New to Photoshop CS4 are the Application Frame and the Application Bar, designed to minimize screen clutter and distraction.

The Application Frame packs the entire Photoshop interface into a single window with a neutral gray background that you can resize, minimize, or maximize (see Figure 1.1). Of course, this all sounds very familiar to Windows users because it’s the way all Windows applications work. Now Mac users have the option of using Photoshop this way, or turning off the Application Frame (choose Window, Application Bar) and sticking to the Mac’s standard application interface, which allows the desktop and other applications to show behind Photoshop windows. Each open document has its own window within the frame, and you can either dock document windows to the top of the Application Frame or pull them free of the Application Frame to float within the frame.

Figure 1.1. The Application Frame helps you keep track of what’s part of Photoshop and what’s not by hiding other programs.

The Application Bar automatically turns on whenever the Application Frame is on; when the Application Frame is off, you can choose to show or hide the Application Bar (choose Window, Application Bar). The Application Bar contains the following (see Figure 1.2):

Figure 1.2. Buttons on the Application Bar perform functions that you might need at any time, no matter what you’re doing or what kind of image you’re editing. Windows users will find them on the menu bar.

When image windows are docked to the Application Frame, they’re tabbed. You see only one window, with tabs across the top giving the names of all the other open images (see Figure 1.3). Click a tab to switch to viewing that document.

Figure 1.3. Tabbed windows save a lot of screen space.

You can control tabbed windows by Ctrl-clicking or right-clicking their tabs to bring up a contextual menu that enables you to close the current image, close all open images, dock all floating windows into the Application Frame along with the one on which you’re clicking (Mac users only), or move a docked image to a new floating window. At the bottom of this contextual menu are the New Document and Open Document commands, which work just like the New and Open commands in the File menu.

Given the number of panels (formerly called palettes) that Photoshop offers, along with the various ways you can store and combine those panels, you have thousands of different ways to configure your workspace. Of course, we all have our favorite combinations, and most of us have preferred setups for particular jobs. That’s why Photoshop’s workspaces feature exists—to enable you to arrange panels the way you like them once and then return to that arrangement at any time with a simple menu command.

The program starts with several logical arrangements, including one for color correction (Color and Tone), one for web design (Web), and one that’s good for pretty much anything, called Essentials. These are all found both in the Workspace submenu of the Window menu, as well as in their own menu at the right end of the Application Bar. Switching to one is a simple matter of choosing it from the menu. If you develop your own favorite configuration, choose the Save Workspace command from either of these menus. Give the new workspace a logical name and click Save. Your own workspace then appears in the menus next to Adobe’s workspaces.

The Save Workspace dialog (see Figure 1.4) also gives you the option of including modified keyboard shortcuts and menus in your saved workspaces. You can change keyboard shortcuts and choose which commands appear in any menu (and which ones don’t) using the Keyboard Shortcuts and Menus command at the bottom of the Edit menu. For example, I use the Trim command a lot to trim off excess whitespace (or transparent space) around an image. The first thing I do when installing a new copy of Photoshop is choose Edit, Keyboard Shortcuts, and assign Shift+Ctrl+T to that command, which is located in the Image menu (see Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.4. Be sure to give your workspace preset a name that will make sense to you when you see it in the menu.

Figure 1.5. Photoshop lets you customize menus and keyboard shortcuts to your heart’s content.

The first group of tools in the Tools panel are called Selection tools because you use them to select all or part of a picture or to select a color. Three basic kinds of Selection tool exist: the Marquees, the Lassos, and the Quick Selection and Magic Wand tools. A selected area is indicated by a blinking dashed border called a marquee, after old-fashioned flashing movie theater marquee lights. To make a selection, you click and drag the Marquee and Lasso tools over and around the part of an image you want to select. Figure 1.7 shows the pop-up menus for the Marquee and Lasso Selection tools.

Figure 1.7. You’ll find seven Marquee and Lasso Selection tools.

The Quick Selection tool selects by color. It’s similar to (but cooler than!) the old Magic Wand tool, which is now hidden in the Quick Selection tool’s pop-up menu (and which you’ll find, in future hours, is a better choice in some situations). You can just click and drag to “paint” over an area you want to select, and the Quick Selection tool extends the selection to include all the nearby areas that have similar colors.

Now we come to some tools that aren’t used for making selections, but that are related to the Selection tools we’ve looked at so far. First, next to the Marquee tools is the Move tool. After you’ve made a selection, you can click and drag with the Move tool to move the selected part of the image to a different location.

The remaining oddball tools in the Selection area are the Crop tool, the Slice tools, and the Eyedropper/Color Sampler/Ruler/Note tools. You can use the Crop tool to change the size of the picture’s canvas, deleting everything outside the area you select. The Slice tools are designed specifically for creating web images; with it, you can divide an image into multiple areas, each of which loads separately on a web page and can link to a different web location. You’ll learn more about slicing in Hour 24, “Going Online with Photoshop.”

The Eyedropper tool picks up a sample of any color you click on, making it the active color so that you can paint with it. The Color Sampler tool places a reference point on the screen wherever you click and displays all of the color information about that spot in the Info panel. You can keep track of the information for as many as four samples at a time. You use the Ruler tool to measure dimensions and angles in the picture. Click and drag a line to measure a distance between two points and see it displayed in the Info panel. To measure an angle, first create a measured line. Then place your cursor on one of its two endpoints. Hold down the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key while clicking and dragging from the endpoint of the first line in the direction of the angle. Again, the angle’s measurement is displayed in the Info panel.

Finally, the Note tool works like the yellow stickies it resembles. Use it to place notes on your documents while you’re working on them. The note icon can go either on the canvas or in the area adjacent to it within the document window, and its text is visible in the Notes panel. The notes don’t appear on printouts of the image.

The Painting tools haven’t changed from the previous version of Photoshop; the set still contains 22 tools in 8 slots. Among these are a Brush, a Pencil, and a Clone Stamp (which works like a rubber stamp). These all apply “paint” to the canvas in some way, just like the real-life tools they emulate. You can change the tip width and angle of most of these tools. The Pencil tool and Brush tool share a space in the Tools panel with the Color Replacement tool, which does just what its name implies as you paint with it. A button on the Tool Options bar turns the regular Brush into an airbrush, and you can adjust the paint flow, just like a real airbrush, with a slider. The Clone Stamp tool picks up and copies a brush-shaped piece of the background and “stamps” it wherever you click, once or multiple times (see Figure 1.8). You’ll also find various erasers that, as you might expect, take away part of the picture. You can use a plain square “block” eraser or you can erase with any of the Brush shapes. Two special-purpose erasers, the Background and Magic Erasers, can automatically erase a background or a selected color.

Figure 1.8. Here I’ve used the Clone Stamp to give this bowling-ball-loving dog a twin.

Four special retouching tools are part of the Painting set as well: the Healing Brush (whose icon looks like a Band-Aid), the Spot Healing Brush (a Band-Aid overlapping a round selection), the Patch (which looks as if it belongs on the knee of someone’s jeans), and the Red Eye tool (a single-function tool introduced in Photoshop CS1).

The Spot Healing Brush and regular Healing Brush tools are even better than the Clone Stamp for retouching small areas within a picture because they work only on the spot, wrinkle, or scar you want to remove, without affecting the surrounding area. The Patch, on the other hand, covers a larger area, and Photoshop automatically blends the patched area evenly into the background. It’s great for covering up large, intrusive objects in the middle of your photos. The Red Eye tool is essential for fixing eye color in flash photos.

The History Brush, combined with the History panel, enables you to selectively undo and redo as many of your changes or individual brush strokes as you want, throughout the image or in specific areas. The Art History Brush imitates different painting styles, adding brushstroke textures as you paint.

With the Gradient tool, you can create backgrounds that shade from one color to another or even run all the way through the rainbow. The Paint Bucket, which shares space with the Gradient tool, pours paint (the Foreground color) into any selected area.

Finally, this section contains tools that move, blur, and change the intensity of the image. These are the Blur/Sharpen/Smudge tools and the Dodge/Burn/Sponge tools. The second and third tools of each set are found on pop-up menus. We’ll look at these tools in detail in Hour 6, “Choosing and Blending Colors,” and Hour 8, “Different Ways to Paint.”

The Path, Type, and Shape tools do a variety of useful things, all of which make use of vector paths to create elements in a picture. The icon of a letter T represents the Type tool, which puts scalable type on your picture. The Path tools, represented by a fountain pen icon, draw reshapable paths, which can form lines or shapes. After you have drawn a line or shape, you can use the Path tools to select a portion of your path and reshape it. Path tools can be used as both Selection tools and Painting tools. In Hour 13, “Using Paths,” you’ll learn how to work with all of the Path tools.

The Shape tools are Pen tools that can draw both filled and unfilled shapes, including rectangles, ellipses, polygons, and more complex shapes. The Line tool is also part of this set. It draws straight lines that, when you hold down the Shift key, can be constrained to 45° or 90° angles, just as if you had used an architect’s T-square and triangle. Figure 1.9 shows the Shape tools and some of the shapes that you can use with them.

Figure 1.9. You can create your own custom shapes, too.

Three Viewing tools are available: the Hand tool, the Rotate View tool, and the Zoom tool. The Zoom tool is shaped like an old-fashioned magnifying glass, and the Hand tool, not surprisingly, is shaped like a hand. The Rotate View tool’s icon is a bit harder to figure out—it’s a hand rotating a piece of paper. With the Zoom tool, you can zoom in by clicking the tool on the canvas to see a magnified view of your picture, or zoom out by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) as you click the image. You can also click and drag the Zoom tool to enlarge a specific part of the image. When you zoom in, the picture is usually too big to see all at once, so you can use the Hand tool to move the image around within the window. Use the Hand tool, shown in Figure 1.10, to slide the part of the picture you want to see or work on into a convenient spot. Press the spacebar while using any other tool to temporarily switch to the Hand tool.

Figure 1.10. The Hand tool moves an image within its window. You can use it either in the image window or, as seen here, in the Navigator panel.

New in Photoshop CS4 is the Rotate View tool, which you can use to turn the image’s canvas within its window to match your preferred angle for drawing. This feature will be most useful if you use a graphics tablet for painting, because you can match the image window to the angle at which you hold the tablet. To use the Rotate View tool, just click and drag; press Shift to constrain the rotation to 45° increments. You’ll see a compass rose in the image window as you rotate the canvas (see Figure 1.11), so you can see how much rotation you’re applying as you drag.

Figure 1.11. Rotating the image enables me to more easily edit the picture with a graphics table.

Every one of these tools can be selected by clicking its icon in the Tools panel, but Photoshop gives you another, even easier way to access the tools. Instead of clicking the tools you want to use, you can type a single-letter shortcut to select each tool. To toggle through the available tools where there are pop-up menus, press Shift plus the shortcut letter until you reach the tool you want. Table 1.1 lists the tools with their shortcuts. Dog-ear this page so that you can refer to the table until you have memorized the shortcuts.

In early versions of Photoshop, tool options were set on a panel just like the Layers or History panel. With version 6, users learned to reach for the Tool Options bar instead (see Figure 1.12). As you change tools, the controls available on the Options bar change according to whatever options are available for that tool. If the Options bar isn’t visible, choose Window, Options, or simply double-click any tool to display the Options bar, set to the controls for that tool.

Figure 1.12. Any toolbar component with a triangle next to it has a pop-up menu.

As with workspace presets, you can save combinations of tool settings as tool presets, and Photoshop comes with a collection of built-in presets to get you started. The Tool Presets menu is located at the far-left end of the Options bar (see Figure 1.13). You can use tool presets to save specific option sets for tools you use often, such as a big soft-edged brush shape for painting clouds or a small hard-edged eraser for touching up tiny details.

Figure 1.13. The tool presets that come with Photoshop include some that you’ll probably never use, but they do give you the idea.

To make your own preset, all you have to do is switch to the tool you want to use and set its options on the Options bar. Then click the arrow to display the Tool Presets menu and click the Create New Tool Preset button at the right side of the menu. Enter a name for the tool preset and click OK.