17 Essential Terms Every Photoshop

Beginner Needs to Know

Photoshop is one of the most well-respected photography editing tools for a
reason: it's brilliant. It does, however, come with a steep learning curve,
especially with terminology. Don't worry though, we're here to help you sort your
blend modes from your layer masks and RAW files.

1. Blending Mode
Setting a blending mode controls how the image you are working on is affected by the
paint or editing tool. The base colour is the colour in the original image. The colour that
you want to apply to your image is the blend colour. Once a blend mode has been selected
and the edit applied, this the known as the result colour.

2. Brush Tool
One of Photoshop's most beloved features it the ability to treat a photo as if it were a piece
of artwork. The Brush tool is the closest digital equivalent to using a paintbrush. One of its
major advantages over its physical siblings is the ability to change the tip shape, diameter,
and hardness almost instantaneously.

3. Clone Stamp Tool

The Clone Stamp tool allows you to paint one part of your photo over another. This is
most commonly used for duplicating or removing objects. It is very similar to the Healing
Tool except that it copies the colour and texture, rather than blending them.

4. Curves
The Curves command is probably one of the best ways to make tonal adjustments to your
images. The Curves graph is based on the Histogram, and allows you to brighten, darken,
add contrast, and even adjust colours all from one panel.

5. Dodge and Burn Tools

The Dodge and Burn tools are based on a traditional darkroom technique that
photographers would use to regulate exposure on certain parts of the image. The Dodge
tool allows you to lighten an area, while the Burn tool darkens. By specifying the exposure
for mid-tones, shadows, or highlights you are then able to airbrush to apply the change or
drag and select an area.

6. Eyedropper Tool
Photoshop uses foreground colour to paint and fill areas, and background colour to make
gradient fills. The default foreground colour is black, while the default background is white.
You can change these to a colour of your choosing using the Eyedropper tool. Select the
Eyedropper, click on a colour in the image and the automatic foreground colour will be
changed. If you Alt + Click in Windows, or Option + Click on Mac, then you can select the
new background colour.

7. Feather
Feathering is the term that Adobe uses for creating soft edges. Using feathering you can
either adjust harsh edges, blend images, or make a specific object standout.

8. Histogram
A histogram is a graph which represents the tonal values in your photo or image. By
interpreting the graph you can determine the amount of shadows, midtones, and
highlights. The histogram doesn't tell you where these tones are in the image as all it does
it count the total number of pixels for each tone. Using the histogram you can quickly
assess whether your image is properly exposed and has the appropriate level of
contrast.

9. History Panel
One of the most important features of an image editor is the ability to undo what you just
did. Whether you made a mistake or just wanted to try a different approach or technique,
the history panel provides a chronological list of the edits you have made. Having an
opportunity to undo edits you just made makes you more likely to experiment. It also saves
hours of heartache if something goes wrong. The default number of states that you can
make appear in the history panel is 20, although you can easily change that in the
Photoshop menu.

10. Layers
When you open an image in Photoshop it is assigned as a background layer. You can then
stack multiple transparent layers on top of the background layer. This allows you to
make changes to the image without actually editing the image itself. You could use it to
composite two images together, add text, or even add effects.

11. Layer Masks

Layers allow you to stack multiple effects, images, and adjustments on top of the original
background layer. If you wanted to change the transparency of a layer you could easily do
that using the Opacity option. However, that adjusts the transparency for the entire layer. If
you wanted to composite two images you can use a layer mask which effectively allows
you to hide portions of a layer.

12. Magic Wand Tool

The Magic Wand tool is a huge time saver when you want to remove a consistently
coloured area like a background. The Magic Wand automatically selects an area of the
same colour without you having to trace the outline. You can even specify the colour range
-- known as tolerance -- relative to the colour that you selected.

13. Metadata
Metadata is best described as information about information. In the case of digital
images, the metadata is not the image itself, but rather the information about it. This
includes things like geolocation, date and time, exposure, camera model, and ISO. As the
metadata can often reveal far more than you may realize, it's a good idea to remove any
before uploading to the internet.

14. Patch Tool

The Patch tool is one of the easiest ways to remove areas of your image without leaving
a gaping hole. Using the Patch tool you simply select the area you want to remove. Then
by dragging the selection over to a part of the image you want to replace it with.
Photoshop then removes the original area and using high-quality feathering, seamlessly
blends the new texture in.

15. PSD File

While image files come in a variety of formats, there very few formats for saving a work-
in-progress image edit. Adobe realized this might be a problem as you may not want to
overwrite the original with an unfinished edit. To solve this particular problem they created
the Photoshop Document (PSD). Just as Microsoft's file formats became the standard for.
All office documents, Adobe managed the same with the PSD. Fortunately, you don't
actually have to use Photoshop to open a PSD if you do happen to get sent one.

16. RAW
One common theme in nearly every photography article and guidebook is that you should
be shooting your pictures in RAW. Despite most photos eventually appearing as
JPEGs, shooting in the format means you lose most of the photos digital information. RAW
contains the uncompressed, largely unedited image data that comes directly from your
camera's sensors. By shooting in RAW you don't limit your options when it comes to image
editing.

17. Saturation The saturation refers to the intensity of the colour in an image. A
saturated image is one that has overly bright colours, whereas an unsaturated image is
one where the colors are too dark. In Photoshop you can use the Hue/Saturation
adjustments to change the saturation to a percentage of the original.