How This Book Is Organized

This book comprises a bunch of independent sections designed to answer your basic Photoshop questions. Oh, sure, you can read the book cover-to-cover, and it will make perfect sense. But you can also read any chapter or section out of context.

Also, this book is a cross-platform book, meaning that it tells you how to do things in Photoshop on both a PC and a Macintosh computer. You’ll notice commands for both PCs and Macs, and sometimes text is specific to one platform or another.

To help you slog through the information, I’ve broken the book into eight parts. Each of those parts contains chapters, and those chapters are divided into sections and subsections. Graphics abound to illustrate things that would take 1,000 words to explain, and you’ll even find glorious color plates — 16 pages in all — to show off techniques and effects in living color.

To give you an overview of the kind of information you’re likely to find in these pages, here’s a quick rundown of the eight parts.

Part I: Getting the Basics Down

The first stage of using any computer program is the worst. You don’t know what you can do, you don’t know how good the program is, and you don’t even know how to ask a reasonably intelligent question. These first three chapters get you up and running in record time.

Chapter 1 introduces you to image editing, explains where to find images to edit, and provides a quick glimpse of what’s new in Photoshop CS. Chapters 2 and 3 take you on a grand tour of the Photoshop interface and image window and give you all the information you need to navigate both.

Part II: The Care and Feeding of Pixels

Before you can edit a digital photograph, you have to know a few things about the nature of the beast. What’s a pixel, for example, and why is getting rid of one so dangerous? What’s the difference between a color image and a grayscale image — other than the obvious? And how do you save or print your image after you finish editing it? All these questions and many more are answered in Chapters 4 through 6.

Part III: Selections and Layers

The selection tools let you cordon off the portion of the photograph you want to edit. Select the face, for example, and Photoshop protects the body, no matter how randomly you drag or how spastic your brushstrokes. Chapter 7 helps you understand how selections work and how to use them to your advantage. In Chapter 8, I give you a full run down of layers, a Photoshop feature that adds flexibility, creative opportunity, and security to your image-editing life.

Part IV: Basic Editing

Chapters 9 through 11 are all about image editing — a body of skills that comes in very handy when you want to retouch, change, or improve photographs. Chapters 9 and 10 tell you all you need to know about correcting image colors and imperfections. Chapter 11 goes into all those cool filters that can magically transform your images into anything you can imagine —watercolor paintings, mosaics, or chrome, just to name a few. (When you’re done with Chapter 11, check out Chapter 21 for more about filters.)

Part V: Using Your Virtual Paint Brush

Photoshop offers amazing brushes and pencils that are remarkably capable, allowing you to perform pages and pages of tricks while expending minimum effort. Find out how to smear colors, get rid of dust specks, fill areas with colors and patterns, erase mistakes, and do a whole lot more in Chapters 12 through 14.

Part VI: Heavy-Duty Photoshop

Just what is a layer mask? Chapter 15 answers these questions and more as it plumbs the depths of creating fade outs, saving intricate selections, and more. Chapter 16 takes you to the world of paths and shapes where you’ll discover how to add vector graphics, to your Photoshop images. Chapter 17 moves on to creating type and how to manipulate it as well as warp it into incredible shapes. In addition, you’ll find out how to place type on a path, a new Photoshop cs feature.

Part VII: Photoshop for Webbies

Web graphics differ in many respects from real-world images. For starters, the color palette is different, Web graphics use specific file formats than image files meant for print, and Web graphics are dynamic, meaning they can move and change on the Web page. Chapters 18 and 19 give you the lowdown on Web graphics and Photoshop’s sister program, ImageReady. Check out the bonus chapter (www.dummies.com/go/photoshop_cs_fd) for more Web graphics details.

Part VIII: The Part of Tens

Chapters 20 and 21 contain the ultimate Photoshop Top Ten lists. In Chapter 20, find out more about just a few of Photoshop’s essential filter effects, and in Chapter 21, find answers to that age-old question, “Now that I’ve finished mucking up my image in Photoshop, what do I do with it?”