You've heard about it, you've seen the amazing things that people can do with Photoshop, and now you even have access to the program. But where do you even start?

Opening your photo in Photoshop

This is the same process you would use to open any document. There are two ways to go about it.

Either you can open Photoshop, go to File > Open and then navigate to the picture you want to open:

Alternatively, you can open the picture from your finder/explorer window. Select the file you'd like to open, Command click, or Right click and select the Open With option. Photoshop may be one of the options on the list, in which case select it and the image will open in Photoshop.

If it is not immediately visible on the list, select other. This will bring up a list of the applications installed on your computer, and from there you can select Photoshop.

Tools

Your tools palette (or tool bar) is the first thing you need to know about and it should look something like this:

From top to bottom:

• Move
• Rectangular Marquee
• Polyagonal Lasso
• Magic Wand
• Crop
• Eye Dropper
• Spot Healing Brush
• Brush
• Clone Stamp
• History Brush
• Eraser
• Gradient
• Blur
• Dodge
• Pen
• Horizontal Type
• Direct Selection
• Ellipse
• 3D rotate
• 3D Orbit
• Hand
• Zoom
• Default background and foreground colours
• Set foreground colour
• Set background colour
• Edit in quick mask mode

If you hover your cursor over the tool bar, it will tell you what each tool is. Often a letter will follow the name of the tool. This is the keyboard shortcut to select that tool. It isn't important to know these shortcuts at this stage, but as you get more advanced in Photoshop, they can be quite useful and can save you time.

Another important factor to note is that some of these tool buttons have little triangle on the bottom right corner. This means that there is another, related, tool in the same box. If you click and hold on a tool with an arrow, it will bring up a list showing you the other tools in that box as seen below.

Below is a quick breakdown of some of the basic tools you might use at this stage.

Move Tool

The move tool does exactly what it says – when you need to move something around in your document window, select the move tool, then click and drag it to the desired position.

Rectangular Marquee Tool

This is a selection tool with which you can select a certain section of your document. It can be changed to a circular or line marquee tool by clicking and holding the button on the toolbox and then selecting the required option from the menu (as seen above).

Magic Wand

This is a special selection tool used to select areas of the same or similar colour with one click.

Crop

This tool is used to cut outer sections off a document. This can be with the intention of removing irrelevant or unwanted sections of a photo (like the guy pulling a face behind your friends), or to shift the focus in an image by removing distractions.

Eyedropper

You can use this tool to select a foreground or background colour either from the swatches palette or from the document you are working in. The colour selected will show in the foreground/background swatches at the bottom of the toolbar.

Healing Brush

This tool can be used to cover over problems in an image, such as a line through an image that has been scanned. The healing brush tool uses a combination of the original picture and the pixels in the spot that you have selected (which has no line) to 'repair' problems. You will also find the patch tool and the red eye tool under this button.

Brush

The brush tool could fill an entire How To Guide all on its own, as it is one of the most flexible tools in Photoshop. There are many different options including changing the opacity (transparency), flow and shape, as well as various editing features. You can choose your brush shape from a set of preloaded brushes (including leaves and stars), or you can download and install a myriad other brushes, depending on what you're after.

This button is also where the pencil and colour replacement tools can be found.

Clone Stamp

The clone stamp is another way of covering over problems in an image. It differs from the healing brush tool in that it duplicates, without blending, the section of pixels you have selected to copy from. This can result in an unnatural looking duplication if you are not careful with your cloning.

Eraser

This does exactly what it says – it erases sections as you click and move it over them.

Gradient

With the gradient tool you can create a shape that gradually changes colour. It can be used linearly so that the colour changes from one side to the other, or you can create a radial gradient so that the colour changes from the middle out, or vice versa. On this button you will also find the paint bucket tool, which can be used to create fills of a solid colour within a selection, or over the whole page.

Horizontal Type

This is the tool you would use if you'd like to add text to your image. Select the type tool, click on a point on your page, and start typing. You can also find the vertical type tool under this button, which will allow you to set your text down or upwards. If you have not set it in the correct spot, you can then select the move tool to shift the text.

Zoom

This will allow you to zoom into your image.

Set foreground colour / Set background colour

Double clicking either of these swatches will bring up a colour picker palette from which you will be able to select a colour. This can be done either by using your cursor, which will automatically change to a colour picker tool when you move it over the palette, or by entering in colour values on the right hand side, which will enable you to match exactly to another colour. Using the eyedropper tool to select a colour will also affect these swatches.

And that's it for your basic Photoshop tools, in my next How-To Guide for Photoshop I'll be covering basic colour manipulation and cropping, so stay tuned.