“How To” Tips Make Photoshop Tasks A Cinch

If you have a specific task and don’t know where to begin, there may be a How-To ready to walk you through it

Do you hate digging through the new Adobe Help Center, looking for the answer to your specific question? Or if you’re not using CS2, even just using Photoshop Help (Cmd-//Ctrl-/)? If you have a particular task to do, even something simple like automating something or replace a color in an image, you may not even know where to begin looking without knowing the particular tool to search for. Well, there’s a feature in Photoshop, ImageReady and (to some extent) Acrobat called “How Tos” that put you on the right path.

Photoshop And ImageReady How Tos

Go to the Help menu in Photoshop or ImageReady and you’ll see a whole variety of How To subjects, including drawing and painting, automating the applications, working with type, working with color and more. Figure 1 displays the How Tos in Photoshop CS2. Each of these subjects has anywhere from two to twelve specific How Tos that address a specific task. The one on working with color, for example, has a How To for changing a color image to grayscale and one for replacing a color in a photo.

Figure 1: The How Tos in the Help menu.

Select a How To and Adobe Help (or, in CS2, Adobe Help Center) will open and display the help page you need to accomplish the task. It makes it pretty easy!

And the best news of all is that, if you look at the bottom of the Help menu, you will see instructions for creating your own How Tos. This may be very useful if you are an instructor and want to create a battery of How Tos that your students can refer to when working on class assignments. Or perhaps you have found a great feature in Photoshop and don’t want to lose it in Photoshop Help. Or you can just use How Tos as bookmarks so you can refer to sections quickly. We’ll explore how to create How Tos in my article on Wednesday, December 7th.

A Note On Acrobat’s How Tos

Photoshop and ImageReady are the only two Adobe applications with How Tos right in the Help menu. Acrobat has a similar feature, but selecting How To… in the Help menu instead brings up Acrobat’s How To window, which pretty much does the same thing but keeps you within the Acrobat application. And unfortunately there’s no way I know of to add or edit any of Acrobat’s How Tos.