Adobe Photoshop CC For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Drawing tablets from Wacom enable you to use a special stylus, which you hold like a pen or pencil or brush, to move the cursor (rather than using a mouse, track pad, or trackball). Some of Wacom’s models enable you to control the cursor with Multi-Touch, much like an iPhone or iPad, and they include support for Windows 10.

Here are five reasons you’ll love your Wacom tablet when working with Photoshop CC. These reasons primarily involve maximizing your efficiency with the Wacom Tablet. The Optimal Tablet The inexpensive Bamboo series comes in several sizes and a couple of models. The Intuos line of tablets come in a variety of specialized versions, some in a couple of different sizes.

The Edit --> Content-Aware Scale command in Photoshop CC is designed to be used when an image needs to be resampled to a new aspect ratio but can’t be cropped. It tries (very hard) to keep the subject of the photo undistorted while stretching or shrinking the background. Here’s how to use it: Open an image or make a selection.

If you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Photoshop, you may notice the ellipse near the bottom of the Toolbox. Click that and you can customize the Toolbox to optimize it for your workflow.You control the behavior of Photoshop’s tools through the Options bar. With the exception of a few path-related tools (Add Anchor Point, Delete Anchor Point, and Convert Point), every tool in Photoshop has options.

Adobe Bridge, the asset-management program for Photoshop and other Adobe programs, is a separate program in the Creative Cloud Manager. You can open Bridge independently, or you can choose File→ Browse in Bridge from Photoshop’s main menu to launch Bridge — seen launched here. If you choose Bridge’s Preferences→ Advanced command, you can elect to have Bridge launch automatically whenever you log in to your computer.

At the Adobe MAX conference in October 2017, Adobe announced that Adobe Sensei will play a larger role in Photoshop. (Or, depending on when you’re reading this, it may already be doing so.) What is Sensei? Accessed by clicking a blue circle in the upper-right corner of Photoshop, Sensei is Adobe’s “creative intelligence” and “design intelligence” (try to avoid the term “artificial intelligence”).

In Photoshop you can paint in 32-bit color — with some caveats. The Brush, Pencil, and Mixer Brush tools (but not Color Replacement) are available. The Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, and Eraser tools are also available in 32-bit color, but not Dodge, Burn, Sponge, Background Eraser, or Magic Eraser. Type layers, shapes, and paths are also at your command.

Here are some basic truths about pixels that you really need to know. Although reading this article probably can’t improve your love life, let you speak with ghosts, or give you the winning lottery number, it can help you understand what’s happening to your image as you work with it in Photoshop. Each pixel is independent.

You’re the Photoshop master of your office. Everyone knows that you understand everything about digital images. So you’re the right person to create the company’s new brochure. Except you’re a photographer. Or you’re a web designer. Or you’re actually pretty new to Photoshop. And you don’t have a clue about preparing images for a commercial printing press.

If you print your images yourself at home or the office, you can stick with the PSD Photoshop format when saving. (Remember that you cannot re-save in a Raw format after opening in Photoshop.) If you send the photos to the local camera shop (or discount store) for printing, stick with JPEG — or, if the folks doing the printing accept it, TIFF.

If the final destination of your image is PowerPoint or Word, use the PNG file format. If your image has areas of transparency in it, PNG is definitely the way to go.What about all that neat clip art that you have on your hard drive? How do you use those images when Photoshop won’t open the vector-based WMF and EMF clip art files?

Generally speaking, you use Photoshop’s Save As to generate copies of your images for use on a website or to show off with smartphones, PDAs, and other such devices. You can, however, choose File→Export→ Save for Web (Legacy) if you prefer the old command. Here are the three file formats that you need for the web: JPG: Use JPEG for photos.

You hear the term resolution a lot when working with digital images. Digital cameras have so-many megapixels of resolution; inkjet printers have so-much by so-much resolution; to work in Photoshop, your monitor must have a resolution of at least 1,024 x 768 pixels; when printing your images, you must use 300 pixels per inch (ppi) as your resolution (wrong!

Image resolution is nothing more than an instruction to a printing device about how large to reproduce each pixel. On-screen, when working in Photoshop, your image has no resolution at all. An image that’s 3,000 pixels wide and 2,400 pixels tall looks and acts exactly the same in Photoshop whether you have the image resolution at 300 ppi or 72 ppi.

Check out the various special features of Photoshop that were formerly in the Extended version only. This article won’t get you fully up to speed on how to work with the features; instead, it’s meant to quench your curiosity about those features designed for specialists and scientists rather than photographers and designers.

Since the last version of Photoshop CC was released, new features and improvements (so-called “bug fixes”) have been introduced regularly. Many of them you’ll never even notice, but some of them add significant and powerful capabilities to Photoshop. Here is a look at some big and little changes since the introduction of Photoshop CC: Learn Panel and Rich Tooltips: Okay, newbie, Adobe has made it much simpler to figure out which feature does what.

To better understand the difference between resampling an image and cropping an image in Photoshop CC, consider the following situation: A painter paints a picture. He paints it at whatever size he thinks is appropriate. (Or, perhaps, on the only piece of canvas he can afford on that particular day.) A patron likes the artwork, but the painting is too large for the frame that works best with the dining room table.

Whether you take a picture with a digital camera or use a scanner to bring a photo (or other artwork) into Photoshop, you are digitizing the image. That is, digit not as in a finger or toe, but as in a number. Computers do everything — absolutely everything — by processing numbers, and the basic language of computers is binary code.

HDR stands for high dynamic range. The dynamic range is the visual “distance” from black to white. By making that visual distance greater, you create a wider tonal range in the image. The world we see around us contains far more range than can be reproduced on a monitor, printed to paper, or even saved in a 16-bit image.

The engineers at Adobe didn’t just make improvements and add features to Photoshop, the Camera Raw plug-in got some love, too. There are new features, improved performance, and changes such as moving the Upright adjustments from the Lens Correction panel to the new Transform tool. Additional camera support: As soon as Adobe has a handle on a new camera’s Raw capabilities and format, it’s added to Camera Raw.