Photoshop Tutorial for Fashion Design (Part 2)
New File, Save File

To create a new document, go to File > New. In the New Document option window you can name your file, choose from a number of presets offered by Adobe Photoshop. We will use the U.S. Paper preset.

The presets could be customized and saved for future use. The size refers to the paper size. You can choose between Letter, Legal and Tabloid. Whenever I change the paper size, the width and height of my document is changed. In addition to width and height, you can change the unit of measurement. Select pixels if you’re working on the web graphics or centimeters if you live in Europe.

You can also change the resolution of your document. In general, computer screens work in either 72 or 96 pixels per inch. So 300 resolution won’t really show on your screen. However, it is very important for the final output, like printing your document. As a rule of thumb, the higher the resolution, the better the quality of your print. However, 300 is a little too high and it creates large file sizes.

In general, the fashion industry works in documents with 200 pixels per inch resolution. But from my experience, the difference in the output between 150 pixels per inch and 200 pixels per inch is not that big. However, the file size is much smaller which saves you memory and disk space. So we’ll keep it at 150 pixels per inch.

Below the resolution is the Color Mode. We talked about Color Modes when we explored the menubar and I advised to make sure that your new documents are in RGB color mode and 8 bit channels. And finally Background. My personal preference is transparent, which gives me much more flexibility.

Now that I’m happy with all the presets and I know that I’m going to use this a lot in the future, I’m going to save it. I’m going to keep all the options checked, name it and click “OK”. The next time I would want to use my preset, I will go to Presets and find it listed in the Custom options.

It is strongly recommended that you save your files frequently. Computers have a tendency to crash. And if you don’t develop a good habit saving files, you can have a very devastating experience by losing hours of work.

I already named my file when I opened it. I’m going to explore where I want to save my document, I will keep the Photoshop format to preserve transparency and layers and click “Save”. Choose “Maximize compatibility” and click “OK”.