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For this series we are looking at Adobe's Photoshop, a software package that was launched in 1987.

The name photoshop is also a term used to describe the digital 'airbrushing' of photographs; whilst photoshop can be used to do this, it can do FAR more.

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Whilst we will be focussing on Photoshop at all points, there are alternative softwares that do the same things. In the last few years Adobe moved from a flat purchase fee to a monthly subscription package making it both a confusing and cost prohibitive option that makes those alternatives all the more attractive. (Creative Bloq recently published a run down of some of those alternatives here)

Because Photoshop is the industry defining software all of those alternative softwares follow similar approaches, use similar tools and offer similar options - this means that learning about photoshop opens the door to most of them.

Also, as you learn about Photoshop, you will gain a better idea of what you need your software to do, should you explore those alternatives you'll know what to look for.

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Photoshop is a bitmap or raster graphics editor.

You don't need to worry about what this technically means (feel free to google it if you need to know or enjoy being confused).

Bitmap editors are great at some things - and we'll look at those in a minute - but they're also really bad at other things. This is why understanding what Photoshop is is important - so you use it when it's the right tool and not when it isn't.

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The best way to think of Photoshop is as a toolkit jam packed full of art materials and tools.

If you each received the same package of creative tools, you would use them slightly (or vastly) differently. You might even find novel ways of using tools that no one else has thought of in order to create unique outcomes. Every art tools has been creatied for a specific purpose, but we all know it's fun to find our own ways of using them too.

This is Photoshop.

Ask a group of photoshop users how to carry out a simple task and you'll receive a slightly (or vastly) different answer from each because they've each taken ownership of their toolkit and learned how to use it slightly differently.

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You might be worried about how complex Photoshop might be. I remember that exact feeling when I wandered into the Mac Lab at Leeds Met uni in 1998. When we get around to opening photoshop and looking at the tools and interface, your heart might sink because it looks complex and overwhelming.

Well I'm here to tell you not to worry.

As with any toolkit, you only use the tools for the job.

This image is what Photoshop looked like to me at first.

(Bonus points for naming the plane)

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When you know what you need Photoshop to do and, importantly, what you don't need it to do, it begins to look a lot more like this.

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Bitmap images are good for:

Because Photoshop works with individual pixels, it is good at creating or working with images that contain huge amounts of complex information (including photographs). This means it is good at

Realism

Texture

Depth

Fidelity of colour

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Zooming into a photo shows us that each and every pixel is a single colour - this is how photoshop deals with complex tonal and textural difference - no matter how subtle

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Resizing!

Because of how images are stored in photoshop, it is not good for producing work which may need to be resized after production (specifically enlarged).

Here's a simple example:

Imagine that you use photoshop to produce a logo for your friend's art organisation. It has to be displayed onscreen and maybe on the printed invoices. Great. You produce a logo 3cm by 3cm...

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Your friend's business grows and a year later they want their logo printed on a t-shirt. The original image that you created is too small. Using photoshop you enlarge it and this happens.

You've got no option but to recreate the work again - but a bit bigger. What a pain!

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A year after that they want it on the side of a fleet of vans and a year after that, on the tail fin of a 747 jet (I might be over simplifying the ease of building an arts organisation empire) - you need to make it bigger again and again!

Put simply, photoshop is good if you know the size at which you want to use or reproduce the work you're creating. If the work might need to be used at various sizes (like a logo) - it's no good. For that you'll need a 'vector' image editor such as Adobe Illustrator.

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The square on the left represents 4 pixels in Photoshop.

The square on the right represents those 4 pixels enlarged in Photoshop by 200% - 4 pixels becomes 16.

This means that with 4 original pixels, Photoshop has had to 'make up' 12. There is more 'false' information than 'true' information.

You'll notice that the sharp definition between black and white has been lost. Photoshop has used an algorithm to make it's best guess, based on the original content, at how to trick our eyes.

If you've ever printed an image off of the web and it's looked pixelated and blurred, this is why.

Caveat:

The algorithms that Photoshop uses to enlarge or shrink images have improved and continue to improve. Some enlarging is ok. To what amount depends on your original image. As a rule of thumb though, if your image has clean definition, strong edges etc, avoid. If you're working with tone and texture, you might get away with something like 20-30%.

Adobe will almost certainly begin to use AI in this area of photoshop. At the moment the scaling algorithms all use the information contained within your image, but it's likely that they will soon be using information from elsewhere to 'learn' what your image contains and to better predict the new information needed. strange times.

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Because of the huge amount of information contained within a bitmap image - every single pixel has to be remembered as well as lots of other info - Photoshop documents can quickly become huge! This can cause less powerful computers some problems as they run a complex piece of software AND manage the information contained within the image or images being processed AND are asked to reconfigure the entire image and all it contains.

Not only can these large files push your PC to its limits, they also take up a lot of storage and can be slow to pass across sharing platforms.

All of these issues have been made less problematic by improvements to hardware over the years, but limitations are still evident.

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Broadly speaking there are two forms of digital image making software. Bitmap (Adobe Photoshop) and the other is Vector (Adobe Illustrator).

The two are not interchangeable. They specialise in different things and have different purposes.

Broadly speaking, everything that I have described photoshop as being good at, illustrator is bad at.

Everything I have described Photoshop as being bad at, Illustrator specialises in.

Designing a logo? Illustrator is the tool for you as the output artwork can be rescaled to absolutely any size without the slightest alteration to image quality

Where a photoshop file might be hundreds of Megabytes or even Gigabytes in size, an illustrator file will be Kilobytes. An average PC shouldn't have any issue with an illustrator file.

Again, broadly speaking, Photoshop images might not look digital - they might be photographic or digitally painted to mimic real world artefacts. Illustrator files have the clean and precise look of digital imagery (as illustrator advances, it grows texture and other 'real world' aesthetic capabilities but these do not come close to 'real' or 'photographic'.

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Photoshop is so adaptable (remember, it's a toolkit) that's impossible to show one type of work and say "this is what it does".

Speaking very broadly though, we can categories Photoshop's use into 3 distinct areas.

1. Working on images that are generated outside of Photoshop - 'airbrushing' photos for publication. Tweaking colour and tone values of photographs or scanned work.

2. Working on images that are a mix of digital and analogue. Bringing 'real world artefacts' into a digital sphere in order to create work which is a mix of both.

3. Working on images that are entirely digital. These may appear cleanly digital or they may ape traditional analogue image making processes.

Let's look at some examples of these 3 categories.

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This is a GQ cover from 2003 depicting the actor Kate Winslet. Famously, she kicked up a storm when a digitally augmented (photoshopped) rather than original photo of her was used. It is through this sort of use that the verb 'photoshopped' has entered common parlance.

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Here's a photograph that's had a bit of the old Photoshop treatment in order to adjust tonality and colour.

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My own illustration practice falls firmly in this category. Essentially I draw components and textures by hand and then scan them into Photoshop where they are coloured and composed into 1 final image.

For example this image consists of 4 separate drawings of the cyclists whilst the clouds, sky and greenery are all made from a single ink mark that has been repeated. All components were created in black ink and coloured digitally in photoshop. There is no 'original' image of this illustration.

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Although more complex than the previous illustration, this again uses the exact same techniques to bring together many drawn elements and real world artefacts to create one single image. I think of this process as a form of collage. First I draw, create or gather the 'bits', then I take them into photoshop and then I collage them together into one, final image.

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Dermot Power for Star Wars The Force Awakens

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Photoshop can be used to generate images from scratch. Photoshop 'Brushes' can be made to emulate the characteristics of real media - watercolour/oil/charcoal/pencil etc - and so work created in Photoshop can have an infinite array of visual characteristics. This is one of the primary reasons for its success.

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Irish artist Dermot Power trained as a painter and worked, in the early 90's as a comic artist.

When he began getting work in the world of concept art for film and TV, he realised that working in paint was a disadvantage - it took too long and meant lugging his materials around from studio to studio - often all over the world. Photoshop was the answer (far easier to pack a laptop and tablet than a full artist's studio).

Using his understanding of paint, application and colour theory - not to mention world class draughtsmanship - Power has spent the last 20 years becoming one of the most in-demand and respected concept artists working. The following are all digital...

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The illustrator Kyle Webster, specialises in working with Photoshop and makes his own brushes in order to create a wide variety of styles.

At one point he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year simply from selling the digital brushes that he made. He now works for Adobe and his brushes are exclusively available through Photoshop.

Making brushes in photoshop isn't hard - it's relatively easy to important textures or other ephemera and turn them into usable brushes - making GOOD brushes that emulate real world materials isn't so easy and it's obvious Webster has built a lot of technical know-how to achieve what he achieves.

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So that's our introduction to what Photoshop is and what it does. You may be frustrated that we didn't USE photoshop today but in my experience a little bit of time spent building some understanding now can save a lot of issues later.