One of the newly enhanced features in Photoshop CS is the improved Help menu; but first, take note of the Photoshop Welcome screen.

 

 

There are some useful tutorials and information sources presented on this screen. The Setting Up Colour link under the Colour Management Setup heading is a good link to investigate. Clicking this link will reveal information on setting up colour profiles for your monitor and other devices so you will have some kind of consistency in your images (for example, printed images will be consistent with or appear similar in terms of colour to images on your monitor).

 

 If this seems a bit daunting at this stage don’t worry, you can set up your colours later if you wish by choosing Edit->Colour Settings from the Photoshop menu bar. (Colour settings and monitor calibration will be dealt with in more detail in lesson 4.4.)

 

Under the What’s New heading, you can see links to Adobe Acrobat files describing the Photoshop CS enhancements and new features. These files come with Photoshop CS and are automatically located on your system when you install Photoshop (they are located in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS\Help).

 

If you have an Internet connection, you can take advantage of two links (Advanced Techniques, and What’s New Movie) that are available online.

 

Clicking the Close button in the lower right of the welcome screen will make it disappear. If you clear the checkbox labelled Show this dialog at start up, before you close the welcome screen, it will not appear again when you start Photoshop CS. (You can always get it back by choosing Help->Welcome Screen from the Photoshop menu bar).

Once you get past the Welcome Screen, your key access point for getting help is the Help menu located on the far right of the Photoshop menu bar.

 

If you have an Internet connection, you can access Photoshop Online from the Help menu. This option will open an Adobe Photoshop web site in your Internet browser. On this site you can find links to information, tutorials, and a search engine to help you find the answers you need.

 

You can also select the Updates option from the help menu, which (if you have an Internet connection) will open a web page containing available updates for versions of Photoshop back to version 5.0.2.

 

The Systems Info option will display a window containing Information on your computer processor, memory, resources available to the Photoshop program, and a list of the installed plug-ins for Photoshop.

 

In the lower section of the help menu, you will find a comprehensive list of topics, each having a right pointing arrow (black triangle) next to it. A right pointing arrow indicates that there is a sub menu available for the given item. If you let your mouse pointer hover on a menu item with a right pointing arrow, the associated sub menu will appear. This feature is consistent across all Photoshop menus, not just the help menu. A menu item with three dots after it (such as Photoshop Help…) will display a window or dialog box when clicked. This is also consistent across all Photoshop menus.

 

When you select a sub menu item from a help topic, a page will open in your Internet browser displaying step by step instructions about the given task as well as hyperlinks to more information. You do not need an Internet connection to access these help pages or hyperlinks as they were installed with Photoshop CS and are stored locally on your system.

 

 

 This is an example of one of the HTML help pages packaged with Photoshop CS.

 

If you select the Photoshop Help option from the Help menu (or press the F1 key), a locally stored HTML page (the page shown above) will open with the following hyperlink options located in the upper part of the grey navigation panel at the left of the page.

 

Using Help	When you click on this link, the navigation panel will display links to instructions on the use of the other help components (contents, index, site map, and search). Clicking on one of these links will display the corresponding help instructions in the large area of the page next to the grey navigation panel.
Contents	The contents link will display a table of contents comprised of hyperlinks in the navigation panel. Clicking on one of these links will display corresponding information or links to other pages.
Index	Clicking the index link will display an alphabetized list of links to various help topics. Clicking on a letter in the index will display its corresponding list of help topic links.
Site Map	The site map link will provide a comprehensive list of available links to the locally stored help pages
Search	The search link will provide a search engine that finds links to any help pages that contain the term you enter. To use this search option, java script must be enabled in your browser.

 

You can also select Help -> How to Create How Tos -> Create your own How to from the Photoshop menu bar. This option will display instructions for adding your own how to content to the Photoshop help files and for adding entries to the help menu. The concept of customizing the help menu and adding help pages will be dealt with in detail in the Photoshop CS Advanced manual.