Well, no reason for a lengthy explanation here, as this article is on time
  for once. :)  Instead, let's just jump right into the first of what is likely
  to be a very large section on 32-bit apps.
 
  This article, and at very least the one following it, will deal with probably
  the best known and most powerful art application I have yet to hear of.  The
  images you can produce with Photoshop are completely unlimited.
 
  There is nothing you can't do with this program, provided you're willing to
  work a bit to do it.  I will not pretend to be the world's greatest living
  Photoshop expert.  Far from it, there are still a variety of commands within
  the program that completely boggle me.  Still, I've been working with it long
  enough to be confident that I can at least explain the basics.
 
  This article won't be going into depth on the various commands available to a
  user.  That's for the next one.  Instead, I'm simply going to talk about the
  very basic of photoshop.  How it works, and some of the things it can do. So,
  without further ado:
 
  _____Adobe Photoshop v4.0
 
  The first thing a typical user is greeted with upon double-clicking the
  Photoshop icon is an opening screen.  This screen actually gives you a good
  idea of what the program's capabilities are.  It is a photomontage, and I
  suggest you take a look at it while your filters and preferences are loading,
  and the program initializes.  It's really a nice piece of artwork.
 
  "Wait, wait, wait!" You say, "What are filters?"  Relax.  I'm getting to
  that.  For now, let's take a look around the basic Photoshop screen.  It's
  finished loading, and now you're staring at a window containing a rather
  large amount of objects.
 
  These objects are your tools.  In a way, photoshop is quite similar to
  Dpaint.  Photoshop has a "Toolbox", which is the bar that runs vertically
  down the screen, and has all those little, confusing icons.  That, at least
  is similar in appearance.  In addition, Photoshop has a variety of menus
  lining the top of the screen... but more on those in a moment.  Let's take a
  few minutes to explore Photoshop.
 
  Click on File:New, and make a new canvas.  I'd suggest 640x480 at 72 pixels
  per inch.  The pixels per inch is irrelevant if you're not going to be
  printing your work, otherwise you'd want to work in inches, not pixels, and
  DPI (dots per inch) instead of pixels per inch.  But if I were to cover
  printing functions in this series of articles, I'd still be working on it
  when I was ninety. :)
 
  Assuming you clicked "Okay", you now have a blank white canvas sitting in
  front of you.  Select the paintbrush tool (conveniently represented by a
  small icon that looks like a paintbrush), and just draw a line across the
  screen.  Stop a moment and take a look at it.  Notice the edges.  It's not
  just a simple, black line is it?  This is photoshop's automatic anti-
  aliasing at work.  Remember back in the dpaint articles when we discussed
  anti-aliasing?  Well, it's no longer necessary to do it by hand.  Instead,
  photoshop does it for you.
 
  You can turn off anti-aliasing on certain commands, mostly the selection
  tools (we'll get to those shortly).  Things such as the paintbrush, the
  airbrush, and the paint bucket will automatically anti-alias, unless you're
  filling in a section that was chosen with a selection tool that had its
  anti-aliasing feature turned off.  Confusing enough for you?  Good, let's
  move on.
 
  The Selection tools are the ones at the top of your "toolbox".  They include
  the magic wand, the Marquee, and the Lasso.  Each of these tools has a
  variety of options, but let's cover the basics first.  Click on the marquee
  tool (the dotted-line rectangle icon), and select an area of your picture by
  clicking and dragging.  It shouldn't take you too long to get the hang of the
  marquee tool.  It's relatively simple.  Now what you see in front of you is
  your canvas (that has one line drawn on it from earlier), with an odd-
  looking rectangle sitting atop it.
 
  That odd-looking rectangle looks odd, doesn't it? (Let's hear it for
  redundancy :)  This is because it appears to be moving.  The dotted line is
  cycling.  There's a very simple explanation to this.  It makes it a hell of a
  lot easier to see when you're selecting something more complicated then a
  white background.  Good then, now it's sitting there.  What shall we do with
  it?  For now, let's leave the anti-aliasing on (I'll explain how to turn it
  off and on in my next section, which deals with the various sub- windows of
  photoshop).  Take the airbrush, and put it over an area as far away from your
  rectangle as possible.
 
  Now click.  Nothing happening, right?  Now let go of the mouse button, move
  the airbrush so it's over your selection, and click.  Hey...it's filling with
  black!  But you'll notice that at the edges, it stops.  Your moving selection
  line thingy also seems to be disappearing, but have no fear, this is simply
  photoshop's way of clearing up that much more processor space for the
  airbrush itself (or at least, I think that's why it goes away. :)  You will
  notice that as soon as you stop clicking the airbrush, the selection line
  thingy comes back.  Pretty cool, huh?
 
  Now click on the marquee icon, and then click on your selected space.  This
  de-selects it.  You'll notice that your black square is not anti-aliased,
  even though I told you we were leaving the anti-alias on.  This is because
  the marquee tool's anti-alias functions depend on a command called feathering
  (again, more on that next issue).  For an example of auto-anti-aliasing,
  click on the magic wand tool (it looks like... well... a magic wand icon. :)
  Now click on your square.  It's selected.  That's because the magic wand
  selects pixels of similar color surrounding the pixel you clicked on (just
  how touchy the wand is will be described... you guessed it).
 
  Now go to the menus along the type and click on Select:Inverse.  Suddenly,
  everything _except_ what you had originally selected is now selected (Very
  useful command, trust me).  Now pick a different brush color, let's say blue.
  You do this by clicking on the black square overlapping the white one on your
  toolbox.  To change your background color (more on that... ah why bother ;)
  you would click on the square that's being overlapped.  To change your
  foreground (which is what we're doing), click on the top one.
 
  The color picker is pretty intuitive. Slide the bar up to the approximate
  shade, and then pick a color from the larger box.  Once in a while, you'll
  see a little exclamation point pop up with a replacement color you might want
  to choose.  Disregard it.  It's for printing purposes only, and we're not
  getting into that.  Now select your color (blue for my example), and click
  okay.  That done, select the airbrush again, and spray around the edges of
  your black square.
 
  Same thing's happening as before, right?  You can only spray in the area you
  selected (which, due to the inverse command, is everything _but_ the square).
  So the area around the square is becoming blue.  Good.  Stop spraying, click
  on the magic wand icon, and then click anywhere within your selected field.
  It deselects.  Now take a look at your square, or more specifically, the
  edges.  They look like they've been run over with the dpaint smooth tool.
  Very subtle, but not hard to miss if you're looking.  That's photoshop's
  auto-anti-aliasing, and it's excellent.
 
  _____Conclusion
 
  Well folks, that's all I have time/space for this time around.  The next
  article will be a look at how you can change what your tools do, and
  following that, we'll get into the wonderful world of filters.  Again, please
  do not expect this as a comprehensive guide to Photoshop, as I have read them
  and they are usually 300+ pages long. :)  I'm just offering some basics, and
  a few tips.  So, until next time!
 
 

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