Welcome to Photoshop for absolute beginners. First of all a couple of rules or at least suggestions. It is my intention to add to this tutorial on an ad hoc basis as and when I have time. To keep all the tutorial in one place I propose to do that by replying to my own post so if you have any comments or questions please do not reply to this post but instead post either in general chat or under a different subject heading in this forum. That way we can keep the tutorial manageable. I will attempt to answer any questions and queries that are posted. I intend to write this tutorial in a very general way without making too many specific references to Photoshop commands and keep this as general as possible so that if you do not have Photoshop, which is after all a very expensive program, you can probably do some of the same things in whatever program you of choose. But before we start do you really need Photoshop at all. It is not necessary to have Photoshop to carry out editing. For most of my normal day-today photography in connection with my work I use a much simpler program which can do the basic things I need. That is to say straighten horizons, crop images, adjust exposure etc and resize. The program I use is Irfanview which is not only very quick and easy to use it also has the advantage of being free. www.irfanview.com Alternative more fully capable programs are also available much more cheaply than photo shop. The obvious examples are Gimp www.gimp.org which is an open source image editor and free There is also Google's offering which is the more basic but functional Picasa which you can get for free www.picasa.google.com If you are allergic to layers then there are two programs both American which are relatively inexpensive and very good for editing. Both of these unlike Photoshop are designed specifically with photography in mind and therefore do not have all the graphic design bloat which makes Photoshop so difficult to understand. Lightzone $99.95 www.lightcrafts.com Picture Window $89.95 www.dl-c.com These both use an entirely different style of interface to Photoshop so this tutorial will not really help out all that much. However both programs can do everything a photographer would need and it is possible that you will achieve your results more quickly with them.. Finally if you are into extreme effects and want a competent image editor which can also do graphic design tricks, accept Photoshop plug-ins and have the latest gimmicks such as content aware resize you could try Xara's offering Xara Photo and Graphic Design 7 which costs ÂŁ69 www.Xara.com
All of these are available as free downloads for a limited trial period. Finally there is the Adobe alternative Lightroom which is a valuable addition to Photoshop or indeed an alternative to Photoshop if you do not want to do detailed retouching. However Lightroom is hardly inexpensive the full offering is ÂŁ237.60 but you might wish to consider it if you choose to shoot in raw