Photoshop Introduction
Photoshop is one of the most powerful software there is. It's a professional software for artists, photographers, illustrators and designers.
You can retouch your photos or paint a texture or any other kind of picture. You need to spend a lot of time into Photoshop, the software is quite complex and close to industrial professionals.
Photoshop supports all file formats, which GoMan can export, so Photoshop works great in conjunction with GoMan. The files which GoMan is able to create are: *.tga (Truevision Targa, this is the filetype for finished textures) *.bmp *jpg *.tif
Index
A short list of the existing topics
Preface
Well, the most Photoshop tutorials requires good basical knowledge. You don't need any Photoshop knowledge to do this tutorial.
I'm trying to hold it as simple as possible. If there are any bad results or vagueness, please contact gothicfan359 or Praiden via personal message, thanks and have a lot of fun.
Prefered filetypes
If you are working on a kind of project with Photoshop and you have to leave or quit your current project, save it as Photoshop file (*.psd).
PSD is to prefer while you are working on, because psd saves your layers, it saves your channels(alpha channels), it saves all of your paths, it saves your slices and it saves without any compression. One thing will never be saved and that is the history. The History saves all of working steps, but the history isn't really important. By the way, if you want to get some steps back in your project you have to press CTRL + Z, and then CTRL + Alt + Z.
Photoshops User Interface
To know the user interface is the most important part of your working conditions. You should use this interface introduction if you are confused about the tools.
This is the interface of Photoshop 7 but other versions doesn't look much different.
1. The Toolbar (of Photoshop 7)
The Toolbar is a moveable window and it can be arreted at all edges of the Photoshop window.
Go above one of the icons to get a tooltip with a information about the tool (very useful is the shortcut hint).
Hit and hold one of the Icons to change to one of the tool variations.
a) The selection tools
The tool in the upper left corner is used to select rectange an elliptical selections. If you hold down shift and use this tool you can select circles and squares. The shortcut for this tool is m.
In the upper right corner is the move tool (shortcut v), this tool is used to move the selected part of the image. If you just want to move your selection area use your selection tool (shortcut m).
The tool left in the middle is the lasso tool, hit and hold your left mouse button and draw the outlines of your selection. The variations of this tool are the polygon lasso tool, which draws straigt lines for the selection area (just click to the place where a vertice should appear, Phototoshop
generates the outline when you are done) and the magnetic lasso tool which draws the outlines with influence by the pixels nearby.
The magnetic lasso tool works like the lasso tool, but it generates the vertices for the selections automatically, it's a great tool for quick selections but it is not exactly everytime. Shortcut L.
The tool to the right of the lasso tool is the magic wand tool. This tool selects pixel areas by their color, hue and satuation values.
Click in some yellow area and the wand will select all pixels which are yellow, the selection depends on the tolerance and sensitivity which can be changed in the option bar (under the mainmenue). Shortcut w
The next tool is the crop tool. Select a rectangle are and doubleclick into the selection. Everything which was out of the selectionsframe were going to be cropped. The selected area is cut out of the image and the other parts were deleted. Good tool for creating 1024*1024 textures from photos.
Shortcut C
The last selection tool is the slice tool. You can slice your image in much rectangles an Photoshop can save your big images as a mosaic of little graphics.
This tool is quite useful in webdesign affairs but for our use it is less useful.
b) The paint tools of Photoshop
The Healing Brush tool is the first one of the icons. Healing Patch Tool is a variation of this tool.
Both are useful to remove scratches or stains fromt photos and so one. Your possibilities in using this tool are realy fantastic, arent they?
To use these tools you must define a sourcearea for your healing operations. The sourcearea should be similar to the area which should be healed.
Play around with this tool and learn what you can do with thése tools when you are working on a texture. Hold down shift and click to define a sourcearea.
This is one of the most important and powerful tool for texture artists, remember, no good texture without some healing.
The advantage of the healing tools is that the copied area will be calculated into the existing pixels, there are no hard edges and the different color values will be assimilated. Cool tool. Shortcut J.
The tool in the upper right corner is the brush tool. A variation of this tool is the pencil tool. The difference betwenn them is, the brush tool is able to paint with smooth egdes, the pencil make damn hard edges. You can change values like the opacity or the diameter in the optionsbar.
When you are working with the brush, hold down shift to make a horizontal or a vertical line. Use the right mouse button to get better access to the options and use some of the brushes which are looking interesting. Shortcut B.
Next tool is the clone stamp tool (variation: pattern stamp tool). The clone stamp tool is similar to the healing tool but it just copies your source area to your target area, plain simple and with hard edges. It's useful to create a background for a texture, and details can be worked in with the healing tool.
The pattern stamp tool doesn't need a sourcearea because it stamps a pattern on your image. The pattern can be choosed in the optionsbar.
Shortcut S.
The history brush is the next tool. When you are hitting CTRL + Z, the changes influenced the complete image. With the history brush you can undo some actions (working steps) in a special area of your image, so you remove color there and there and the other parts of the images are not influenced, thanks to the history brush.
Shortcut Y
The next tools are the eraser tools. The eraser removes pixels from your current layer, the background eraser can erase your background layer and the magic eraser tool works like the magic wand tool, but it doesn't select the pixels, it deletes them.
Shortcut E.
Next tool is the Paint Bucket Tool and the Gradient Tool. These tools fills the complete selection or layer (if there is no selection).
Paint Bucket fills wit a plain color and gradient with a gradient wchich can be configured in the optionsbar by clicking on the gradient in the left
corner. Shortcut G
The next tool family is useful for retouch working. The blur tool mixes the pixel like the gaussian blur filter. You can smooth hard edges with this tool.
The Sharpen Tool is the opposite of the blur tool, it sharpen pixels by changing their hue/saturation values. You can sharpen edges if you did too
much blur.
The smudge tool is good to smudge areas together, it's a good way to make your image looking ugly or looking fine.
The last painting tools are the dodge, burn and sponge tools. Dodge and burn increases or decreases the hue of a pixel and the sponge increases or decreases the saturation of a pixel.
c) Path tools
The direct selection tool is used to select the vertices and the path selection tool is used to select paths.
The Texttool is explaining itself.
The pathtool is used to create paths which can be used as selection or they can also be used for vector graphics.
Draw your path with the pathtool and delete or add some vertices with the tools. The transform points tool is used to create a bezier curve from a hard edged linear edge.
The last tool there is used to create some geometrical forms which can also used as vector graphics.
d) View Control Tools
The first tool is the notes tool. Click somewhere into your picture and leave there a note. An audio message is possible, too.
The next tool is the eyedropper tool. Variations are the measure tool and the color sampler tool.
Click with the eyedroppertool into your picture and it will set the values of the clicked pixel as your foregroundcolor.
When you are using a brush, hold down Alt to get quick access to this feature.
The Color sampler is good to get informations about up to four colors at the same time.
The measure tool can be configured and then click an hold to measure a line or an angle.
The next tool is the hand or pan tool, you can use it instead of the scroll bars to navigate through your image. Or hold spacebar and use your left mouse button to get the same effect.
The last tool is the zoom tool, you can zoom in to about 1600%. Just click with your left mouse button or use your mousewheele to get the same effect.
e) Foreground-Background Colors
To get the window below click on your fore- or background color.
Color Picker
This window is used to pick a foreground or a background color.
(I'm sorry but I'm hoping that the last picture will be translated as soon as possible)
