Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

What Is Photoshop?

Photoshop, as the fellow says, is an image editor. It lets you open
an image—whether captured with a scanner or a digital camera
or downloaded from the Web—and change it. You can adjust the
brightness and color, sharpen the focus, retouch a few details, and
do scads more. When you’re finished, you can save your changes,
print the result, attach it to an email, post it to your blog, whatever.
If you can imagine doing something to an image, Photoshop can
do it. It’s that capable.

But it doesn’t end there. You can also use Photoshop to enhance
artwork that you’ve scanned from a hand drawing or created with
another graphics program. If you’re artistically inclined, you can
start with a blank document and create a piece of artwork from
scratch. If that’s not enough, Photoshop offers a wide variety of
illustration tools, special effects, and text-formatting options, from
placing type on a path to checking your spelling.

Opening an Image

Like every other major application on the face of the planet, Photo-
shop offers an Open command in the File menu. Not surprisingly,
you can use this command to open an image saved on your hard
disk or some other media. But Photoshop offers a better way to open
files: the Adobe Bridge. I’ll be showing you several ways to use this
independent and powerful application throughout this lesson. The
following steps explain the basics:

1. Start the Bridge. Assuming that Photoshop is run-
   ning (see Step 6 on page xviii of the Preface), click the
   icon in the application bar or choose File→Browse
   in Bridge. Both icon and command appear in Figure 1-2. (The
   application bar sits to the right of the menu bar on the PC and
   below it on the Mac. I show it above the menu bar in the fig-
   ure so you can see the details better.) A few moments later, the
   Adobe Bridge will come into view.


2. Navigate to the McClelland Boys folder. The Bridge window
   is, by default, divided into five main panels: two on the left,
   the large content browser in the middle, and two more on the
   right, each labeled black in Figure 1-3 on the following page.
   (Blue-green labels show ancillary options.) The top-left section
   contains tabs that let you switch between the Favorites and
   Folders panels. The Favorites panel gives you instant access
   to commonly used folders, as well as a few places that Adobe

Application bar

Figure 1-2.

Opening an Image 5