Adobe illustrator cs4 basic tutorials pdf free download

Got a favorite tutorial that belongs on our list? We want to hear from you, so leave your comments below! With his team of designers and experts, he helps customers put forth the best possible impression with high-quality collateral. Wow, what a great collection of illustrator tutorials! Seriously… I have about a third of these open in new browser tabs ready to bookmark and try out.

Thanks for a great roundup! I am trying submit designs for a t-shirt organization, however whenever i submit the design it gets rejected due to pixel, cos they cannot print it due to pixel.. I use adobe photoshopt cs Please assist me with my question. Informative tutorials! Thanks for sharing. We are the standard bearer of online folder printing delivering absolute quality infused with the design knowledge of an advertising agency.

Learn More. New Here? Shop Folders. Download Free PDF. The complete beginners guide to Adobe Illustrator Get started.

Rizwan Chowdhury. A short summary of this paper. Almost all of the principles demonstrated and covered will apply to future and previous versions.

Some diferences may apply if you are using a previous or future version. Also I will also be a workspace recommending my the workspace that I use that I ind really efective. Tho unlike the brush tool, the blob tool does not work along a vector path, the blob tool essentially creates and builds vector shapes. I will be taking you through some of the details you need consider as we set up a new document.

You can also download Adobe Illustrator This software contains Mercury Performance System which will improve your workflow by providing the speed on large files.

It has many extended effects and textures, blurs, shadows and it preserve their aspects in spite changing of the resolution. You will also see support for cross media design so that you can adapt to your preferences. There is an attractive and very interactive interface which will maximize your vector graphics.

(PDF) How To Do Everything with Adobe Photoshop CS4 – Tutorial | Catalin Birlea – – Create beautiful vector art.

It is imperative, therefore, to create teaching tools that encourage shared power in the classroom between student and instructor.

Such tools help students co-create their learning environments, are life giving, and essential to building growth-fostering relationships. Empathy is essential and the foundation in building relationships. In this dissertation I add spirituality to the framework, as I believe it is essential for college students to experience life giving learning environments in graphic design classrooms, and build meaningful relationships.

Titali Mahine Martinez Flores. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we’ll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Photoshop cs4 tutorials.

Charles Gibson. Abstract This tutorial has a massive 89 steps detailing the entire process to achieve the image above and don’t worry, all my tutorials can be done by anyone who has basic knowledge of Photoshop. Related Papers. You only need to learn and use the way that you like best.

To open a file, choose File Open. For this chapter, you can open one of your own images, or just follow along. Similar to what you might find in your web browser when you have multiple web pages open in the same window, Photoshop groups documents into tabs when more than one file is open at a time: To cycle through open documents, use the keyboard shortcut CTRL-TAB for both platforms.

Then, while still holding those keys, simply click anywhere on the image to zoom into that area. As before, click with those keys held down to zoom out. Another way to think of this is that it moves the camera, not the actor.

But the current version of Photoshop has actually added a little improvement. This will cause your image to zoom in until you release the mouse button. The Magic of Navigating with Keyboard Shortcuts The really cool thing about navigating documents with the keyboard shortcuts just mentioned is that they toggle only navigational tools. Using any other navigation method, you would need to move your cursor to change the view of the document, and perhaps go back and select the Brush tool again after that.

Who has the time and patience to do that? The Navigator Panel The Navigator panel is another way that you can navigate documents see Figure As you drag the slider at the bottom of the Navigator panel to the right, you zoom into the image. Dragging to the left zooms back out. Once you zoom in, a little red rectangle on the image preview in the Navigator panel appears, representing the portion of the image you are now seeing in the main document window. You can drag that rectangle around to see different portions of your image, which is similar to what you saw previously with the Hand tool.

As with all other panels in Photoshop, if the Navigator panel is not visible, you can select it Tip from the Window menu at the top of the interface to reveal it in all of its navigational glory. Tools Instead of using keyboard shortcuts to toggle navigational tools, you can select them from the Tools panel on the left side of the interface.

You can select the Zoom tool which looks like a magnifying glass, shown next to zoom in and out. To change the view of your image, you can select the Hand tool in the Tools panel, right above the Zoom tool. Once you select the tool, simply drag your image around to change your view. The Application Bar Mentioned briefly earlier in this chapter, the Application bar is a new feature that provides quick access to commonly used tools.

This is used for temporarily rotating your image. As with the Hand tool, this only changes your view, not the image itself. In previous versions of Photoshop, you might find enclosed in the package a sheet listing all shortcuts. But this list is absent from recent versions. A few versions ago, Photoshop introduced the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts.

Instructions on how to do that were provided earlier in this chapter. However, by going to Edit Keyboard Shortcuts, you can get a list of all keyboard shortcuts in addition to customizing them. Be aware that not all keyboard shortcuts will be on this list.

The bulk of our study in this chapter will be about layers. Layers are perhaps the most critical element of Photoshop and can greatly increase your efficiency and the quality of your final product.

Your ability to use Photoshop well will largely depend upon your ability to use layers well. I usually like to start my projects, especially artistic projects, with a brand-new document.

This way I can ensure that my document is set up to the correct specs for output. If you start with an existing project that is too small, it might be impossible later to make it large enough to print.

At first this dialog box can be intimidating as you glance around at all the empty fields. And Photoshop also has your back. Photoshop understands that this is a little overwhelming to new users.

It also knows that even if you are a total pro and know exactly what you should put in every field, it gets tedious filling out all this technical info. These presets are nicely arranged into a variety of categories based on different workflows. Figure shows the drop- down list of presets. People in the video world, web graphic designers, print graphic designers, those who create content for mobile phones and portable devices, those in the film industry, photographers, and many more use Photoshop on a daily basis.

And for each of them, Photoshop has document presets ready to get them started. Each preset also has a variety of sizes to choose from that are common to that medium or industry.

For example, if you were to select the Web preset and then click the Size drop-down list, you would be presented with most common computer screen resolutions, as well as some sizes useful for web graphics. You can change the unit of measurement to a variety of units.

The default unit of measurement in Tip the United States is inches. For web and video documents, inches are irrelevant. The Truth about Resolution The term resolution is tossed around a lot these days. It is quite possible to have an image that is high resolution, but is still low quality.

What Are Pixels? When Photoshop refers to resolution, it refers to how many pixels are in a given area. So, before we understand resolution, we need to learn a little about pixels. Name Your Stuff! Better to accept the fact that naming files and layers is just a part of life, and name your Photoshop documents. The fewer pixels in a given area like images. When there are more pixels in an image, they will be smaller and less conspicuous, and the resolution will be higher. Resolution on a computer screen is expressed in pixels per inch ppi.

This is because computer monitors have pixels. Printers and scanners often print and scan using dots or lines. When we refer to the resolution of these and other such devices, we use the terms dpi dots per inch and lpi lines per inch. People often mistakenly use the terms dpi and lpi when referring to computer files, even though computer screens have neither dots nor inches. However, most monitor specs read in terms of pixel dimensions, not dot dimensions.

The Bottom Line per Inch You must keep in mind resolution when you are creating your documents in Photoshop. Just because you tell Photoshop that you want to create a document that is 8. How many pixels are in those inches? For onscreen graphics and images, or for images intended for video or 3D programs, 72 ppi is the standard, because that is the resolution of computer monitors and TV screens.

Printed documents require smaller pixels to look clean, so the standard is usually about ppi. Even though ppi is a fairly common standard, you should never assume anything. I once designed a CD cover for an independent punk band, and I assumed that ppi would be fine. However, their CD production house recommended I create the art at ppi— twice the resolution that I was planning on. When asking your printing agency about resolution, be sure that you get the resolution for your Tip computer document, not the resolution of their printer.

The first person you ask about this may not know the correct answer. What they might be tempted to tell you is the resolution of their printer, which may be something like lpi. In most cases, this does not translate to document resolution. Document Color The rest of the fields used to create a basic document pertain to color. As such, you should use this color mode when using Photoshop to create images for 3D programs, video games, motion graphics, web graphics, or anything that will have its final output on a computer monitor or TV screen.

Use this color model for most jobs that will be commercially printed. Color Depth This is a huge can of worms. Until you get more proficient at Photoshop, leave this setting at 8 bit. In a nutshell, this refers to the number of possible colors. A 2-bit image would contain only four colors. An 8-bit image can contain Scientists estimate that the human eye can perceive about 10 million colors. So, for now, 8 bit will be fine. Background Color Ah, finally some respite from the mentally intensive properties used to create a new Photoshop document.

The Background Content drop-down list shown here essentially allows you to specify a background color for your document while you are creating it. From this list, you can choose to create a White background layer, a Background Color that is the same color as the current background color in the Tools panel, or simply to create a Transparent background layer. Introduction to Layers As previously mentioned, layers are an integral part of using Photoshop effectively.

They basically contain the various pieces of our documents. Think of the layers of a sandwich. But what if you wanted to remove the lactose from the Swiss cheese? In Photoshop terms, we would say that they are on the same layer. If you add the paint strokes onto the same layer with the photo, and then you want to make changes later move them, recolor them, change their transparency, and so on , you would be in trouble. It would be extremely difficult, and in some cases impossible.

Not to mention that the pixels that you painted over would also be ruined and would need to be repaired, which would probably take half an eternity.

On the other hand, if you create a new, blank layer and then paint on that, it would be extremely simple to adjust the paint stroke. And painting on a new, separate layer would have the added benefit of leaving the pixels of your photo untouched.

The Layers Panel The Layers panel is really the hub of our layers-centric workflow. Figure shows the Layers panel in all of its layered glory. If your Layers panel is not visible, you can retrieve it from the Window menu at the top of the interface. Notice in Figure that when you create a new document, a background layer is already created for you.

Photoshop actually offers several different types of layers: plain old layers, background Note layers, adjustment layers, text layers, smart object layers, and others. If you have Photoshop Extended, you can also have 3D or video layers. How to. Fiddle with the Background Layer By default, when you open a file or create a new document in Photoshop, it automatically creates a background layer for you.

This layer is locked to prevent you from accidentally performing certain changes to it, such as moving the layer or rearranging its layer order in the Layers panel. In some instances you might want to edit your background layer directly not edit a copy. If you are exporting to another program or to video or 3D work, you may want transparent areas in your background layer, so that other objects may show through beneath the layers in the Photoshop document.

For whatever reason, if you want to unlock your background layer, simply double-click it. A dialog box will pop up asking you for the name of the layer and for a few other properties of the layer. The new default name is Layer 0, as shown here. You are then free to use the layer as you please. The icon looks like a notebook page about to be turned. The page-turning icon used to create a new layer can be seen throughout Photoshop and in almost all Tip Adobe applications.

It is a universal icon indicating that something new will be created. Remember this if you ever get stumped. This works if you want to create a new brush in the Brushes panel, a new style in the Styles panel, a 3D light in the 3D panel, and so on.

The Layers panel will then show you that a new layer has been created. Photoshop automatically names it Layer 1. If you create another new layer which you can do by using the same method , the default name will be Layer 2, and so on.

Or if the layer is already created, you can rename it by double-clicking exactly the name of the layer and typing the new name. How many layers can you have in one document? As many as your computer can handle.

What Is That Checkerboard Pattern? But with the new layer that was created, you may have noticed that the layer thumbnail is a gray-and-white checkerboard pattern. What gives? It basically tells you that nothing is there.

You can change the size of the layer thumbnail by going to the fly-out menu of the Layers panel Tip and selecting Panel Options. From there, you can choose whether to make the thumbnail larger, smaller, or to hide the layer thumbnail entirely.

Hiding the layer thumbnail can help speed things along if you have a really big project with a lot of layers, or if you are on a slow computer. Just use the default Photoshop size from the Preset drop-down list, and make sure the Background Contents drop-down list is set to White.

Next, make a new layer by clicking the Create A New Layer button in the bottom right corner of the Layers panel. These two color swatches are the foreground and background color swatches. After clicking on that color swatch, we will meet an important new friend called the Color Picker see Figure In the center of the Color Picker, we have a tall, narrow bar from which to select the basic color.

You can drag the little arrows on the hue slider vertically, or you can simply click the color to use. Next, we need to go to the big square on the left to fine-tune this blue color. Now select the Brush tool by clicking it in the Tools panel, or by pressing B on your keyboard.

This turns your cursor into a paintbrush. Notice that the in Chapter 5. For now, make sure that your new, blank paint squiggle is on the new blank layer is selected, and just drag in your document to paint a layer we created, and not on the squiggle see Figure Create another new blank layer.

Go back to the swatch in the Tools panel, and open the Color Picker again. This time, change the color in the narrow color bar from blue to green, and click OK to accept. The layer with the green squiggle is on top of the layer with the blue squiggle in the Layers panel. And it also covers up the blue squiggle. But we can change this through the magic of layers. Simply click the layer with the green squiggle, and then drag it down below the layer with the blue squiggle see Figure This would be a great time to rename them discussed earlier in this chapter.

Another Project: Opacity and Layer Blending Another one of the features of using layers is that we can blend them together in interesting ways. The most simple and speedy way to blend layers together is by using opacity. Opacity is the opposite of transparency. Combining Images Before we adjust opacity to blend layers together, we need to have layers to blend. Our first step is to open multiple images. I will then repeat that multiple files, they show up as tabs process to open the file dark image.

To follow along, open in the Photoshop interface. Or you can just read and watch me work some sweet image-editing magic on these pictures.

These are displayed as tabs toward the top of the interface see Figure Click one of the tabs to switch documents. This is one of the new, cool features in Photoshop CS4. You have a couple of ways to do this. First, you can select one image and then copy and paste it onto the other one. In our example, we want to copy and paste the dark image on top of the light one. You can also select the entire image by going to the Select menu at the top and choosing All.

Tip You can also copy and paste by choosing those options from the Edit menu. To blend these by lowering the opacity of the top layer, click and drag on the word Opacity in the Layers panel. Figure shows what the project looks like now. Notice how the increased transparency of the dark image layer allows some of the light image beneath it to show through.

This allows for even more of the light image beneath to show through. The final result looks like the house is surrounded by early morning fog. Even if your only mission in Photoshop is to remove blemishes or annoying people from photographs, all photos essentially consist of variations in color.

Colors also have strange powers, with each color evoking different emotional responses. Just realize going into this chapter that it might feel a little incomplete. Entire books have been written on most of the following subjects. I cover here only what you need to know to get started with Photoshop. The Essentials of Color Before we get into how to use color in Photoshop, we first need to look at what makes up a color.

One color model that has always made sense to me is that of hue, saturation, and lightness. We see this model often in Photoshop as well. These three properties refer to different elements of a color. You can choose among several ways of looking at color, and great variations in terminology exist.

What Is Hue? Hue is what most people probably think of when they think of color. So, even though red and pink are different colors, they still share the same hue.

It uses the hue, Note saturation, and lightness model to adjust colors. Saturation is the intensity of a color. As we increase saturation, colors become more vibrant and intense. As we desaturate colors, they become faded and washed out.

Completely desaturating a color will produce gray. Figures and show a blue color with different levels of saturation. Note that both of these blues have the same hue and lightness. The only thing that has changed is the saturation. What Is Lightness? Lightness is a self-explanatory color property. Increasing lightness makes a color lighter closer to white , while decreasing lightness makes a color darker closer to black.

One of the most common tasks in any image editing program is to make things a little brighter. In lower-budget image editing programs and sometimes even in Photoshop , when you brighten an image, it universally brightens every pixel. The reverse is also true; when you darken every pixel in an image, you also darken the brightest pixel, completely losing pure white. Figures and show the same blue from Figure with varying amounts of lightness.

Pastel colors are created by increasing lightness and decreasing saturation. But when certain colors are used in certain ways, they do influence us. Sound farfetched? In contrast to stop and danger signs, infomercials want your money, so they FIGURE The blue swatch try to create feelings of reliability and stability.

This is typically from Figure with reduced done with blue, as it radiates professionalism and trust. I used examples with these two colors intentionally, because they can evoke such powerful responses from people.

Red and adjacent colors such as yellow and orange are referred to as warm tones. These are powerful colors that can create not only feelings of warning, but also passionate emotions such as anger or rage. See Figure to see how warm colors can add to the intensity of art. Or we can add just a little tint of these colors to create warmth instead of heat. If we have a photo, we can tint it with a warm color to add a little warmth.

Did You Know? About Tinting Like many concepts in the world of color, tinting can be confusing because the term is often used in different ways. In painting, a tint of a color means a color mixed with white to lighten the color, and a shade of a color is a color mixed with black to make it darker. Using this definition, pink is a tint of red. Essentially, it means to subtly add a color to an entire image.

This has an effect similar to using a colored filter on a camera lens. Perhaps the most common type of tinting is seen in sepia-toned images, which are photos that are black-and-white with a faint, dark yellow tint to them think of the first part of the Wizard of Oz. This subtle addition of color to an entire image is the definition of tint that I will be using throughout this book unless otherwise specified.

Also, as with warm colors, how the temperatures make you feel is a good guide to how the colors should be used. Cool things like a breeze or ice cream are generally seen as calming and relaxing. But cold things can create feelings of alienation or fear. Cool colors work the same way.

Used with restraint, cool colors create a relaxed feel. Used more intensely, they can create feelings of isolation. Figure shows an image as is, and Figure shows it tinted with cool colors. Does the image with the cool tint make you feel differently about it? What story does it tell that the original image does not? Because colder colors can create relaxed feelings, they are often the best choice for professional Tip circumstances, like bank logos and the already-mentioned infomercials.

Examine Restaurant Logos The use of colors in restaurant logos is a great way to study the effect that colors have on us. Notice that these logos are often the color of the foods that are served there. Most foods have earth tones, so it makes sense that red, yellow, and orange are used so often. These colors are also mostly found in comfort foods, which is another reason for these businesses to use them in their logos. Some restaurants want nothing to do with the greasy, unhealthy food served at these places.

Instead they want to serve fresh food that caters to a more health-conscious audience. So what color would you guess they would use in their logo? It is possible to create really intense art that has blue in it.

These are just general guidelines. But remember that they are guidelines because they resonate with human nature, not because some ancient nerd arbitrarily made this stuff up. Using Colors Together A friend and hero of mine, noted illustrator Bruce Heavin, once said something very profound about color that has always stuck with me. Like notes on a musical scale, colors become beautiful, ugly, intense, or out of place based on the colors that surround them. If we surround the pink heart with red hearts see Figure and more pink hearts, it would look like a card your mom might buy.

The Color Wheel The color wheel see Figure is a way to view the relationships between all colors. If you plan on doing any kind of art or design with Photoshop, I strongly suggest picking up a physical color wheel. Although I like to have mine in hand, you can also view color wheels online. Several different color wheels based on different models of color are available. Because the wheel shows color relationships, it becomes an invaluable help in choosing colors to paint or design with.

If you get stuck while designing a web site, DVD menu, or digital art piece, you can try one of these color schemes. These are also called the primary colors. Learning is a process which continues throughout the life of an artist, graphic designer, and illustrator. Along the way, designers find the task of mastering Adobe Illustrator a large obstacle which requires practice and experience in using the vector-based application. Practice comes in the form of Illustrator tutorials , which offer tips, tricks, and artistic styles from other designers who have mastered certain techniques based on their experience.

From these tutorials, a designer can polish their skillsets on a variety of topics which will strengthen their own artwork. Sometimes a simple tutorial has tips which may have been overlooked based on the subject of the tutorial.

By looking past the subjects of the tutorials, an endless array of learning opportunities exist. This post presents 40 excellent simple to complex Illustrator tutorials and presents the overall techniques of each tutorial, summarized in a brief overview. The purpose is to pick and choose among the tutorials based on the areas that need improvment. Whether your are a seasoned professional or a designer just starting out, these Illustrator tutorials offer a way to brush up on your skills. Inserting and formatting text Pg.

Placing images Pg. Working with objects Pg. Arranging Pg. Grouping Pg. Locking Pg. Applying Transparencies Pg. Applying Styles, Effects and Appearances Pg. Working with symbols Pg. Saving Pg. Figure 1. Navigation to Illustrator CS4 on a Mac. Figure 2. Opening a new document in Illustrator. Options include, but are not limited to: Page Size : Choose a page size from the menu, or type values for width and height. When you have entered all of your document settings, click OK.

Figure 3. Tools in Illustrator. Figure 4. Extra Tools in Illustrator. To Tearoff additional tools, do the following: 1. Figure 5. Sub-Toolbar in Illustrator. This helps to turn one shapeinto another Delete Anchor Point toolDeletes points from a path without causing a break in the path. Type toolCreates resizable and moveable text frames in which you can type text. Type on a Path toolUsed to type on an objects path. Line toolCreates straight lines. Ellipse toolCreates ellipse shapes that hold text.

Rectangle toolCreates rectangle shapes that hold text. Polygon toolCreates polygon shapes that hold text. Paintbrush toolDraws a path and applies a brush stroke simultaneously.