Subtitles of the Movie

These next few movies I want to demonstrate and show you how some of the basic features of the Photoshop interface work. Like most applications, Photoshop has a collection of pulldown menus at the top of the screen. Simply press and click on any of the names, and it pulls down a collection of menu options you can choose from. Some of these options are grayed out for different reasons, and I want talk to you more about Photoshop's modal nature, and why some of these options will be grayed out. Many of Photoshop's options and techniques can be replicated from a menu item, as well as some combination of buttons at the bottom of a particular palette. So usually in Photoshop, there is at least two ways to do the same thing from two different areas, if not more of than two ways. Photoshop is a palette driven application. And this is a palette, and each palette has different features and options depending at what the nature of that palette is. If you're not seeing any palettes, go to the Window menu and choose to show some palette that you are not seeing. If a palette is up and you want to hide that, you can choose Hide whichever palette is you want to hide. You can press the tab key and all the palettes will disappear temporarily. Press the tab key again, and the palettes will come back. Holding the shift key down and pressing the tab will hide all the palettes expect for the Tools palette. And this is very convenient, because you are probably going to want the tools palette on your screen all the time. So that shift + tab brings back all the palettes expect for the Tool palette and vice versa. This palette at the top, underneath the menu items is called the Options palette. And it is a very long skinny palette, which you can actually break off and have somewhere else on your screen if you wish. Personally, I find that it is such a strange shape, I leave it either at the top of my screen or the bottom of my screen, but usually at the top. And you can see it wants to dock to the side, if you get it close enough to the side of your monitor. This is the Tools palette. Tools palette is a long vertical palette with many different buttons or icons for different tools you can choose to use. You can move any palette by clicking on the gray title area here, and click and drag it to a new position. So in this way, you can design your work area the way you like to work. Generally though, I tend to leave my tool palette on the left side of my monitor. Other features of the interface which are fairly standard for most computer applications are things such as the after a menu item. If something has a after it, it means it is going to bring up a dialog box. And a dialog box gives you further options for whatever that Control or Command was. It's asking you to make some kind of decision here before you move on, so you either say OK, or you can cancel to get back to where you started off from. Several menu items have key commands associated with it. For instance, the most familiar one is Command + Z, or on the Windows platform Control + Z. Command + Z will undo the last action you did. It's a very convenient command; will undo the last thing you did. Now if I do Command + Z again, it will redo the last thing I did. Generally I don't use keyboard shortcuts too often, because I want my students to see exactly where the item is. And they need to memorize those keyboard shortcuts themselves if you use these things all the time. Photoshop has so many keyboard shortcuts. It's difficult to memorize all of them. When you have an image open, and I'm going to open up another picture, you can choose which image you want to edit, and you can know which image you are editing by seeing which one has the more pronounced edge. So currently this one the albers_squares is the current active image. And if I click on this one back here, that is now my currently active image that I am editing. You can only edit one image at a time. But you can drag pieces of one picture onto another one. If you want to choose the image in the background a different way, you can also go the Window menu. And at a very bottom of this little gray break here are all my open files. So you can see that Photoshop works like many other applications. It's a combination of Tool palettes as well as menu items and menu options.