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The basics of Photoshop are relatively easy to pick up, but can seem a bit of a mystery when you first come to the program, thanks to its somewhat unintuitive interface and lack of simple tutorials.

Upon first inspection you will see that Photoshop is basically made up of four areas: the menu bar, at the top, the toolbar just below it, the toolbox on the left and the palettes on the right. The different modes and options you can choose are located in the menu bar and toolbox which always stay the same. The toolbar will change with the context.

The palettes are there to show the current status of your image, including the history of all the actions you have used and a thumbnail overview of how the ‘big picture’ currently looks.

Let’s take a look at how the interface changes depending on use. From the toolbox, select the type tool (it looks like a capital T). Notice how the toolbar changes completely to enable you to set the font name, size etc.

Now notice the updates in your palettes. The type tool modification will be added to your history in the history palette, and a new layer will be generated for your text and displayed in the layers palette.

Whatever you’re trying to do in Photoshop, then, the chances are that your starting point will be either the toolbox or the menus. While the toolbox contains everyday tools such as selecting, filling and making shapes, the menus have more complicated functions like blurring, sharpening, and all the other effects Photoshop can achieve (mostly to be found under the Filter menu).

When you have selected a tool from the toolbox, you can alter its settings using the toolbar - options from the menu will generally open a dialog box. Finally, when you want to go back and alter something that you already put on the image, you can use the palettes, although they have some other uses too, notably changing colours.