Photoshop Tutorial for Fashion Design (Part 3)
Menus: File, Edit, Image

Photoshop menu is for Mac only. It is used to adjust Photoshop preferences. You can click on “General” and access other preferences in the submenu, hide Photoshop program or quit it entirely. Windows users will find these commands either in the File or Edit menus.

The File menu allows you to create a new document, open an existing document, open recent documents, close the document, save the document, or “Save Document As”, where you choose a different name and the file format, like popular JPEGs, GIFs used for clip art, TIFF files or native Photoshop files. You can also import documents from different input devices like a scanner. If you have a scanner attached to your computer, the name of your scanner will show up in the submenu. Then you can set up your page to print, select the printer, page orientation and paper size, and finally print. Here you can also access page setup, orientation, select you printer and printer options. Click “Done” if you simply want to assign the settings to the document or click “Print”.

The Edit menu allows you to apply basic editing commands to a selected object and edit document presets. Use Edit to undo or redo your actions as well as Cut, Copy, Paste and Clear. Keep in mind, just like in any other software before you can use Cut, Copy and Clear, you need to select what you want to copy, paste and clear. In Photoshop, you’ll be using a Selection tool to do so: copy, clear and paste. If you have text in your document, you can check the spelling or find and replace text.

The Fill command in Edit menu allows you to fill your document or selection with color or pattern. By default, Photoshop gives you a number of presets but you can also create your custom pattern which I will show you how to do later in the session, and with the Stroke command you can outline your image or a selection.

Other important features in Edit menu are Transform commands. Use Free Transform to reduce, enlarge, rotate your image or selection. You can hold the Shift key to scale proportionally. You can also use option bar to set specific values like angle degree or percentage value of the size of the image. If you activate the Aspect Ratio icon, you can scale your image maintaining the aspect ratio. When you’re ready to exit Free Transform feature, just click on any tool and choose to “Apply” if you’re happy with the changes that you’ve made, “Cancel” to go back and continue changing or “Don’t Apply” to go back to your original image.

Transform command also allows you to scale and rotate as well as skew, distort and warp your image and selection. In addition, it has a number of rotation and flip presets.

The next set of commands in Edit menu is about defining your own brushes and patterns. To define the entire image as pattern simply choose “Define Pattern”. Preview it and name it in the popup window. Click “OK” or “Cancel”. To define a specific area of your image as a pattern select Rectangular Marquee Selection tool from the tool palette, click and drag around the area that you want to define, go back to Edit menu, choose “Define Pattern”, preview, name it and select “OK”.

You can find your newly created pattern in the Fill menu. Choose “Pattern”, click on the Custom Pattern thumb, scroll all the way down, click on a thumb to select and click “OK”. To delete your pattern simply go back to Fill, right click on the thumb, and click “Delete Pattern” and click “OK”.

The rest of the Edit menu is about your document and Photoshop presets where you can purge your Undos and Histories, set color profile to your document or set your personal shortcuts.

The Image menu allows you to manipulate the size and the appearance of your document. Use the Image menu to set the color mode, make adjustments to image coloring, duplicate your document, change image size and resolution, change canvas size, rotate the canvas, and finally crop your document.

The Mode command allows you to select the desired color mode for your document. You don’t need to remember them all. Our recommended settings are “RGB Color” and “8 Bits/Channel”. In fact, I encourage you, whenever you open a document or create a new one, to make sure that your mode is set to RGB and 8 bits channel.

The Adjustments submenu offers a variety of commands that allow you to recolor or modify the colors of your artwork. Some of the more commonly used adjustment commands include Brightness / Contrast, Hue / Saturation, and Desaturate, if you want your image to be in grayscale. Also Replace Color, Invert, Threshold, that converts your image into black and white: the higher the level, the more black it’s going to be, and finally Variations [NOTE: may be missing in your CS4 and later]. Variations allow you to change the overall color balance in your image. For example, I want to add more yellow to my midtones, make shadows slightly darker, and highlights lighter.