Okie, today we are going to learn some of the basics of using photoshop and pixeling with it. :) I use Photoshop CS2 but any version is about the same as far as using it for pixels... Here we go!

Please open up Photoshop :)

For starters we are going to learn how to simply open up an image and begin to work with it. For this we will start with some line art. You can use my strawberry if you would like.

Save it to your hard drive somewhere you can find it, then Open it in photoshop. You can do this a couple of diffrent ways.
1. Click on File - Open - and then browse to where you have it saved 2. Open the folder you have it saved in and simply drag it over and drop it into photoshop.

Ok, so now we have our strawberry saved and opened in photoshop, it should look something like this:


Next we are going to make the .gif image so that we can work with it easier later on and create layers (next lesson, but go ahead and do this now) to do this click on Image - Mode and select RGB like so:
Next thing I will do is pick the colors I am going to use. To do this you can click on the 'set foreground color' (note: you can click the back ground color and set it also so you will have your second color ready to go, just have to click it to switch to it, you can click back and forth this way).
To set the color, left click once on the color box:
and it will bring up a color picker like this:
Here you have all sorts of ways to pick colors so just play around with it a bit and find a color you would like to start with. :)

Now we will set up our tools so we can pixel! To start with we will set our drawing tool.

Right click one time on it and you should get this little menu:

Select "Pencil Tool"
Now we will set the size of our tool to 1. This is what I do all my pixel work in, of course you are free to use whatever size you want, I'm just showing how I do it :)
You should now see in the upper left corner, the icon is a pencil and next to it will have something that says Brush and a number, in this example it is 7 because that is the size I am using to make my circles ;)


Now, if you click the little arrow you will get a drop down box with a slider, you can slide this up and down to make your pencil size or you can type in a number. For now we will slide this down to 1. This is the size of a pixel. The setting of 1 is = to 1 pixel. Easy peasy, huh? : )

Ok, we are almost ready to start, but before we do, lets get our erasor ready, I'm sure, if you are anything like me, you will need it hehe :) it is very similar to how we set the pencil up but just a little bit diffrent. We are going to click on the erasor button:

Once we have that so it is selected, if you look up just a little bit, you will see the erasor icon, where it says Brush, and another choice that says Mode:

As shown in the picture, we want to set it to Pencil. This will give us a block shaped erasor to match our pixel pencil tool. Also, select the Brush option and set it to 1 just like you did above setting the pencil tool.

So now we will draw with one pixel at a time and erase with one pixel at a time. That is really all there is too the basics of using photoshop to pixel with. :) Other than zooming in and out and saving your file once you are done which I will show you now. :)
To zoom you can simply Click on the zoom tool to zoom in:


To zoom out (or to zoom in a diffrent way) You can click on View at the top of the screen and you will get this dialog box:

Selecting 'Actual Pixels' will show you what it will look like at its normal size. :)

Saving:
You can do this diffrently if you would like, this is just how I do it becuase I like psd files of everything so I can go back to them later and fiddle if I want to. So, we are basicly going to save this twice. first. click on File, Save As and it will bring up a dialog box.


In the top box, call your file whatever you would like and then choose Save. Now you have a PSD file saved you can go back and edit any time. This will especially come in handy once you start using layers and other things, which I will talk about in the next lesson. :)
But for now we are going to save our strawberry as a transparent gif :) So we will click on File, and then choose "Save for Web" you will get a box that looks like this:

Don't let it scare you, for now all we are going to do is click 'Save" and you will get another box that looks like this:

You can change the name of your image and call it whatever you want then click on Save again and you are done! Wasnt that simple :) These are just the very basics of using photoshop for pixeling. In the next tutorial I do I will be going over layers and how to use them as well as some other things. I hope that someone finds this helpful! :)

Ready for more? Let's go on to lesson 2!