Before attempting our paint scheme it is important to be familiar with the certain tools and techniques we will be using. The program I am using is Adobe Photoshop CS2, a famous line of graphics creation software. It is full of advanced tools and filters, however do not become daunted by such a program as a lot of it we will not need to use.
I will begin by taking an overlook of the program, explaining the parts of the interface.
The menu bar
This is the Photoshop menu bar, I'm sure you've all seen one of these before so I wont patronise you. Points of interest is the section under the menu tabs, this allows for tool specific configuration. When you click on a new tool this section will change and display options for you to fiddle with which will change the way the tool works.
If this is not being displayed go to "Window" - "Options".
Another point of interest are the tabs on the right hand side of the interface. Once clicked these will produce drop downs. A useful one being "Brushes", this tab displays detailed information on the brush selected along with all the brushes available to you. This I will go into more detail further down.
The "Edit" menu
Important to any repaint, the "Transform" section under "Edit" holds valuable manipulation methods to your image or layer. I advise before starting the actual repaint that you go through these tools to experiment and see what they do.
The "Image" menu
This menu contains very important adjustments that can be made to your image (or layer when selected). Over time you will discover this to be very useful. I will cover this area when we use particular adjustments, however it is advisable to have a look through all of them to see what they do and how they are controlled.
The "Filter" menu
The Filter menu contains once again highly valuable tools that allow you to manipulate and add effects to images or layers in an easy, automatic way. The 2 sections I use regularly are "Blur" and "Sharpen". Both of these sections are self explanatory, the Blur section allows you to use filters that can produce a wide variety of blur effects that come in useful when creating repaints. The Sharpen filters allow you to crisp up images or layers once manipulation has taken place.
The tool bar
Accessed by going to "Window" - "Tools", this bar represents the back bone to Photoshop and inevitably your repaint. On it is all the tools available to you. I have made the following diagram to label each one and include its keyboard shortcut inside the brackets.
Although the keyboard shortcuts do not really need memorising they are however useful in speeding things up. Throughout this walkthrough I will state the keyboard shortcut whenever a tool is selected so you can get used to using these shortcuts.
All of the tools with a small black triangle next to them offer different variants of the tool, you can access these by clicking on the tool and holding the mouse button. A small drop down will appear presenting you with the different variations.
As mentioned before, by clicking on each tool further options will appear underneath the menu bar at the top of the screen. For example the following image is produced when clicking on the Magic Wand. Here as you can see you have the choice of how additional selections are managed, it is currently set to Add. You also have the choice to select the level of "Tolerance" which relates to how defined the selection is relating to the colour. Anti-aliasing meaning if you wish to have smooth edges, Contiguous meaning if you wish to have selections made even if they are not connected to one another and Sample All Layers merely means if you wish to run the selection through all the layers. These options will be different for each tool and this one is merely being used to demonstrate.
No need to worry if you did not understand the information regarding to the Magic Wand, you don't need to know at the moment and I will explain when we use that tool.
The Layer Palette
Displayed by going to "Window" - "Layers", this will be the heart of your repaint.
Layers allow you to separate different parts of an image from one another. This of course is highly useful for repaints as it allows you to adjust segments without having to alter or manipulate anything around it. A mini tutorial on layers and how they work is available here , however I will cover this as we progress through the repaint.
The 2 other tabs situated in this Palette are "Channels" and "Paths". "Channels" allows you to view the different colour channels (Red, Blue, Green) and remove them if you desire. However, I rarely even view this tab. It can be useful for a particular method of smoothing covered in curves. "Paths" displays the paths saved within the psd (Photoshop Document). These paths are vectors which are important parts of any repaint (usually) and I will cover this as we reach it.
The Brushes tab
This is a rather useful tab accessed at the top right of the program. By selecting the paint brush tool then selecting this tab, it allows you to view all the brushes available to you.
It also allows you to set shapes to the paint brush such as "scattering" which may be desirable for the particular effect you're looking for. You can also increase or decrease the Master Diameter which is the diameter set when you first select the tool. Have a quick look at what each brush tip shape does to the appearance of the line in the preview box.
