Now that you know a little bit more about the photoshop interface and how to get around to the different
elements I think it's a good idea to back up a little bit and learn how to open up or start a new photoshop
file from scratch.
So I'm going to exit out of the projects that I had opened before.
You can also if you have those open go to file new and it's going to bring open this window for a new
Photoshop document or if you're opening up photoshop and you have this window just click Create new.
This window has a lot of pre-built templates that you can use.
So you can see any recent documents that you've started.
For example if you are always creating a YouTube thumbnail like I do I have a couple of different projects
that have those dimensions already so that I don't have to create it from scratch or you can go through
these tabs up here and you can kind of see some common options.
So under print you have your typical eight and a half by 11 inch paper file for web.
You have different ones for like Web sites mobile film and video.
Again this is a great one to get straight to the perfect size for a thumbnail for your YouTube video
or whatever it is or a graphic for you here your video depending on the presets.
But if you want to create something completely from scratch you go over to this panel over in the right
hand side or you can start with one of these options that you have and then customize it either way
works.
But here we have on our right hand side we have the different option.
So you have a name so if you want to call it a certain thing.
So we'll call this maybe you will call this social social if I could spell social post a social post
we might want to make a square and then below the title you give it you have your options for the size
and the aspect ratio.
So you have your width and height and this is in inches currently but you can change this.
So for example if you want to work in pixels which is common for anything that's going to go on online
you can use pixels and say we want something to be a perfect square.
We would put the width to be 1000 by 1000.
And I'm just having through these and using my keyboard or you can just click and and type in your numbers
say.
So now the orientation for her a square doesn't matter if it's portrait or landscape which you can see
here I can't click but say it was inches.
So say we have and you can see that I when I go back to inches it converts those pixels to inches for
us but say we have a five by seven photo but we want to change it automatically to orientation or to
a landscape orientation.
You can just click this button and it will kind of swap these numbers to change the orientation.
Let's go back to our pixels though and now let's go 1000 by 1000 the next option is this art board's
checkbox.
Now our boards is something that is newer to Photoshop.
And if you've used Adobe Illustrator you are familiar with what art boards are.
But we'll be going into depth about this later on in this section.
But basically what this allows you to do is have multiple versions of a of a project that you're working
on up at one time.
So before we would actually have to open up multiple different Photoshop files to have like two different
projects we're working on.
But now with our boards you can actually have like to 1000 by 1000 pixel projects or graphics that you're
working on in one project.
I know that sounds a little confusing but for now just leave that unchecked and we'll go into that later
on resolution.
This has to do with the quality of your graphic so you can see here.
We have currently it says 300 and then on the right it says pixels per inch in the U.S. we're using
inches but in other parts of the world or depending on what project you're working on you might want
to use pixels per centimeter.
But really what this means is it's going to have 300 pixels per inch which is a lot little individual
pixels per inch of a graphic or a project.
The higher the resolution obviously means the higher resolution and the higher quality but you don't
really need to go above 300 typically that's kind of the upper limit of what you would want for anything
even for print documents.
You can go even lower seventy two is kind of a standard lower end resolution 100 to 150 is kind of your
mid range and so you can play around with it but typically staying around 150 is gonna be perfectly
fine.
If you had literally one pixel per inch this would mean that for every inch of your project it would
have one pixel which is a an individual color basically and if pixels are a little confusing to you
something you might want to refer to is the resolution of like your television.
A lot of televisions you know you see the four K resolution or the standard 10 ATP resolution.
So for now we're just going to leave it at that.
The only other thing to know is that if you have a higher resolution it's going to increase the file
size.
So sometimes you might not need to go higher and might not want to go higher even if you could to kind
of minimize that that file from getting too big.
So let's just leave it at 150 for now.
Next you have your color mode.
So typically you're going to want to work in RG B color this.
There's different color modes.
A couple are popular RG B and then see y k CNY K is popular for print.
So if you know you're going to be printing a project out you might want to work in C M y K because if
you go to a printer and your project is in RG B then the colors might end up a little bit different
than what you were expecting.
But for any sort of online graphic use RG B.
And of course like gray scale that's going to just be black and white along with this color mode.
You have 8 bit 16 bit and 32 bit I would leave it on 8 bit the higher the bit means the number of basically
shades of color that are available to you in a project or when you're working on a graphic 8 bit is
perfectly fine for pretty much any project that you would need unless you are more advanced and you
know for example if you're working on some sort of graphic for three and a nation or for an app or something
and whoever is asked you to create the graphic says I need it in 16 bit color just you know where to
change that but for now just leave it at 8 bit under this you have your background contents.
So right now this is basically what the background of your project will be.
So right now it's set to white and we'll see what that looks like but you can change this to a specific
color or if you click this drop down menu you can choose a transparent color or lack of color.
Really just transparency.
So if you're creating something like a logo where you don't want a background you can have it be transparent.
Now this is more.
This does more have to do with the background of your canvas that you're working on.
You can always change the background color or adult layer with the color to a project to have a different
color.
And that would be done in your project itself.
This is more just in terms of the canvas and how it looks when you're working.
And I'll show you this in just a second.
And then there are a couple of advanced options for color profile and pixel aspect ratio.
Again these are more advanced.
You would probably know when you need to change these if you're if you know what these are color profiles
this will change depending on what monitor you're using and for the pixels again if you're using or
creating something for a specific video project you might change this.
But for you watching this course I'm going to bet you that you just want to leave it at square pixels
and the color profile at whatever it is set to right now for you.
All right.
You still with me because now we're going to click Create and it's going to open up this project and
you can see that it has a white background.
Really quickly I'm just going to click file new.
I'm going to change the background to black and click Create and then we're gonna go to file new and
changed the background to transparent and click Create.
And so you can see if I tab between these the different options you have for the background being a
specific color and the transparency is this checkerboard pattern.
So if you ever see this sort of checkerboard it means that it's going to be transparent like I said
perfect for editing or creating logos or graphics where you don't want a background.
That being said you can still create graphics in these other projects and turn off your background.
And I'll just show you really quickly.
Even though we haven't gone over the layers panel.
If you check on this little eyeball option next to the background at four actually first we have to
turn off the lock which this background layer is typically locked in the beginning and then we turn
off that eyeball.
You can see that it becomes transparent.
So this is sort of just a temporary background that's locked.
Same here with this black background.
Unlock it.
It becomes a layer instead of a background and you can now turn that on or off.
So there's always kind of multiple ways to do things in photoshop and you'll realize that as you go
through this course and if you take other courses or watch other tutorials by other people you'll see
that they do things differently in photoshop and that's completely fine.
I'm showing you the ways that I do different things that makes the most sense to me.
And I hope that it works for you.
But like I said there's lots of different ways to do the same thing in photoshop.
It's such an advanced application.
But now you know how to open up a project at any sort of specific size or aspect ratio in Photoshop.
So congrats to you.
That's a big step.
And we'll see you in the next lesson.