Basic navigation & how to combine images in Photoshop
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Welcome everyone, this video is just going to be an introduction to navigating around Photoshop. We're going to combine these three images all into this lovely little collage here. We're going to move him around, we're going to resize him. We're going to practice zooming in and out, and navigating. No, not super exciting, but super fundamental. Let's get into it now in Photoshop.
The first thing we're going to do is open up a bunch of files. Let's go to 'File', 'Open'. What I'd like you to do is, in your exercise files there is a folder called '01 Layers', double click that. Inside of there we want navigation, we want 'Navigation 01', '02', '03', '04'. These are the images we're going to combine. Now you can open them individually by selecting, and clicking open but that can be a bit tedious so what we're going to do is click this first one at the top here, then hold down 'Shift' on the keyboard and click the last one, and it should highlight them all. Or open them up individually, whatever works.
Let's click 'Open'. So in Photoshop when you've got more than one document open it transfers them into these tabs along the top here. So click on the tabs, just get used to it. So these are all the images I've got open, four of them. Now what I'd like to do is combine them all into this first image here. So we're going to start with 'Navigation 02'. That's the one I want to move into this Navigation 01 document. Now there are lots of ways of kind of copying images into files, and moving them around but I'm going to show the way that-- I guess it's just kind of future bullet proof. It just works with, later on when we get to slightly complicated things like Layer Masks and Adjustment Layers, this technique is still going to work. The technique is pretty simple.
Use the 'Move Tool'. It is the first tool in the Tool Bar here. All you do is click, hold, and drag your mouse, clicking, dragging, drag, drag… hover above this tab for about a second, and it switches. I still got my mouse down, still holding, holding… let go. It's a bit weird, I know, I promise. I totally understand. Let's give it another practice though. Let's go to 'Navigation 03'. Same thing, I'm going to get my 'Move Tool'. Click, hold, and drag. I'm holding my mouse down, holding my left mouse key down. Holding, holding, hovering above the tab, then letting go. That is the technique. It's kind of weird, but it's kind of future proof later on.
Let's go to the last one here. Click, hold, and drag, drag hold, hold, let go. I've got a slight problem, this one's a different size. Now I've resized these first ones just to make life easy, and it's fitting in here perfectly but more often than not you're going to be kind of combining images and they're going to be really different sizes. Sometimes they can be really big, if you've taken them on a quite a high end digital camera, that can be really, really big. So this is going to bring us into some more of the navigation things we need to learn throughout this course. I'm going to pile them all into here. Don't worry if you're like, "Man, these shortcuts, there's too many." We're going to kind of reiterate these all the way through the course. You'll find that the ones we cover right now in this video are going to be the ones that you'll use forever in Photoshop. At least the ones you use the most.
Couple of things I want to do now. I want to transform this guy here, just too big. So what I can do is-- I've got it selected; I know it's selected, because over here in my Layers it's got that gray highlight and I can turn the eye on and off, so I know it's the right one. Then go up to 'Edit'. Let's go to 'Transform', and let's go to this one that's called 'Scale'. This one you're going to use really often, 'Edit', 'Transform', and 'Scale'. And what I'd like to do is-- now depending on your screen you might have to zoom out. Especially if it's a really big image. So we're going to learn one of our first shortcuts for navigation. We'll learn a couple in this course.
The really common one is, if you're on a Mac, hold down 'Command' and tap the '-' on your keyboard. It's kind of at the top there, near your numbers. You'll see, it zooms out. If you're on a PC, hold down 'Control', and tap '-'. So '-' zooms out, and '+' zooms in. So get a practice with that. Hold down 'Command' on a Mac, 'Control' on a PC, just tap '+' to zoom in, '-' to zoom out. So minusing is going to allow us to see the edges of this Transform Box we've got here, when we're scaling. Now what we're going to do is-- you can move it around by clicking the center. Avoid this little cross here in the middle. It's just the center of rotation not something we want to mess with at the moment. Anywhere inside of here moves it around.
What I'm going to do is, I'm going to kind of line it up. Photoshop is a really cool tool. It's on by default, it's called Smart Guides, and it just says "Hey, did you mean lining up with this guy?" and you're like, "Yeah, exactly what I meant." If yours isn't kind of snapping to the edges like mine go under 'View', and just check that, under 'Show' down here, you got a tick next to 'Smart Guides', make sure that's on. What I want to do now is resize it. I'm going to grab this bottom corner, just drag it. What you'll notice is that, if I just drag it, it's going to potentially distort it. You could drag it and kind of hopefully get it there, but nice little trick is, while you're dragging it, before you let go, just hold down the 'Shift' key.
If yours has all gone a bit wrong, let's hit 'Esc' on your keyboard. That's the "I didn't mean it" button. Hit 'Esc', let's go 'Edit', 'Transform', hit 'Scale'. Now when dragging this corner here, hold down the 'Shift' key. So down on your keyboard, hold 'Shift', grab the corner, and what you'll notice is that it locks the height and width. Now we're not looking for perfection here, just get it kind of close to these other ones. We'll look at doing it perfectly later on, but get it kind of close to the right size.
Last thing you need to do when you're using Scale is that you need to hit the 'Enter' key on your keyboard. Otherwise, it's kind of half way through, see these dots in the side, it means "Hey, I'm busy doing Scaling now, you can't do anything else," because if you go up to your Panels along the top here you can see, they're all grayed out. Just means you can't do anything until you hit 'Enter', or 'Return'. So let's zoom in, you know what the shortcut is? Remember, it is 'Command +' on a Mac, or 'Control +' on a PC. I want to go in nice in Type because I want to show you one more shortcut before we go. And that is kind of moving around once you're in this sort of, kind of really close, you have to be zoomed right in so that the image goes off the edges.
Say I want to go over here to the right. You can use these little sliders, this is the cave man way. If you feel like you want to be a cave man you can drag these little scrubbing things up and down, that totally works. You might feel a little overloaded with shortcuts already but if you aren't, let me give you one of the really common navigation shortcuts. It's that, you just need to hold down the 'space bar' key. So 'space bar' on your keyboard. You can see, my little cursor changes from that little Move Tool to the little hand. Then just click, hold the mouse, kind of drag it across. That's going to be it for the basic navigation Photoshop. We're obviously going to build on these skills later on. If you feel like, "Man, I'm not good in getting every single one of those" don't worry, we'll cover them again and again as we move through the course.
So just to recap, whenever you need to move one image to another, click on it, grab the 'Move Tool', click, hold, and drag, wait. Drag it down, let go. You'll often need to resize, it's under 'Edit', 'Transform', 'Scale'. But to make sure the height and width doesn't get all distorted you hold down, which key was it? Let's test, say in your head. Yes, hit 'Shift'. Shift just means that height and width won't get distorted. Remember, when you're finished, you've got to hit 'Return' key otherwise life doesn't work.
Couple of other shortcuts that I jumped to there was the zooming in and out which is 'Command + and -' on a Mac, or 'Control + and -' on a PC, and holding down the 'space bar' allows you to click, hold, and drag, and move around. All right, that is going to be it for this video. We're going to get into doing some actual Photoshopping in the next video, I promise. Let's finish there, I will see you in the next one.