Most Important Photoshop Tools to Learn

In order to really grasp the entire range of options that Photoshop offers it is very important that you look at the most basic tools as the perfect way to get started. In order to start working with the more advanced aspects of Photoshop you absolutely must take the time to really dig into the important tools that will take more time to master, as well as understand. Once you have gathered a good basic foundation with Photoshop, you will find that learning the more advanced concepts is much easier than you previously thought.

You should always begin with the basics, this includes learning how to open, and save a file. Because Photoshop is such a powerful program, there are several different file types that it is capable of working with. Learning the differences in these is something that most people learn over time, but it can be very complicated and complex until you get the grasp of it. However, there are plenty of books on the market that are designed to help with this so that it is much easier to learn the various file types and how they will impact your image editing experience.

Beyond the extreme basics of opening and closing, a file is things such as cropping pictures. There are several ways to do this, you could either choose to use what is called a destructive method which actually alters the picture, or you could use a none destructive method and instead use layers and masking to cover the parts of the picture that you no longer need. Regardless of the method that you choose to use, there are going to be different instances where one will work better than the other. For example, if you use a none destructive method to crop with, you will be able to easily revert back to the original image if you missed something that should have been included, or omitted from the image.

Other tasks include resizing the image. This is again something that involves both destructive and none destructive methods. By resizing the image and changing the number of pixels in the image, you are using a destructive resize method. However, if you simply resize the picture, keeping the same number of pixels in the image, then it is not damaged. The type of image resizing that you are doing will often depend on the project. Saving a picture for an avatar on a forum, or creating a thumbnail image will almost always result in needing to use a destructive resize method in order to actually meet the size guidelines.