h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Basics of Photoshop - A11304749
Author: Cosmicdudeman-Thingite Minister of Certain Substances - U3715074

This is in its finished form, but as you can see there is some things I'm not so sure about (the version when certain things changed), if you know more specifics about these things please inform me. Elsewise it is done.

... pictures of all types

except for vectors / 3D objects / CAD



plus more mention should be made on layers blending / layers options.



will look over this when I hve more time

This is one subject I am *really* interested in, but it's too late for me to comment tonight. Rest assured that I will give it a damned good look tomorrow and come back as soon as I can with praise and suggestions!

Thanks Jon_m, I included the bit about the CAD and 3-D in it.

notes that the key storkes should be for both PC and Mac (spits)

Can you change that 'all kinds of pictures' to 'bitmap pictures'

The problem with writng an entry on the 'basics' is that what basic tools you use depends entirely on what you use photoshop for.



If you use it for creating graphics from scratch then brushes and fills are most usefull tools

Web graphics - then slice and text come into play

Photo editing - then the image adjustments / masking / blending modes come into play more.

Personally, I've been using Photoshop for years for photoediting / web design and creating graphics, and I almost never use liquify or extract, prefering quick mask and lasso

Are you just going to keep complaining? I already did some of the things you said. And expanded it beyond what I already had.

Its what I do, I whinge

One of my pet hates that, whingeing
Good entry, enjoyed the read, many thanks
Nother

I've never used Photoshop, but I have heard a lot about it and I think it sounds interesting.

Now I've had a chance to look at your entry, here we go with my thoughts:

Intro - ok, I can live with that.

Under Tools: Selection Tools
the magic wand
>>it selects an area based on colour, I think (at times it seems to have a mind of it's own)<< - you're trying to tell us how to use Photoshop but you don't seem very sure here. So, does it select based on colour or not?

>>When using the lasso tools you must "close" the lasso or else it goes spastic<< - I hope you can see why this should be changed?

to make this section a little easier to follow, it might be better to show it as a bullet pointed list (as an example)

Editing tools
>>Editing tools (in this entry) refer to tools like the paintbrush, the paintbucket, and the blur tool<< - does this mean that in the Photoshop instructions "editing tools" refers to something else?

again,I think this would benefit from being a bullet pointed list (or however you deal with the previous section)

In the previous section you were speaking to the reader by using 'you' a lot. In this section you have moved over to he/she. I don't really like either but you need to stick to one or the other.

As we get to the airbrush section I realised that you'll need to include which version you are talking about, or else it's not going to make sense to Photoshop newbies like me.

oh poop

I've run out of time, but I will be back

Once again, I'm not sure about some of the changes that have been made, I've worked with 6.0 and 8.0 and I've noticed differences between them, but I don't know if the changes first occured to 7.0 or 8.0. What needs to be changed about the one sentence? Is it the use of the word spastic?

I wouldn't recommend the use of that word anywhere, and it won't survive the editing process.

Hi Cosmicdudeman!!

I think to get round the problem of Photoshop upgrades,all you need to do is specify which version you're writing about. That way if someone comes along with an upgrade later, they can just stick a bit on the bottom

Stick with it though, this is going to be a useful entry to people like me who have not yet taken the photoshop plunge.

Also, you could add a comment that although people use the word Photoshop when they are manipulating or otherwise editing images, they are not necessarily using the Photoshop program. Like Hoover and Sellotape and Kleenex before it, it has now almost become the accepted name for this type of work.

There I edited out the word "spastic".

The GIF is compresses - the GIF format compresses ?

Yes, the GIF is a compressed format, it compresses by removing colours.

it compresses using horizontal repition.

It also uses a reduced palete, however this is a by-product of the compression method, not the method itself.

Thanks for that bit of info. I updated the entry (again) to include it.

I still think "the GIF is compresses" needs rephrasing...

I think it might be worth leaving out that whole section on file formats. We need a seperate entry on them. GIF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF and RAW need more than 1 paragraph to explain them all, and it will just clutter up this entry.

Then you can take care of that because I don't want to have to do the research for it.