Photoshop® CS3 Channels and Masks Bible

Chapter 2. Exploring Tools, Palettes, and Menus

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Displaying the image

• Looking at the Image window

• Accessing menus and dialog boxes

• Using palettes

• Using the arsenal of tools

Fundamentally, image editing is about changing the color of pixels. When you apply many of Photoshop's editing features, what results is a change in color or tonality. Sure, there are many features that enable you to display your image, isolate areas, organize data, and save your images to different formats and locations but the bottom line is all these features are there to assist you in your ultimate purpose — to change how your image looks.

Photoshop's graphic user interface offers a large variety of tools, commands, dialog boxes, filters, and menu items to perform almost any image editing task. But Photoshop's real power comes from your ability to apply combinations and sequences of these operations accurately and creatively, especially when working with channels and masks.

This chapter describes the primary features that you employ in your work-flow — how they operate, where to locate them, and when to use them.

Displaying the Image

When you open an image in Photoshop, by default, it fits perfectly in the Image window regardless of its size. During the editing process, you may have to change the size of the screen image so that you can observe details more closely or see changes to the image as a whole. Changing the size of the image display does not affect the physical size of the image or how it prints. ...