What you need to know about Photoshop.
You don't need to know much about Photoshop for this course to be useful.
In my previous material, Learn Photoshop, Web Design,
and Profitable Freelancing, I show you the basics in greater detail.
Even there, I don’t babysit you through every single tool and feature,
because of two main reasons.
One, you don’t need to know all of them for your web design needs.
And two, you can find information, tutorials, and
free courses everywhere about the basics of Photoshop.
Just in case you’re a beginner and
you’re not sure about the tools I’m about to talk about, stay calm.
Things are pretty simple, and you’ll catch them as we go along.
So, we have a massive amount of tools and options available in Photoshop.
But luckily for us, we're only going to use a few.
Let me do a quick run-down of what we'll use the most.
Use V for the move tool.
This should be the default tool you'll revert to at all times.
No matter what you do, after you do it, always go back to the move tool.
Why is this so important?
Well, we constantly need to move things around, hence the move tool.
Besides that, we need to regularly select layers from the canvas.
To do that, we press and hold the Control key and
click on any object whilst we're on the move tool.
This make finding layers a whole lot easier,
since you no longer have to look for them in this crowded panel.
Space bar.
We use this a lot to navigate through our project.
We'll usually have quite big projects, so moving around is important.
Simply hold the space bar and you'll see your cursor will change.
Then, click and drag in order to move around.
Nice and easy.
We'll use control 1 to bring our view back at 100%.
Never make the mistake of looking at your project at a different zoom level.
You can check that by looking at your bottom left of the screen.
If you're just slightly zoomed in or
out that will drastically change the amount of details you'll perceive.
It's fine to zoom in from time to time to get a better view.
But always revert back to 100% with Control 1.
Zed accesses the zoom tool, and is really easy to use.
Press once and you'll have your default setting from up top.
In my case, it zoom in.
Hold ALT to revert it and now, we're zooming out.
Simple.
Some users prefer to zoom in and out by using their mouse scroll.
I don't advise you use that since your mouse scroll can be used in
conjunction with the shift key to jump up or down the page.
This is quite useful for long designs like blogs.
Use U to draw vector shapes.
These are our bread and butter.
Without shapes, we wouldn't do anything.
All these will be used heavily.
So make sure you can easily cycle through them by using shift U.
Also, verify you have your align edges option checked.
And that your line tool weight is set at 1 pixel.
Lastly, the type tool with the hot key, T.
Without text, we'd have a mirror image gallery.
So this tool is very important.
More on it's functions and options when we arrive at the typography section.
A few other things to keep in mind are the following.
I don't recommend you detach tabs,
since it's far more difficult to have a clear view on your design.
I see this a lot with people that are using Macs.
And I find it very distracting, hard to use, and overall suboptimal.
Don't use Photoshop's auto selection option from the top left.
If you want to easily select your layers,
hold the control key while on the move tool and click on your layer.
That will select it.
Have this option set to layer, not group.
And always revert back to it in case you temporarily change it.
Give as much space as possible for the layers panel.
Maximize the canvas space by keeping the tools in one line and
by not having your layers panel too wide.
Whenever you start working, double click on the background layer to unlock it.
When you want to drag a layer into another document.
Do so from the canvas, not from the layers panel.
Otherwise, it won't work.
The difference between opacity and fill, from the top of the layers panel,
is important.
Say we have an object on our screen with a stroke effect.
I'll make it pretty big and obvious so, you can really see it.
Now, opacity affects the entire layer, as you can see.
0% means it's no longer visible.
I'll bring it back to 100%.
Now fill.
That affects the layer excluding any layer styles.
So it doesn't do anything to our stroke, our bevel, our satin, or
whatever effect we might use.
That's the difference between them.
Of course, color, gradient, or pattern overlay are exceptions.
Another thing you should know is that Photoshop works with vectors too.
I know most people associate vectors with Illustrator or CorelDRAW.
Shapes of vectors.
So any rectangle, line,
or custom shape you'll see with this particular thumbnail, is a vector shape.
If you right click and restorize it, then it becomes pixel based.
That means if you try to enlarge it, it will become fuzzy and blurry.
This applies to everything you restorize.
That's about it.
Only a handful of tools are actually useful in our web design efforts.
Sure, we may use others from time to time, but these are the absolute must-haves.
Regarding the rest, I know I went through them quite fast, but don't worry.
I'll explain them several times throughout the course as they're being used.
I do recommend you go through all of these points at least one more time.
So you're sure you've understood them.