Photoshop’s incredible selective Undo

Photoshop’s incredible selective Undo

Here’s one major difference between Photoshop and other programs. Almost
all programs have some form of Undo, enabling you to reverse the most
recent command or action (or mistake). Like many programs, Photoshop
uses the Ô+Z/Ctrl+Z shortcut for Undo/Redo and the Ô+Option+Z/Ctrl+Alt+Z
shortcut for Step Backward, which allows you to undo a series of steps (but
remember that you can change those shortcuts, as described in Chapter 3).
Photoshop also has, however, a couple of great features that let you partially
undo.
Painting to undo with the History Brush
You can use Photoshop’s History Brush to partially undo just about any filter,
adjustment, or tool by painting. You select the History Brush, choose a history
state (a stage in the image development) to which you want to revert,
and then paint over areas of the image that you want to change back to the
earlier state.
You can undo as far back in the editing process as you want, with a couple of
limitations: The History panel (where you select the state to which you want
to revert) holds only a limited number of history states. In the Photoshop
Preferences➪General pane, you can specify how many states you want
Photoshop to remember (to a maximum of 1,000). Keep in mind that storing
lots of history states takes up computer memory that you might need for processing
filters and adjustments. That can slow things down. The default of 20
history states is good for most projects, but when using painting tools or
other procedures that involve lots of repetitive steps (such as touching up
with the Dodge, Burn, or Clone Stamp tools), a larger number (perhaps as
high as 60) is generally a better idea.

The second limitation is pixel dimensions. If you make changes to the image’s
actual size (in pixels) with the Crop tool or the Image Size or Canvas Size
commands, you cannot revert to prior steps with the History Brush. You can
choose as a source any history state that comes after the image’s pixel
dimensions change but none that come before.
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If you don’t have specialized software

If you don’t have specialized software

 
Admittedly, Photoshop CS4 just plain can’t do some things. It won’t make you
a good cup of coffee. It can’t press your trousers. It doesn’t vacuum under the
couch. It isn’t even a substitute for iTunes, Microsoft Excel, or Netscape
Navigator — it just doesn’t do those things.
However, there are a number of things for which Photoshop isn’t designed
that you can do in a pinch. If you don’t have InDesign, you can still lay out the
pages of a newsletter, magazine, or even a book, one page at a time. (With
Bridge’s Ouput panel, you can even generate a multipage PDF document from
your individual pages.) If you don’t have Dreamweaver or GoLive, you can
use Photoshop to create a Web site, one page at a time, sliced and optimized
and even with animated GIFs. You also have tools that you can use to simulate
3D in Photoshop CS4, such as Vanishing Point .
Page layout in Photoshop isn’t particularly difficult for a one-page piece or
even a trifold brochure. Photoshop has a very capable type engine, considering
the program is designed to push pixels rather than play with paragraphs.

Photoshop even shows you a sample of each typeface in the Font menu.
Choose from five sizes of preview in Photoshop’s
Preferences➪Type menu. However, you can’t link Photoshop’s type containers,
so a substantial addition or subtraction at the top of the first column
requires manually recomposing all of the following columns. After all, among
the biggest advantages of a dedicated page layout program are the continuity
(using a master page or layout) and flow from page to page. If you work with
layout regularly, use InDesign.

Other things you can do with Photoshop

Other things you can do with Photoshop

 
Although Photoshop isn’t a page layout or illustration program, you certainly
can produce simple brochures, posters, greeting cards, and the like using

only Photoshop. One of the features that sets Photoshop
apart from basic image editors is its powerful type engine, which can add,
edit, format, and stylize text as capably as many word-processing programs.
Photoshop even has a spell check feature — not bad for a program that’s
designed to work with photos, eh?
Even if you don’t have the high-end video features found in Photoshop CS4
Extended, you can certainly supplement your video-editing program with
Photoshop CS4 (even if Photoshop can’t open and play movies you capture
with your video camera). From Adobe Premiere (or other professional video
programs), you can export a series of frames in the FilmStrip format, which
you can open and edit in Photoshop.

What Photoshop is designed to do

 
Adobe Photoshop is an image-editing program. It’s designed to help you edit
images — digital or digitized images, photographs, and otherwise. This is the
core purpose of Photoshop. Over the years, Photoshop has grown and developed,
adding features that supplement its basic operations. But at its heart,
Photoshop is an image editor. At its most basic, Photoshop’s workflow goes
something like this: You take a picture, you edit the picture, and you print the
picture .
Take photo, edit photo, print photo. Drink coffee (optional).
Whether captured with a digital camera, scanned into the computer, or created
from scratch in Photoshop, your artwork consists of tiny squares of
color, which are picture elements called pixels. (Pixels and the nature of digital
imaging are explored in depth in coming lessons Photoshop is all about changing
and adjusting the colors of those pixels — collectively, in groups, or one
at a time — to make your artwork look precisely how you want it to look.
(Photoshop, by the way, has no Good Taste or Quality Art filter. It’s up to you
to decide what suits your artistic or personal vision and what meets your
professional requirements.) Some very common Photoshop image-editing
tasks are shown in Figure 1-2: namely, correcting red-eye and minimizing
wrinkles