What s on the Menus?

What's on the Menus ?

The menus across the top of the screen contain the commands that enable you to open and manipulate files. They are accessed just as you would access any other menu, by clicking to open the menu and choosing the desired command from the list. Whenever you see an arrow or an ellipsis to the right of a menu command, it indicates that there is either a submenu, in the case of the arrow, or a dialog box, in the case of the ellipsis.

File and Edit Menus

The first two menus are File and Edit. Photoshop's File and Edit menus will be mostly familiar to anyone who has used other Macintosh or Windows programs. The File menu lets you work with files: opening, closing, saving, importing and exporting, printing, and, of course, quitting the program. There are also several time-saving automation features that you'll learn about in Hour 18, "Special Effects and Useful Tricks."

The File Browser, first introduced in Photoshop 7, has been renamed the Bridge in this version, and it's been beefed up considerably. Naturally, you can see all the data about your photo or scanned image while you preview it, and you can add your own keywords to help the Bridge locate and open your files. In addition, you can search Adobe's online stock photo collection and save groups of images that you want to open at the same time. When you open the Bridge, you can search any of your graphics folders by selecting them. After you've found the folder you want, all its pictures will appear as if they were slides on a sorting table. Figure 1.9 shows the setup. To open a picture, just double-click it. You'll also see all the information available about the picture, including its size , color mode, date and time it was shot, make and model of camera used, and a lot more than you'll ever need to know.

Figure 1.9. The Bridge lets you see thumbnails of all the images in a folder.

The Edit menu includes all the editing commands you're familiar with from other applications: Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear, and the most important oneUndo. It also contains the Transform tools, to scale, skew, distort, and rotate selections.

Mac users take note

As of Photoshop CS, the Preferences command moved to the far left Photoshop menu in Mac OS X; in Windows, it's still under the Edit menu.

The menus that you might not be as familiar with (unless you've spent a lot of time working in other graphics programs) include

• Image

• Layer

• Select

• Filter

• View

• Window

The Image Menu

The Image menu, shown in Figure 1.10, has several submenus. The first of these, Mode, enables you to select a color mode in which to work. Most of the time, you will be working in RGB mode because that's what your monitor displays. Color modes are discussed in detail in Hour 5. The second submenu, Adjustments, is one you'll probably use on every photo you work on. It's the source for all kinds of color adjustments, from automatic level and color corrections to sliders that let you tweak contrast, change red roses to blue ones, and so on. You will learn how to use the tools on the Adjustments submenu in Hour 6, "Adjusting Color."

Figure 1.10. The Adjustments submenu.

The Image menu also has the tools you've already seen to enlarge an image or the canvas it's on, plus additional ones to invert colors, posterize , and even correct color and saturation by example.

The Layer Menu

Arguably the most powerful feature of Photoshop is the capability to work on different layers . This enables you to combine images, create collages, and make corrections without fear of damaging the original picture. Think of it as working on sheets of transparent plastic. Each layer is totally separate from the others. You can paint on a layer, change its opacity, or do whatever you want with it without disturbing the background or other parts of the picture on other layers.

The Layer menu opens dialog boxes to create new layers. It also has many commands to merge and work with layers, applying layer effects, styles, and color adjustments. Figure 1.11 shows what's on the Layer menu. Hour 6 and Hour 11, "Adjusting Color" and "Layers," will teach you how to work with all kinds of layers.

Figure 1.11. The Layer menu.

The Select Menu

You have Selection tools, so why do you need a Select menu? The Select menu works with the tools to let you modify areas you have selected. You can grow or shrink the selected area by as many pixels as you want, or feather its edges so the selection appears to fade into a background on which you have pasted it. In Hour 3, "Making Selections," you'll learn all the tricks for selecting parts of a picture and working with them.

The Filter Menu

Filters are the tools that make Photoshop fun. The Filter menu lists more than a dozen categories of filters: Some blur or sharpen the picture, some distort it, and some turn it into imitation paintings, colored pencil drawings, or neon light sculptures. There's so much for you to do with filters that we'll spend Hours 14, "Filters that Improve Your Picture," 15, "Filters to Make Your Picture Artistic," and 16, "Filters to Distort and Other Funky Effects" applying them to your pictures.

Filter Fact

Photoshop filters are plug-ins, and many work with other graphics programs as well. If you install third-party filters, such as Alien Skin's Eye Candy or Andromeda filters, they'll appear at the bottom of the Filter menu.

The View Menu

Like the Zoom tool, the View menu has commands that let you zoom in on and out of the picture. As you can see in Figure 1.12, it also has the commands governing rulers, guides, and grids that enable you to measure and place objects precisely within the work area. The Show command opens a submenu that gives you access to grids, guides, notes, and slices.

Figure 1.12. The View menu.

You can set the rulers to measure in pixels, inches, centimeters, points, or picas, or by percentage. Choose the measurement with which you're most familiar. The setting is done in a Preferences dialog box; open the dialog box by choosing Photoshop Preferences Units & Rulers (for Mac OS X) or Edit Preferences Units & Rulers (for Windows). The unit of measure selected with the Units & Rulers preference also determines the unit of measure for the New dialog box (refer to Figure 1.1). When creating for the Web, consider setting your rulers to pixels.

Guides are lines that you place over your picture to position type or some other element that you're going to add to the picture.

Try it Yourself

Placing a Guide

To place guides, follow these steps:

1.	Choose View Rulers. This makes the rulers visible at the edges of the canvas.
2.	To place a horizontal guide, put the mouse pointer on the ruler at the top of the screen and drag downward. You'll see a line scrolling down the canvas as you drag. The left ruler shows you the position of the line.
3.	To place a vertical guide, put the mouse pointer on the ruler at the left of the screen and drag across. You'll see a line scrolling across the canvas as you drag. The top ruler shows you the position of the line. See Figure 1.13 for an example of a vertical guide. Figure 1.13. Guides let you place type or objects right where you want them.
4.	To switch the orientation of a guide as you drag, hold down the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key.

After you have placed a guide, you can't move it unless you use the Move tool. (You can place a guide regardless of what tool is selected.) You can hide it by choosing View Show Guides to remove the check mark. To get rid of the guides, choose View Clear Guides. To lock guides in place, press Option+Command+; (semicolon) (Mac) or Alt+Control+; (Windows).

The Show Grid command, which is also found on the View menu (View Show Grid), places an entire grid of guidelike lines over your image, rather like a layer of transparent graph paper. The Snap To commands make it easier to position an element, such as a block of type. In effect, they make a guide or gridline "magnetic," so that when you place the element near it, the line pulls the element right up against it.

The Window Menu

Most of Photoshop's commands can be accessed in several ways. The easiest way, generally , is to use the palettes. Photoshop's palettes give you information about your picture, and character and paragraph controls for the Type tool. The palettes contain options for many of the tools in the toolbox, a choice of brush sizes and shapes , colors, as well as access to Layers, Paths, and Channels. There are also Actions and History palettes to help you work more efficiently , and to see what you've done and step backward when necessary. The Window menu (shown in Figure 1.14) shows and hides these palettes. If there are some palettes, such as Actions, that you're not ready to use, close them to keep your screen uncluttered.

Figure 1.14. You can also click the tabs on the palettes to bring them forward.

The Help Menu

The final menu is the Help menu, which gives you access to Photoshop's comprehensive help database, which is essentially the entire manual, with a good search function. I use it frequently.