This article is meant for the very beginners of the Photoshop. This is my first tutorial on the software and I’ll be posting more tutorials. In this article I’ll show you the basics of Photoshop and three simple tasks a beginner can do with Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop is a powerful software and it can be used to achieve fantastic image effects. In this article I’ll show you three basic steps in Adobe Photoshop – Cropping an image, Adjusting the size (width and height) of an image and adjusting the lightning of the image. These are the very basic steps of Photoshop and no matter which version of Photoshop you use it’ll all have the same process.

Importing an image to Photoshop for editing

First of all, you should import the image you want to edit. This can be done in two ways. Either you can right click the image and from the 

menu select ‘Open with’ and then select ‘Adobe Photoshop’ and the image will directly open in Photoshop.

Otherwise you can open the Photoshop software and go to File (from the menu bar) > Open (Ctrl+O) and then select the image you want.

After opening the image you’re good to go.

Some important basic tools in Photoshop

As this my first tutorial, I’ll just refer some basic tools which will be useful from the very beginning. We’ll be covering other tools in future tutorials.

1. Crop tool : Left side of your screen you’ll have your tools window (if not go to Window > Tools). You’ll see a small button like this  

 and that is the Crop tool. As the name suggests. It is used for Cropping images.

2. Marquee tool : Marquee tool is used for selecting  portions of images for editing. For instance you want to change the brightness of certain parts of an image, you can select those parts using marquee tool and the change the brightness so that it’ll only be applied to the portion you’ve selected.

For now we’ll settle with these two tools. Let’s now get started with editing process.

Cropping images in Photoshop

Once the image is opened in Photoshop, select the Crop tool from the tools palette. Now select the portion you want by holding the left button of your mouse and dragging along the image.

After selecting you can see that the region you haven’t selected will become dim. 

Now press ‘Enter’ or right click the mouse and select ‘Crop’ to get done. You’ll have your cropped image now.

Adjusting the size (width and height) of an image

Now, I’ll show you how to change the size of an image in Photoshop. After the image is opened, go to Image > Image size from the menu bar. Now a window will pop up where you can adjust the size of the image

Now, from the window you can change the Width and Height measurements of your image according to your needs from the respective boxes under the ‘Pixel Dimensions’ as shown in the image above. You’ll see that, as you enter the Width the Height automatically changes and vice versa. This is to save the ratio of the image size so that the image doesn’t appear stretched or pinched. Anyway, if you don’t mind, you can uncheck the ‘Constrain Proportions’ box under the same window (refer the image) and put in your own measurements for both width and the height.

Adjusting the lightning of an image

Now comes the last part of this article. One should know that there are many ways of adjusting the lightning of an image. There are many complex ways to create outstanding effects in Photoshop. Anyway, right now we’ll see the basics.

1. Brightness and Contrast

To adjust the brightness and contrast of an image, go to Image > Adjust > Brightness/Contrast

From the pop up window you can adjust the brightness and contrast according to your will.

2. Color Balance

If you want to add a particular color effect to your image, go to Image > Adjustments > Color Balance. From the window move the sliders to achieve the color you want. You can also select a portion of the image using Marquee tool, discussed earlier, to add such color effects to certain parts of the image alone.

Conclusion

This is my first tutorial on Adobe Photoshop and I believe you’ve learned something from this simple article. I’ll try to post some more tutorials here in future. There are so many things one could do with Photoshop and I’ll be sharing few things I know in coming tutorials.

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