The Drawing Canvas

The drawing canvas is the area in which you will create and/or modify images. By default, Photoshop gives you a drawing canvas to work with, but you can easily open another one by using the "New" menu choice from the "File" menu item.

For the moment though, let's just use the default canvas given to us by Photoshop.

As you can see from the figure below, every drawing canvas has a title bar with window control buttons and a drawing area. If you have resized the drawing canvas so that the window is larger than the drawing area as we did before we took the screen capture below, Photoshop will fill the margin with a gray, un-paintable area.

The title bar has several functions. First off, it displays the current name of the image as well as information about the color mode and zoom scale. By default, the name will be "Untitled-1", but once you save the image, it will be changed to the name you saved the file under. The color mode and scale measure are more complex, so we will discuss them after we deal with the basics.

Another cool aspect of the title bar is that you can use the title bar to move the drawing canvas anywhere within the workspace by clicking and holding down the mouse button over the title bar and dragging the mouse. Try it out!

Finally, the title bar provides several control buttons. As with other applications, you can use the buttons to minimize , maximize or destroy the drawing canvas.

Before we go on, try working with your drawing canvas a bit. For example, try maximizing the canvas, minimizing the canvas, and then destroying the canvas.

Woops, just destroyed the canvas? That is okay, you can easily open a new canvas to draw on by choosing "New" from the "File" menu.

When you do so, the "New Canvas Dialog" will appear. You can use this dialog to create your own canvas. Try it out. Title your canvas MyCanavas1, set the Height to 132 pixels and the Width to 172 pixels, and hit the "OK" button. (Note that for the time being we won't worry about Mode or Resolution. We'll discus those later. For now just accept the defaults)

When you hit the "OK" button, you should see your new canvas popup. Try creating a second one for practice. This time, title the canvas "MyCanvas2" and set the size to 3 inches by 3 inches.

You should now have two canvases open. Try moving them around and switching between them. You can either select them by clicking on the title bar of the canvas you want or by selecting the name of the canvas from the "Window" menu item

The Menu Bar
Introduction to Web Design with Adobe Photoshop | Table of Contents
The Tool Box