Subtitles of the Movie

Now I know you're probably chomping at the bit to try to get into Photoshop and start working and learning about the dang thing but I want to give you a little, brief tour of the user interface first. The user interface is basically the work area that we'll be dealing with inside of Photoshop. Now I am well aware having been a student as well as an instructor that learning about a user interface is the most boring part of any video or book, bar none. So I'm going to make this brief but not only that we won't need to do this again because of the similarity of all the Creative Suite applications. So for example when we get into Illustrator we won't need to cover the interface because it will seem pretty common because of what we covered here in Photoshop. Same thing with InDesign and so on and so forth down the line. Now in most of the Creative Suite applications on the left you will see a tall skinny pallet. This is the tools pallet. If you want to run a blanket command on an entire image then you'd probably use a pallet or a menu item to do that. But if you need to get down say with the paint brush and actually scrub an area or paint an area or do something manually you would typically use a tool. Now many of these tools in the bottom right hand corner of the square that they occupy, you'll see a teensy tiny little black triangle at the bottom right hand corner there. What that means is that there are other tools that are usually similar tools hidden underneath that tool. If we hold down the left mouse button we'll have access to the tools hidden underneath the one we are currently seeing. In this example hidden underneath the brush tool is the pencil tool and the color replacement tool. Now a little trick about Photoshop and Photoshop only is that if you right click a tool with that little triangle icon at the bottom it will also get you access to this Flyout menu. In every other application you need to hold down the left mouse button. Now again, down here at the bottom of the tools pallet we have the foreground color and the background color. And again this is the fill and stroke in Illustrator and InDesign. Click this button to reset the defaults which is black as the foreground and white and the background. We could also use this double sided arrow no matter what the foreground and background currently is. Just swap the two. I love using this little arrow when I'm painting or actually the letter X which is the keyboard shortcut. Because if I'm painting with two different colors say a blue and a green the paintbrush only uses the foreground color. So I can paint with green a little bit. Hit the letter X to swap them out and then paint with blue for a little bit. Over on the right here we have our floating pallets. Grab the top of the pallet bar. This flat area of color to move the entire set. These are very customizable. I could grab the name of the pallet, say for example here, the color pallet. Click and drag and I will separate them. I could regroup them to put them other places and totally customize these to my liking. I can minimize these and I could also hit this little X to close this group of pallets as well. For now I'm just going to move this back over here. Now if your ever missing a pallet. Say for example, when we get into talking about layers, if I say, "open up your layers pallet." If it is not showing you can go up to the Window menu and select the name of the pallet that your not seeing from this dropdown and it will pop up. Now at the top of the interface you'll have the Options bar. The Options bar gives you the options for the currently selected tool. It's an interactive area of the interface. So if I select the Move tool, I get the options for the Move tool. As I select one the Marquis tools, I get the options for that tool. Now in Illustrator and InDesign this Options bar is referred to as a Control pallet. Does the same exact thing, just called something a little bit different. At the very top of the interface above the options bar, we also have the Menu bar. So if I say "go to the Select menu," you'll know to go to the very top and go to the Select menu dropdown here. Now one final thing, in a lot of these pallets you'll have a little circle with an arrow through it. This is called the pallet Flyout menu. So if I say go to the layers pallet Flyout menu, you will hit that circle with the arrow in it and you will get all those options in the Layers pallet Flyout menu. In the Flyout menus be aware are specific to that pallet. This is very helpful throughout the Creative Suite. Often times, say for example, as your working with pages in InDesign, you might be wondering well how do I add new pages or how to I change my master pages, or apply this or apply that. Usually the answers can be found by going to the pallets Flyout menu. Ok so we are done. It wasn't that bad, was it? Just a very brief overview of the interface and now as promised we're ready to actually get into Adobe Photoshop.