Never before in the history of photography have more people been able to create such exciting and professional effects on their own. Using your computer you can purchase software at affordable prices which is used by veteran graphic designers and photographers around the world. While there is a large pool of programs to choose from, no programs can come close to Photoshop. The term 'to Photoshop' has been taken into everyday use to mean enhancing photographs, showing its popularity and celebrity reputation.

You can 'Photoshop' any image to include people and places you've never met or been to. An image of you on a beach playing volleyball with Elvis and The Beatles would be hard to produce before Photoshop, but now pictures like this are almost commonplace. Anything you can think of, Photoshop can render realistically.

Photoshop is also useful and perhaps more infamous for removing aspects of the image you don't want. Physical imperfections can be removed from images of people, as is often done in the advertising industry to sell products. Objects that distract from the main focus of the image can be removed just as easily, and the software is so advanced that you can't tell that the image has been altered.

Photoshop is essential for anyone interested in photography in today's digital world. The software is just as important and wide-spread as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint in the media industry. You may feel pressure to learn how to use the software, but the resources are easily available to anyone due to the popularity of the program. A lot of people know how to use Photoshop, so if you know anyone in college or high school, ask them if they could teach you.

They story of Photoshop goes back to 1989 when two brothers developed a software for editing images. The program was extremely useful for their personal projects, and it dawned on them that they could make money by selling this product to the growing software market. They soon founded Adobe and began production of Photoshop in 1990.

The success of Adobe is an outstanding example of the power of the internet. Software designed by Adobe is on nearly every computer in the world, as its free PDF reader has had such widespread popularity. The Adobe Reader is the standard PDF reader, just as Adobe Photoshop is the standard photo editor and is proof of Adobe's unique dominance of media-related software.

To gain experience with Photoshop you should find a copy you can experiment with. Perhaps a friend or relative has one. Go over and explore the program, browsing all the features and adding effects to images. Once you get a feel for how the software operates, ask your friend to show you the more advanced features. Then you'll see why Photoshop has its first-rate reputation. Within no time, you will be addicted to Photoshop.

Once you gain some experience with Photoshop, you should get a copy of your own. Trial versions are available for download, but they do not have all the features. The best way to avoid frustration is to buy the full version. Photoshop is used everywhere, so spending the money on this program is a good decision. When you've bought Photoshop, you may now explore it to your heart's content. It should be noted that you will learn the fundamentals of Photoshop faster and better if you take a course on Photoshop. The tutors will take time to teach you what you need to know to be more efficient and effective in your use of Photoshop, without worrying about each individual effect.

When the time comes that you have mastered Photoshop, the only thing limiting what you can do will be your own creativity. You will have a powerful tool at your hands that can create any image you want, so now you can apply this to personal or business projects and be confident that you can pull anything off.

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Selecting Colors From An Image Quickly Press I to activate the Eyedropper Tool and then click on any color in your image to turn that color into the foreground color. Press the ALT Key and click on any color in your image to turn that color into the background color.

Change Brush Tip Sizes Quickly If you wish to change your brush tip size you can, with any brush selected, press the Right Bracket Key "]" in order to increase the size of the brush tip, or you can press the Left Bracket Key "[" to decrease the size of the brush tip.

The Move Tool & The Arrow Keys Get in the habit of calling up the Move Tool with the keyboard shortcut, which is the letter V. Also, once the Move Tool is active you can use your Keyboard Arrow Keys to nudge a layer or selection in 1 pixel increments. To speed things up, Press Shift along with an arrow key to nudge in 10 pixel increments.

Hide Your Palettes Press Tab once to hide all your palettes. Press Tab again to bring them back. Press Shift+Tab to hide all your palettes except the toolbar.

Zooming In & Zooming Out To use the zoom tool press CTRL and the plus sign "+" (Mac: Command and the "+" sign). To zoom out press CTRL and the minus sign "-" (Mac: Command and the "-"sign).

Navigating In Magnified Images If you have lost your bearings when zooming in on a large image you can jump quickly to specific views using the following shortcuts: To set the view to the top left hand corner of your image press the Home Key. Press the End Key to set the view to the bottom right hand corner of your image. To move the view one full screen down press the Page Down Key. Press CTRL+Page Down (Mac: Command +Page Down) to move the screen view one full screen to the right. Press CTRL+Page Up (Mac: Command +Page Up) to move the screen view one full screen to the left.

Selecting Just The Pixels On A Layer An easy way to select an object that is on a transparent layer is to Press the Command Key (PC: Control key) and click on the layer with the object in the Layers Palette. This makes sure that only the opaque pixels (the pixels that are visible) will be selected with the marching ants, instead of the entire layer.

Tile Images for Better Visibility When open multiple files simultaneously in Photoshop they automatically cascade and it can be quite difficult to find the particular image you are looking for within all of the overlapping files. To avoid this problem you can choose Window> Arrange> Tile and all of your open files will rearrange themselves to be visible all at once. When you're ready to close the windows you don't have to spend time closing them individually, instead use the Close All shortcut Control+Option+W (Mac: Command+Alt+W).

Getting Rid Of the Welcome Screen - And Bringing It Back I am sure you are familiar with the Welcome screen that faces you when you first open Photoshop. If you are like me, at some point you might want to stop this screen from coming up. If you look you will see a check box at the bottom of the screen that you can click to hide the screen at startup. If, at some point down the road, you change your mind and decide that you want to have it show up again, you can temporarily bring the screen back by clicking under the Help menu and choosing Welcome Screen.

Cycle through All of Your Open Documents At some point you may want to find one of your open documents that are hidden, but navigating using the Window menu won't help because you can't recall the name of the file. Instead you can press Control-Tab repeatedly (MAC and PC) to cycle through all of your open documents and switch between them.

The use of a frame can turn an otherwise plain picture into a pleasing one. Usually a foreground element is used to create the frame. Examples are an overhanging tree branch, a window frame, a door, arches, a fence, rows of trees, etc.

A frame serves to isolate your main subject and create an interesting composition. Oftentimes, it's the feeling of depth you're after. You may choose to keep the detail of the frame (as in a wall, fence or branch), or let the frame go completely dark (as in a window frame).

When you are composing a shot, keep your eyes open to foreground (and sometimes, even middle or background) objects that can be used as a natural frame. You may need to physically back up a bit, kneel down for a more pleasant composition, or zoom in to include your subject within your chosen frame.

You can also use image editing software to create a frame without the camera. By combining two or more pictures into one image, you can create spectacular effects. The possibilities are up to you!

Be careful when adding a frame through digital editing though. While you can certainly combine features of different images together, be cautious about adding artificial frames on familiar scenes and landscapes.

As an extreme example, don't frame the Washington Monument with the Great Wall of China. Unless your goal is to create dissonance within your viewers' minds, a picture with an intense difference will only come across as strange.

So, before you take that shot next time, look around and see if there is an object that you can use as a natural frame. Take a picture without the frame, and another one with the frame, and compare. Betcha, you'll like the one with the frame better!

The Measure Tool is the best way to straighten images in Photoshop, taking all the guess work out of it. As I will show you in a moment, Photoshop will do most of the work for you as long as there's something in the image that should be straight! By default the Measure Tool is buried behind the Eyedropper Tool in the Tools palette, so in order to select it, you need to click and hold your mouse button down on the Eyedropper Tool for a second or two. A fly-out menu appears showing you the other tools buried behind it. Select the Measure Tool by clicking on it.

First you want to look for something in your image that needs to be straightened, either horizontally or vertically. Then you want to drag along the edge of the crooked item with the Measure Tool so Photoshop has something to work with when trying to figure out how crooked the photo actually is. In this case, I will click and drag horizontally along the roof of the building directly behind Ms. Liberty. Clearly the roof should be entirely horizontal, yet it clearly isn't at the moment. I'll click once on the left side of the roof, then drag over to the right side of the roof. This draws a thin line between where I first clicked on the left and where I finished dragging on the right, and Photoshop uses the angle of this line to determine how far the image will need to be rotated in order to straighten it.

Click and drag with the Measure Tool along the edge of something in the photo that should be straight horizontally or vertically. If you look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, you can see the angle of the line you've just drawn (it's the number listed to the right of the letter "A"). In my case, we can see that my line is on an angle of 1.9 degrees:

The Options Bar should be showing the angle of the line you have drawn with the Measure Tool. Photoshop now uses this angle to find out how far to turn the image in order to straighten it. To find the "Rotate Canvas - Arbitrary" Command Click on the Image menu at the top of the program, choose Rotate Canvas, and then select Arbitrary:

Go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. Funnily enough the word "arbitrary" is defined as "random or by chance", yet that's precisely the reverse of what we're doing here. This is not random rotation; we are not leaving anything to chance. The Measure Tool has been used to find out precisely what angle and how much our image needs to be rotated by: now Photoshop can use the measurements we've given it to level our image without any guess work. As you probably are already aware, much of the problem with learning Photoshop comes from understanding the terminology, and in this particular case, I don't know what Adobe was thinking.

However, life goes on. Once you choose "Arbitrary", Photoshop opens up the Rotate Canvas dialog box, and as we can see, all the work has already been done for us. In my case, Photoshop has already entered a value of 1.85 for the Angle option, and it even recognized that the image needs to be rotated counter-clockwise, which is why the CCW option is also selected:

Photoshop Tutorials: The "Rotate Canvas" dialog box with the angle and direction already selected for us. You may be wondering why Photoshop entered an angle of 1.85 when the Options Bar showed an angle of 1.9 a moment ago. The reason is because Photoshop rounds off the angles in the Options Bar to 1 decimal place, so it showed 1.9 even though the angle of the line we drew with the Measure Tool was actually 1.85. The angle shown in the Rotate Canvas dialog box is the correct angle.

Finally all we need to do is click on the OK button in the Rotate Canvas dialog box to exit and have Photoshop rotate and straighten the image for us. You should see that the image is now properly rotated and straightened. Everything looks great, and thankfully the Statue of Liberty is no longer leaning to the right. We straightened the image without any guess work thanks to the Measure Tool and the Rotate Canvas command.

You might notice that there is a small problem. Since we rotated the image inside the document window, we now have some white canvas areas around the outside of the photo. We need to fix this problem by removing those areas; for this we use Photoshop's Crop Tool. You can find the Crop Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press the letter C on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut:

With the Crop Tool chosen click near the top left corner of your image and drag down towards the bottom right to create a border around the part of the image you want to keep. Fine-tune your selection by dragging any of corner handles or by dragging the top, bottom, left or right sides of the selection:

Use the Crop Tool to drag out a selection around the part of the image you want to keep. Once you've dragged out your cropping border, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to have Photoshop crop the image.

When you make an image smaller you may interfere with the resolution making the final image take on a blurry appearance. With large, clear images this can be devastating to the effect of the image.

This is a problem in many editing programs, but Adobe Photoshop has the tools to fix this.

To perform this function you must own at least the CS version of Photoshop. If you don't have this version, you may want to get it as it has far advanced features. Buying the software will get rid of the limitations you may have when editing your pictures.

To reduce the size of a picture without losing too much resolution go to Image> Image Size. Click on Resample Image and then pick Bicubic Sharper from the options. This will produce the best results when resizing an image as it significantly reduces the blurring of the image when you change its size.

If you want to enlarge a photograph without losing too much resolution select the Bicubic Smoother.

This tool is so useful for resizing that you may want to select it as the default so that it is automatically selected when you start your Adobe Photoshop up. To do this go to Preferences> General where you can select Image Interpolation. Here you just choose Bicubic Sharper from among the selection and it should be set as your new default.

It is important not to perform multiple resizing on an image. To experiment with image size, use a copy of the original image as many resizings will reduce the resolution of the image more than is needed. Use the copy to find out what size you want then use the dimensions on the original to keep resizing to a minimum on the image you will finally use.