Get into shape with the latest on Photoshop
The Lasso tool. This tool allows you to highlight an image that you have made in an image or an image you have opened in Adobe Photoshop. This marquee tool likes to have smooth hard edges to follow. If you a photograph that doesn’t have a easy to follow edge around objects you will find it hard to use this tool. You have probably seen this when people cut their heads out of a picture and paste it onto somebody else’s body. It is a very funny feature and this is the tool that does it! The lasso tool has three different variations. The second version is the Polygonal Lasso tool. This tool can make different shapes and curves when tracing around or cutting out a piece of an image. The third variation is the Magnetic Lasso tool that only works on images that have defined edges. The tool will clamp onto an edge and give it anchor points to shape the corners. This is good when you don’t have that steady hand you used to have back in high school. I use this myself because I am not the man I used to be!
The stamp tools are a very nice addition to the Adobe Photoshop regime for photographers. Specifically it is great for editors that write tabloids and want to doctor the pictures. With the Clone Stamp tool they will be able to edit out an area of a picture and make it look like it was never there. They can do this by sampling the area around the object they want to not be there and adding it into the portion of the picture they want it too be in. The Pattern Stamp tool allows you to stamp a specific pattern at your desired brush hardness onto an image to make something unique. Like you can take a brick wall patter and make a complete building.
Oddly enough, three more features that were previously hidden to the human eye are now available for you to view on the left menu. This time though the names have almost nothing to do with what they do. First up is the Dodge tool. This tool lightens an area on the image. The Burn tool darkens an area on the image and the Sponge tool changes the level of saturation on an area in the image. These all have their special purposes that you will come to find out about. Burn and Dodge are usually used for making shadows or erasing shadows.
The Path Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool are both used for paths. The Path Selection tool will allow you to select a path component even if it is surrounded by many different paths. The Direct Selection tool will only select a segment of a path. This is a way to reshape a segment to a different path after it has been created and saved.
Below these more popular features are some cool features that you may or may not find interesting. I believe these have been in all the Adobe CS releases, but I am not sure about the Macromedia MX series. The first up is the Notes tool that allows you to add small notes to your images in the background. Also there is an Audio Annotation tool that allows you to add verbal notes to an image.
The Hand tool is used to move objects that are in a layer in anyway that you would like that is 2d in fashion. The Zoom tool helps you zoom in on a picture or object so you can do fine tuning. The Default Foreground and Background Colors tool lets you return back to black and white when you have gone totally out of whack with you colors you are thinking you are in the 1960s! The Switch Foreground and Background Color tool lets you switch the colors you using at will. It is almost like have a painters tablet to hold your saved colors on.
Everything you want to learn about Photoshop is grouped into sections that are easy to identify and access. Tutorials are continually being made simpler and clearer so that everyone is included. If however, you think that the tutorials are not enough there are DVD Rom tutorials that you can purchase and have to access anytime that you forget how to do something and need to refresh your memory. This DVDROM has 120mins (yup, 2 hours) of tutorials that will help you know how to use Photoshop even in your sleep. If you already have more than a basic knowledge of using Photoshop you can take a look at the Photoshop Secrets Special FX. It’s a tutorial CDROM with 19 lessons that are packed into 2 hours that will teach you exactly how to use the special cutting edge effects that the advance Photoshop users’ use.
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