has specifically put custom as the first on the list because of this fact. For today session, let’s change the preset to Web.

Following these steps will present you with a black window with the name of the file, percent of the resolution it is viewing at, and the color mode you have chosen at the top of the window.

From here we can learn about what some of the things you see on the left and right of the screen are. We will start on the left side of the screen because this is the first thing you should learn when you starting to make and edit images in Adobe Photoshop. I am using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, which has some extra features. I will go over these briefly to educate you. The first on the top left is the “move tool” It is an icon that has a cursor and crosshair on it. You can use this tool to move objects on the screen around to your liking.

The next tool is the rectangular Marquee tool. You can also just use this tool to make squares around areas in an image to cut them out easily. You can use that feature to cut out a piece of a picture and paste it somewhere else. I personally use this image a lot when I am working on images for my website or editing my digital photos.

This tool has four variations to it. Two of them are relatively new and you may know them or not. The second variation is the Elliptical Marquee tool that allows you to trace circles. The third is the Single Row Marquee tool. The fourth is the Single Column Marquee tool. These are great when you want to slice out the image of an excel spreadsheet and only post that specific data too an audience. It is most likely it will end up looking like an “L” shape and you will be able to write information around the image within a website. This is very useful for website designers with the proper knowledge of Adobe software products.

Next up is the Lasso tool. This tool allows you to highlight an image that you have made in an image or an image you have opened in Adobe Photoshop. This marquee tool likes to have smooth hard edges to follow. If you a photograph that doesn’t have a easy to follow edge around objects you will find it hard to use this tool. You have probably seen this when people cut their heads out of a picture and paste it onto somebody else’s body. It is a very funny feature and this is the tool that does it!

The lasso tool has three different variations. The second version is the Polygonal Lasso tool. This tool can make different shapes and curves when tracing around or cutting out a piece of an image. The third variation is the Magnetic Lasso tool that only works on images that have defined edges. The tool will clamp onto an edge and give it anchor points to shape the corners. This is good when you don’t have that steady hand you used to have back in high school. I use this myself because I am not the man I used to be!

The next up is the crop tool. This feature does exactly what is says. It is like a marquee tool except it is made specifically for cutting square pieces out of images. That is pretty much all it does. However, this simple feature is used quite often to developed website images.

The next up is the Slice tool. This tool allows you to slice an image into smaller pieces. This is usually used in web design with the use of tables to display formatting on a webpage.

The next in line is a list of four tools that provide ways for the user to fix problems in images. The Spot Healing Brush tool first appeared in Adobe Elements 3. It was implemented into Adobe Photoshop CS2 after that. This tool allows you to fix areas of an image by replacing or blending the colors in an area so that it is like growing a new piece of skin over a bad rash. The Healing Brush tool allows you to fix problems in the image by sampling the surrounding area around the problem and trying to replicate the pattern in the area that is problematic. The patch tool is pretty much a mix of the Healing Brush and the Lasso tool. It is allows you to highlight the area that is scratched or empty and sample the surrounding area to fix the problem. Lastly, the Redeye tool allows you to select the common problem of red eyes and correct them with sampling a piece of the black pupil area and replacing the red eye with the natural pupil color. This is a widely used tool by many consumers.

The next tools are made for painting on the canvas freestyle. The first one of them is the Brush tool. The Brush tool is an old favorite for people that want to free hand draw things like they had a brush which they can decrease and increase the size of the contact point. You can also change the hardness of the stroke as well. This will show differences in contrast. The Pencil tool is just like a real pencil with some added tricks. The modes can give you complete freedom or help you make straight lines when you are trying to make objects. The last one is the Color Replacement tool. This handy tool allows you to select a color scheme on an image and replace it with something else. Unlike the bucket tool that will cover the complete area, this tool will allow you to draw in the replacement by hand as if you had a brush. Let’s say if you had a blue cup in a picture. You can sample the blue color and decide to make it green. Then you just draw over the area of the cup and anything that is of the sampled color will turn green!

The stamp tools are a very nice addition to the Adobe Photoshop regime for photographers. Specifically it is great for editors that write tabloids and want to doctor the pictures. With the Clone Stamp tool they will be able to edit out an area of a picture and make it look like it was never there. They can do this by sampling the area around the object they want to not be there and adding it into the portion of the picture they want it too be in. The Pattern Stamp tool allows you to stamp a specific pattern at your desired brush hardness onto an image to make something unique. Like you can take a brick wall patter and make a complete building.

The History brush tool and the Art History brush tool are unique and sometimes overlooked. You can use the History Brush tool to restore the original image in only just section or part of an image. It is usually used when you take a color picture to black and white and then convert a part of it back to color. It’s kind of like finding a dusty painting and then wiping it off to see the beauty that it holds underneath. It is a true treasure for the graphic designer or photographer that uses Adobe software product regularly. The Art History Brush tool allows you to copy the texture of an image through the use of art specific styles. Unlike the History Brush tool the Art History Brush tool takes the data from the image and creates something new out of it. It allows you to put a different style of art to an image without it losing its originality.

The next feature is the three types of Eraser tools. The most basic is the Eraser tool itself. You can change the size of the area that the eraser returns to the original background. The Background Eraser Tool does exactly what it states. It is able to erase the background without any use of changing layers. Once you have done this you can add in colors to make a new background at will. The Magic Eraser tool acts like the Magic Wand tool. It will erase an area based how it is clicked and verified.

The next up on the list is the Gradient tool and the Paint Bucket tool. These are old favorites from the long line of Adobe Photoshop releases. However, for all the new Adobe Photoshop CS users out there these items are something that may not be so familiar after searching through the web for image editing software. The Gradient tool provides the user the ability to make colors stretch in all directions from high to low in intensity. It is similar to the way you would view the sunset as the colors transition from light to dark. You can also use this feature to apply to certain types of patterns and textures. These features are also available Macromedia and Adobe Fireworks. The Paint Bucket tool is capable of filling in a space or a space inside of the Magic Wand tool to a certain color, patter, texture, or stamp. This is used as a quick way to change colors in a predefined area.

The following set of tools previously were found in another section of Adobe Photoshop, but are now offered conveniently on the left side of the menu. All three of these do pretty much what they say they do. I will still give you a brief explanation of their capabilities though. The first of them is the Blur tool. The Blur tool blurs the area where you paint. The Sharpen tool increases the contrast in the areas you paint. The Smudge tool blends the pixels where you paint. This is similar to when you drag something through wet paint that has various colors.

Oddly enough, three more features that were previously hidden to the human eye are now available for you to view on the left menu. This time though the names have almost nothing to do with what they do. First up is the Dodge tool. This tool lightens an area on the image. The Burn tool darkens an area on the image and the Sponge tool changes the level of saturation on an area in the image. These all have their special purposes that you will come to find out about. Burn and Dodge are usually used for making shadows or erasing shadows.

The next feature has a wide array of variations to it. This feature is the Pen tool. The pen tool allows users to create paths, curves, and anchor points to move lines around in weird shapes without the use of freehand drawing. Ironically enough, this leads to the rest of the tools. The next is the Freeform Pen tool. Unlike the pen tool that automatically makes anchor points where you draw, the Freeform Pen tool lets you draw as if you really had a pen. After you have used either of the tools you can use the next feature, which is the Add Anchor Point tool to create anchor points for new lines or freeform drawing. This helps when you want to attach a line to another line that has already been drawing without overlapping incorrectly. The Delete Anchor Point tool gives you the ability to delete an anchor point that you are not satisfied with. The Convert Point tool changes vector shape masks and paths. This allows different types of anchor points to connect to each other even if they are composed of different types of corners.

The next tools are the Type tools. They specifically describe the Horizontal Type tool and the Vertical Type tool. These pertain to the angle that you are able to write in (Horizontal or Vertical). Unfortunately, when you use this you must turn it into a bitmap and that makes it non-editable after you are finished. The Horizontal and Vertical Type Mask tool allows you to write with text that is filled with a patter or an image as the font color. It can be a nice addition if you are writing against an odd background.

The Path Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool are both used for paths. The Path Selection tool will allow you to select a path component even if it is surrounded by many different paths. The Direct Selection tool will only select a segment of a path. This is a way to reshape a segment to a different path after it has been created and saved.

The following tools are some of my personal favorites. I have started one too many images with these objects. If you look at my website you can see almost exactly where I started when I created it. The first of these is the Rectangle tool that makes a rectangle of various sizes. The Rounded Rectangle tool makes rectangles that are rounded. I used to use this exclusively in Macromedia Fireworks before I purchased the Adobe CS series. The Ellipse tool allows you to make seemingly perfect circles. The Polygon tool allows you to make polygons. The Line tool makes lines with anchor points at the end so that they can be managed by the Pen tool if you want to get fancy.

Below these more popular features are some cool features that you may or may not find interesting. I believe these have been in all the Adobe CS releases, but I am not sure about the Macromedia MX series. The first up is the Notes tool that allows you to add small notes to your images in the background. Also there is an Audio Annotation tool that allows you to add verbal notes to an image.

The tools described below are a set of useful features that you may find useful in addition to some of the other options. I believe some of these tools are used in conjunction with the other tools. However, this makes it a little simpler if you want to do it the old fashioned way. First is the Eyedropper tool that helps sample color from an area. The Eyedropper tool is pretty basic though. The Color Sampler tool has a few more features that allow you to gather the color data from any layer without calling that layer. You can see levels of gradient or replace colors and shapes back to an image. The Ruler tool helps you measure things inside of an image if you are trying to be precise about how you do things. This helps if you are a web developer and you are trying to make every symmetrical and in order. I personally try to do this sometimes and have to slap myself. I like to be organized myself, but I don’t want my websites to look so fine tuned that they would be passed up as not being original. The Count tool helps you count.

The Hand tool is used to move objects that are in a layer in anyway that you would like that is 2d in fashion.

The Zoom tool helps you zoom in on a picture or object so you can do fine tuning.

The Default Foreground and Background Colors tool lets you return back to black and white when you have gone totally out of whack with you colors you are thinking you are in the 1960s!

The Switch Foreground and Background Color tool lets you switch the colors you using at will. It is almost like have a painters tablet to hold your saved colors on.

I forgot to mention that each of these features has its sub-features displayed at the top of the program when you click on them. You have probably noticed by now though. By now you have gained enough knowledge of the Adobe Photoshop CS3 basic features to jump in and start creating your own stuff. You will be able to find further information on each of these features in use with illustrations soon. I can tell you this because I am writing them right now. I believe the visitor will take from you if they can look at one person and know what type of information he is giving rather than it coming from a million different people that may or may not know how to effectively write information to people. Please check back often to view further updates to the website and even more great tutorials in various disciplines in Adobe Software.

Some of you may be looking for even further guidance or special programs that will help you through every step of the process. I would love to be there standing behind you pointing to everything you need to do, but that is just not feasible….. yet! However, my website has a growing amount of unique content written by yours truly and not randomly dispersed from random websites where you are not sure of the credibility of the author or not. The complete tutorial with picture of this tutorial is available at my webpage below. Remember, you can unlock the Adobe Guru in you!

By: Dwight Norris

About the Author:

Caffeinated Content

Love them or hate them, there is no denying their value.

Photographers are often split down the middle with Photoshop, but use it well and it can be a fantastic tool. I use a number of actions that really add to the images I take.

Over the past few years I have built up quite a collection of actions, but find that I only use a select few.

Here are a few recommendations:

Nicole Van. She has some excellent actions, my favorites are the ‘colour pop’ which work well in both natural and studio light. It adds a real kick to the image, great for that modern high key look.

Childish David. He has a beautiful collection of sepia actions, and an awesome colour punch action.

Martas Actions. Her ‘eyes like marbles’ action is a must for all portrait images. Use it subtly and you can transform the eyes in an image. She also has some excellent B&W actions.

It can also be an excellent time saver when processing a large batch. Imagine processing 300+ images from a wedding shoot and applying a custom finish to each one. It can be extremely time consuming, and as a result make your photography less profitable.

You don’t even have to use pre-package actions that other photographs have released and selling, like the ones detailed above. Use Photoshop actions to record your own macros, you may have come up with a beautiful effect and what to apply it again.

Photoshop can be easily overused, use it correctly and you will add so much to your work. It can also save you time and make your business more profitable.

In the following tutorial you will learn about the overall scope of Adobe Photoshop CS3. This program is used mostly to manipulate images. People that do web development, graphic design, and photography will probably prefer the use of this program to edit their images. Once you have grasped this basic knowledge of the software, you will be able to dive into Adobe Photoshop and quite possibly Adobe Fireworks, which works in a similar way. Adobe Fireworks is just a little simpler and has less features. Adobe Fireworks was originated as Macromedia Fireworks. Enough of the chit-chat, lets get down to business!

When you first enter the Adobe Photoshop environment you will see a plethora of features and plug-ins to mess with. Fortunately, with a little training from me you won’t have to be confused by these things. Go to the top left of the screen and select file/new.

Now you should see the picture above. This is the basic variables that you are able to change when you start a new file. You can change the name of Photoshop document to whatever you please. This is best suited when you are trying to organize stuff during your Adobe Photoshop training sessions on the web. The preset window lets you select what type of paper size, resolution, and color mode that you would like to have to start out with. Of course most will just go with custom so that they can personalize their specific project. Most of the time, the project you are working on won’t fit into a category. Adobe has specifically put custom as the first on the list because of this fact. For today session, let’s change the preset to Web.

Following these steps will present you with a black window with the name of the file, percent of the resolution it is viewing at, and the color mode you have chosen at the top of the window.

From here we can learn about what some of the things you see on the left and right of the screen are. We will start on the left side of the screen because this is the first thing you should learn when you starting to make and edit images in Adobe Photoshop. I am using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, which has some extra features. I will go over these briefly to educate you. The first on the top left is the “move tool” It is an icon that has a cursor and crosshair on it. You can use this tool to move objects on the screen around to your liking.

The next tool is the rectangular Marquee tool. You can also just use this tool to make squares around areas in an image to cut them out easily. You can use that feature to cut out a piece of a picture and paste it somewhere else. I personally use this image a lot when I am working on images for my website or editing my digital photos.

This tool has four variations to it. Two of them are relatively new and you may know them or not. The second variation is the Elliptical Marquee tool that allows you to trace circles. The third is the Single Row Marquee tool. The fourth is the Single Column Marquee tool. These are great when you want to slice out the image of an excel spreadsheet and only post that specific data too an audience. It is most likely it will end up looking like an “L” shape and you will be able to write information around the image within a website. This is very useful for website designers with the proper knowledge of Adobe software products.

Next up is the Lasso tool. This tool allows you to highlight an image that you have made in an image or an image you have opened in Adobe Photoshop. This marquee tool likes to have smooth hard edges to follow. If you a photograph that doesn’t have a easy to follow edge around objects you will find it hard to use this tool. You have probably seen this when people cut their heads out of a picture and paste it onto somebody else’s body. It is a very funny feature and this is the tool that does it!

The lasso tool has three different variations. The second version is the Polygonal Lasso tool. This tool can make different shapes and curves when tracing around or cutting out a piece of an image. The third variation is the Magnetic Lasso tool that only works on images that have defined edges. The tool will clamp onto an edge and give it anchor points to shape the corners. This is good when you don’t have that steady hand you used to have back in high school. I use this myself because I am not the man I used to be!

The next up is the crop tool. This feature does exactly what is says. It is like a marquee tool except it is made specifically for cutting square pieces out of images. That is pretty much all it does. However, this simple feature is used quite often to developed website images.

The next up is the Slice tool. This tool allows you to slice an image into smaller pieces. This is usually used in web design with the use of tables to display formatting on a webpage.

The next in line is a list of four tools that provide ways for the user to fix problems in images. The Spot Healing Brush tool first appeared in Adobe Elements 3. It was implemented into Adobe Photoshop CS2 after that. This tool allows you to fix areas of an image by replacing or blending the colors in an area so that it is like growing a new piece of skin over a bad rash. The Healing Brush tool allows you to fix problems in the image by sampling the surrounding area around the problem and trying to replicate the pattern in the area that is problematic. The patch tool is pretty much a mix of the Healing Brush and the Lasso tool. It is allows you to highlight the area that is scratched or empty and sample the surrounding area to fix the problem. Lastly, the Redeye tool allows you to select the common problem of red eyes and correct them with sampling a piece of the black pupil area and replacing the red eye with the natural pupil color. This is a widely used tool by many consumers.

The next tools are made for painting on the canvas freestyle. The first one of them is the Brush tool. The Brush tool is an old favorite for people that want to free hand draw things like they had a brush which they can decrease and increase the size of the contact point. You can also change the hardness of the stroke as well. This will show differences in contrast. The Pencil tool is just like a real pencil with some added tricks. The modes can give you complete freedom or help you make straight lines when you are trying to make objects. The last one is the Color Replacement tool. This handy tool allows you to select a color scheme on an image and replace it with something else. Unlike the bucket tool that will cover the complete area, this tool will allow you to draw in the replacement by hand as if you had a brush. Let’s say if you had a blue cup in a picture. You can sample the blue color and decide to make it green. Then you just draw over the area of the cup and anything that is of the sampled color will turn green!

The stamp tools are a very nice addition to the Adobe Photoshop regime for photographers. Specifically it is great for editors that write tabloids and want to doctor the pictures. With the Clone Stamp tool they will be able to edit out an area of a picture and make it look like it was never there. They can do this by sampling the area around the object they want to not be there and adding it into the portion of the picture they want it too be in. The Pattern Stamp tool allows you to stamp a specific pattern at your desired brush hardness onto an image to make something unique. Like you can take a brick wall patter and make a complete building.

The History brush tool and the Art History brush tool are unique and sometimes overlooked. You can use the History Brush tool to restore the original image in only just section or part of an image. It is usually used when you take a color picture to black and white and then convert a part of it back to color. It’s kind of like finding a dusty painting and then wiping it off to see the beauty that it holds underneath. It is a true treasure for the graphic designer or photographer that uses Adobe software product regularly. The Art History Brush tool allows you to copy the texture of an image through the use of art specific styles. Unlike the History Brush tool the Art History Brush tool takes the data from the image and creates something new out of it. It allows you to put a different style of art to an image without it losing its originality.

The next feature is the three types of Eraser tools. The most basic is the Eraser tool itself. You can change the size of the area that the eraser returns to the original background. The Background Eraser Tool does exactly what it states. It is able to erase the background without any use of changing layers. Once you have done this you can add in colors to make a new background at will. The Magic Eraser tool acts like the Magic Wand tool. It will erase an area based how it is clicked and verified.

The next up on the list is the Gradient tool and the Paint Bucket tool. These are old favorites from the long line of Adobe Photoshop releases. However, for all the new Adobe Photoshop CS users out there these items are something that may not be so familiar after searching through the web for image editing software. The Gradient tool provides the user the ability to make colors stretch in all directions from high to low in intensity. It is similar to the way you would view the sunset as the colors transition from light to dark. You can also use this feature to apply to certain types of patterns and textures. These features are also available Macromedia and Adobe Fireworks. The Paint Bucket tool is capable of filling in a space or a space inside of the Magic Wand tool to a certain color, patter, texture, or stamp. This is used as a quick way to change colors in a predefined area.

The following set of tools previously were found in another section of Adobe Photoshop, but are now offered conveniently on the left side of the menu. All three of these do pretty much what they say they do. I will still give you a brief explanation of their capabilities though. The first of them is the Blur tool. The Blur tool blurs the area where you paint. The Sharpen tool increases the contrast in the areas you paint. The Smudge tool blends the pixels where you paint. This is similar to when you drag something through wet paint that has various colors.

Oddly enough, three more features that were previously hidden to the human eye are now available for you to view on the left menu. This time though the names have almost nothing to do with what they do. First up is the Dodge tool. This tool lightens an area on the image. The Burn tool darkens an area on the image and the Sponge tool changes the level of saturation on an area in the image. These all have their special purposes that you will come to find out about. Burn and Dodge are usually used for making shadows or erasing shadows.

The next feature has a wide array of variations to it. This feature is the Pen tool. The pen tool allows users to create paths, curves, and anchor points to move lines around in weird shapes without the use of freehand drawing. Ironically enough, this leads to the rest of the tools. The next is the Freeform Pen tool. Unlike the pen tool that automatically makes anchor points where you draw, the Freeform Pen tool lets you draw as if you really had a pen. After you have used either of the tools you can use the next feature, which is the Add Anchor Point tool to create anchor points for new lines or freeform drawing. This helps when you want to attach a line to another line that has already been drawing without overlapping incorrectly. The Delete Anchor Point tool gives you the ability to delete an anchor point that you are not satisfied with. The Convert Point tool changes vector shape masks and paths. This allows different types of anchor points to connect to each other even if they are composed of different types of corners.

The next tools are the Type tools. They specifically describe the Horizontal Type tool and the Vertical Type tool. These pertain to the angle that you are able to write in (Horizontal or Vertical). Unfortunately, when you use this you must turn it into a bitmap and that makes it non-editable after you are finished. The Horizontal and Vertical Type Mask tool allows you to write with text that is filled with a patter or an image as the font color. It can be a nice addition if you are writing against an odd background.

The Path Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool are both used for paths. The Path Selection tool will allow you to select a path component even if it is surrounded by many different paths. The Direct Selection tool will only select a segment of a path. This is a way to reshape a segment to a different path after it has been created and saved.

The following tools are some of my personal favorites. I have started one too many images with these objects. If you look at my website you can see almost exactly where I started when I created it. The first of these is the Rectangle tool that makes a rectangle of various sizes. The Rounded Rectangle tool makes rectangles that are rounded. I used to use this exclusively in Macromedia Fireworks before I purchased the Adobe CS series. The Ellipse tool allows you to make seemingly perfect circles. The Polygon tool allows you to make polygons. The Line tool makes lines with anchor points at the end so that they can be managed by the Pen tool if you want to get fancy.

Below these more popular features are some cool features that you may or may not find interesting. I believe these have been in all the Adobe CS releases, but I am not sure about the Macromedia MX series. The first up is the Notes tool that allows you to add small notes to your images in the background. Also there is an Audio Annotation tool that allows you to add verbal notes to an image.

The tools described below are a set of useful features that you may find useful in addition to some of the other options. I believe some of these tools are used in conjunction with the other tools. However, this makes it a little simpler if you want to do it the old fashioned way. First is the Eyedropper tool that helps sample color from an area. The Eyedropper tool is pretty basic though. The Color Sampler tool has a few more features that allow you to gather the color data from any layer without calling that layer. You can see levels of gradient or replace colors and shapes back to an image. The Ruler tool helps you measure things inside of an image if you are trying to be precise about how you do things. This helps if you are a web developer and you are trying to make every symmetrical and in order. I personally try to do this sometimes and have to slap myself. I like to be organized myself, but I don’t want my websites to look so fine tuned that they would be passed up as not being original. The Count tool helps you count.

The Hand tool is used to move objects that are in a layer in anyway that you would like that is 2d in fashion.

The Zoom tool helps you zoom in on a picture or object so you can do fine tuning.

The Default Foreground and Background Colors tool lets you return back to black and white when you have gone totally out of whack with you colors you are thinking you are in the 1960s!

The Switch Foreground and Background Color tool lets you switch the colors you using at will. It is almost like have a painters tablet to hold your saved colors on.

I forgot to mention that each of these features has its sub-features displayed at the top of the program when you click on them. You have probably noticed by now though. By now you have gained enough knowledge of the Adobe Photoshop CS3 basic features to jump in and start creating your own stuff. You will be able to find further information on each of these features in use with illustrations soon. I can tell you this because I am writing them right now. I believe the visitor will take from you if they can look at one person and know what type of information he is giving rather than it coming from a million different people that may or may not know how to effectively write information to people. Please check back often to view further updates to the website and even more great tutorials in various disciplines in Adobe Software.

Some of you may be looking for even further guidance or special programs that will help you through every step of the process. I would love to be there standing behind you pointing to everything you need to do, but that is just not feasible….. yet! However, my website has a growing amount of unique content written by yours truly and not randomly dispersed from random websites where you are not sure of the credibility of the author or not. The complete tutorial with picture of this tutorial is available at my webpage below. Remember, you can unlock the Adobe Guru in you!

A lot of people are already taking interest on photography. This is one way for people to express themselves without having to explain what they want to tell. But not all the pictures you take are perfect; you still need to do some manipulation to make it better. Enhancing the images can add more flare to the photo and it can become more interesting. The different kinds of Adobe PhotoShop effect are mostly used by professionals to enhance the images or photos.

Editing software is also used by people for personal reasons. They play around with it until they come up with something interesting. But the best way to learn how to use PhotoShop and these software applications is through video tutorials. These tutorials will show you the basics of the software. Once you have perfected the basic functions of the software then you will be able to move on to the higher level.

A simple Adobe PhotoShop effect can make an image more interesting and fun. There are different PhotoShop effects that you can play around. All you have to do is watch the video tutorials and follow along. There are also different tools used to achieve a certain effect and this is discussed usually on the first part of the video tutorials.

Knowing the tools and how they can be used is important. You should not only stick to one tool, combining different tools can result to a more exciting effect that you might really like. Using adobe PhotoShop video tutorials for sure, is the best way to learn how to use PhotoShop and master PhotoShop effect basics faster on your own.