Chapter five. Creating How-To Tutorials and Tips

WHEN YOU'RE LEARNING A NEW PROGRAM, reaching for the manual is a time-honored tradition. But if you don't have the manual, where do you turn? With Photoshop, the answer is easy: the Help menu. The Help > Photoshop Help command contains the entire contents of the printed manual and more, and in addition, further down in the Help menu are how-to tutorials that can guide you through common tasks.

If you coordinate a workgroup or teach a class, you can add your own how-to topics to the Help menu of your copies of Photoshop. As long as you have a basic knowledge of HTML, adding your own tutorials to the Photoshop Help menu is quick and easy. Others can also install your custom topics by simply dropping them into a special folder and restarting Photoshop.

In this chapter, I show you a how-to so that you can see how it works, and then I walk you through making your own how-to.