Sams Teach Yourself Mac OS X Digital Media All In One - page 204
Summary
You are starting to learn your way around the Photoshop Elements screen, and you have learned how to
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Chapter 22. Starting, Saving, and Printing Your Work
In the previous chapter, you learned a couple of ways to
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Starting a New Image FileLet's take another quick look at the New dialog box before we move on. Here it is again, in Figure 22.1, just to refresh your memory. Figure 22.1. The New dialog box is used to create a new image file.
Starting at the top, you have the option of immediately naming your image, or leaving it untitled until you save it. Because I am almost always in a hurry, I skip that step and immediately consider page size. In this version of Elements and in the recent release of Photoshop 7, this dialog box has been modified to add a pop-up menu of possible page sizes, shown in Figure 22.2. The default is horizontal, 7x5 inches. Figure 22.2. Most of the standard American and European page dimensions are included.
Choose a page size that's appropriate for what you want to do, remembering that screen formats are horizontal, while magazine covers and illustrations are more likely to be vertical. Landscapes and portraits
If you have something on the clipboard that's waiting to be pasted into your new image, the dialog box will
Resolution is a tricky issue that we'll discuss in depth in the section, "Adjusting Resolution." Meanwhile, if your art project is to be
You have only three choices for Mode in this dialog box. If you're working in color, you must choose RGB Color as the mode. Grayscale lacks color, and Bitmap means simply black or white pixels, with no grays at all. If you want to use Indexed Color mode, you'll need to select that option from the Image, Mode menu after creating the file using RGB
The Contents options refer to what appears on the first layer of the image when it's created for you. White is the usual choice. Background applies whatever color is the current background color in the toolbox. (By default, it's white.) Transparent backgrounds are indicated by a
When you're ready, click OK or just press Return to open the new image. |
Browsing for a File
Most of the time, though, you won't be starting with a blank image. Instead, you'll have a photo that you want to work with. If you know where it is, you can press Command-O, click on the
You can select the thumbnail size from the More menu or by clicking the View By button. The File Browser can also show you the file hierarchy and the creation data or camera file info, as well as a larger thumbnail of a selected image, as in Figure 22.3. Normally, all information about a file is displayed in the
Figure 22.3. The info window includes creation date, camera used, and so on.
Use the top pop-up menu to locate the disk and folder you think the file is on, and just start scrolling through the folder list on the left until you find it. Drag it into an Elements window or double-click it, and it will open on its own. To rotate the selected image 90 degrees to the right, click the Rotate button. To delete the file from your computer, click the Delete File button. Task: Browsing and Opening an ImageTime for a little practice. The following steps will walk you through the process of browsing for some picture files on your hard drive:
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