1. What is Adobe Photoshop CS3? Photoshop CS3 is the latest release of the industry standard in digital imaging. It accelerates your path from imagination to imagery with a wealth of productivity and workflow enhancements, unrivaled editing power, and breakthrough compositing capabilities.
2. Keyboard Shortcuts. Using keyboard shortcut's can be very useful and save a lot of time when doing images. Here's a list of some keyboard shortcut's:
Ctrl+N. This shortcut will open the "New File" dialog box which will let you chose the essentials of your image, like:
Name of the file, the preset you could use, width and height, the resolution of your image, the color mode your image will be using, and of course, the background contents.
Ctrl+O. This is a simple shortcut, it basically just brings up the dialog to load a file into Photoshop.
Ctrl+W. This shortcut will close your current selected image while Alt+Ctrl+W will close all of them.
Ctrl+S, Shift+Ctrl+S. Used to save your current selected image. Ctrl+S is used if you previously saved your image before in that session, Shift+Ctrl+S is "Save As...", you could pick to save your document as a .psd file (Photoshop Document), or any image file.
Ctrl+Z. I use this one a fair amount of times. It will reverse the last action you have done. So, say you brushed something and you don't like the way it turned out, press Ctrl+Z and it will send your image back to the way it was before you brushed on it.
Ctrl+T. Free Transform. This will let you resize your image in both width and height.
Shift+Ctrl+N. Opens the new layer dialog box. Let's you name the layer, select the color, mode and opacity.
Ctrl+E. Merges the active layer with the layer underneath it, or if multiple layers are selected, it will merge them all.
Ctrl+F. If you use Filters and want to apply that exact same filter again, Ctrl+F will do that for you.
Ctrl+Alt+F. This will open the last filter dialog that was used, this helps for applying filters to multiple layers or channels.
F7. Shows/hides the layers palette.
Ctrl+Plus Key. Zooms in, Ctrl+Minus Key will zoom out of your image.
Ctrl+Arrow Keys. Nudges a selection or layer up down left or right by 1 pixel. Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Keys will nudge the selection slightly more.
M. Marquee tool. L will select the Lasso tool. B will select the Brush, Pencil or Color Replacement tool.
Ctrl+U. This will open the Hue/Saturation dialog, you could change the color of your image by playing with the sliders.
Ctrl+D. Deselect active selection. Ctrl+R, will show the rulers. They can be useful for making aligned images correctly.
Ctrl+H. Hide screen elements, usually the marquee selections.
Ctrl+A. Select all.
D. This resets your colors. Forground and Background become Black and White once again, X will also flip your colors.
3. Brushes. Though it's good practice to do your images with not a lot of brushing, you may be feeling lazy and want your image done quickly. I personally like deviantART for my brush resources. They have a good selection to chose from. Also, they have some good renders, stock photo's to play with and much more there. It's worth a look.
4. Tutorials. These never hurt to read and brush up on some things. Especially if you're still rather new to Photoshop and don't know much about it. Again, deviantART has some good tutorials on their site. But, different selections of tutorials are good so, here are some sites:
Remember, Google is your friend. You could always search Google to tutorials. Example: Click here
5. Renders. Renders can make or break your art of work. It's a good idea to have a render that is already cut out unless you can do that yourself. PlanetRenders has a nice selection of them. You will have to sign up with them in order to actually browse the gallery though. Also, I suggest you read Noise-Less's tutorial on render selection and placement.
6. Fonts And Text. Again, like render selection and placement, fonts you chose and the placement of text can also make or break an image. Once again, thanks to Noise-Less he made a tutorial for this. It could be found here.
7. Installing custom content. If you download some custom content such as brushes, actions, and other things, you'll need to place it in the correct folders for Photoshop to pick it up.
Fonts. Of course, these go in your C:\WINDOWS\Fonts folder.
Brushes. Go in your C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Brushes folder.
Actions. Go in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Actions folder.
Shapes. Go in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Custom Shapes.
And so on. It's pretty easy to figure out where stuff goes by looking at what type it is (shape, brush, action) and then looking at the folders in your Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\ folder.
8. Outro. We've come to the end of this tutorial. If you feel I'm missing anything, please leave a comment and I'll update this with what you think should be added. Or, if you find any spelling error's please let me know. I've tried my best to not misspell anything.
9. Change Log