Alright, let's go ahead now and we will start off in Photoshop CS3 here. So let's launch up the program and we are going to go ahead and start with some basic Preference Settings that are going to help us stay on the same page here, while we work throughout this series.

So I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+K on the PC, Command+K on the Mac and that's going to bring up your General Preferences dialog box here and there's a couple of things that I want you to turn On and a couple of things to turn Off, while we are working through this dialog box.

We are going to start off by turning On Automatically Launch Bridge because as a photographer, you definitely need to start using the Bridge as kind of your second hand while you're working with Photoshop. It's going to be a great asset to you for manging your digital files and also for keeping you organized and for launching different files in different applications throughout the series as well. So go ahead and turn On Automatically Launch Bridge.

Next, we're going to come down here and we are going to turn Off Export Clipboard and I am going to do that because of the fact that when you switch between applications, if you have a lot of information stored on the clipboard, it's going to be tough to switch between applications without getting error messages or having trouble exporting the clipboard because of not enough memory and different things like that. So we are going to turn that Off, just to avoid that little hiccup that actually happens quite a lot when you are working between Adobe Applications, so we are going to turn that Off.

Let's move over here to the right-hand side and I am going to turn off Use Shift Key for Tool Switch. What this is going to allow me to do is just have faster access to all the different tools that are on the left-hand side over here on the toolbar, when you're working inside of Photoshop.

Next thing we are going to do is turn on Zoom Resizes Window, now this is an option that's automatically turned on Macs but we are going to go ahead and turn that on the PC as well because it is just helpful for zooming in and out of images and have your Image window resize with you, so that you don't get lost with the Window staying the same size and he image getting bigger.

The last thing we are going to take a look at is this Zoom with Scroll Wheel and you can either turn this on or off, I am going to give you the option to leave it on or off simply because some people like it and some people don't. I, for one, don't enjoy this, I am going to go ahead and leave that turned off for now, but if you want to turn that on, go right ahead and do so.

Now let's go ahead and we'll click the next button, we are going to move into the Interface Preferences here. Inside the Interface Preferences, there's a couple of things that I want you to take a look at, the first of which is used, Gray Scale Toolbar icon. If you turn that on, you'll notice over here on the left-hand side, that the Toolbar icon went completely to neutral gray. This is just going to help to keep your eyes from averting to that one spot of color in the user interface. I find a lot of times when you are working inside of Photoshop, you want to minimize the amount of colors you see, other than what's in the Image window itself, so turning that on and off is actually quite a handy little thing to have.

The next thing I want you to make sure that you have turned off is Show Channels in Color, we'll take a look at exactly what this means in a later chapter, but for now we're going to make sure this is turned off because it is going to give us some more accurate preview on working with our channels here inside of Photoshop CS3. So make sure that's turned off.

And then go ahead now and we will click Next again to jump into the File Handling Preferences. Here inside the File Handling Preferences dialog box, which you want to make sure you come down here and do is change maximize PSD and PSB File Compatibility, we are going to change that to Never and you want to do that simply because if you maximize PSD and PSB file compatibility, you are actually increasing the size of the Photoshop file and you are really going to maximize the file size of your Photoshop documents and it's just going to be kind of a pain if you are not switching between other applications. So you want to change this to Ask, if you are switching applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, Photoshop and InDesign, but for this particular series we are just going to be mainly inside of Phostoshop and Adobe Bridge. You don't need this turned on because it's just going to get bulkier files and there's really no need for this, go ahead and turn that to Never.

Now there's another thing that you can take a look at here inside this dialog box and that is Prefer Adobe Camera Raw for editing JPEGs. Yes, you can edit JPEGs using Adobe's Camera Raw now, it's an amazing new feature and we are going to cover that in the Camera Raw chapter. So I am going you give you the option to turn this on or off now but after you go through the actual Camera Raw chapter, you might want to go back and turn this on anyway because you'll see just how powerful an Editing tool Camera Raw can be for your JPEG files.

But now you're going to do is, we are going to click Next we're going to click that twice and now we are going to come into the cursor's dialog and inside of the cursor's window, there's a couple of things I want you to be aware of here. The first of which is over here into the Brush Tip options, you have the option of setting it to Normal or Full Size. I actually prefer working with Normal but you can set it to Full Size if you wish and what Full Size does is give you an accurate preview of exactly how many pixels are actually affected by a particular Soft Edge brush. So you see here it's a little bit wider that the main stream of the brush, that's simply because this brush right here affects more that just those central pixels that are in the main stream, it affects all these arid pixels out here as well. So, if you want that full and accurate preview, go ahead and turn that on. I actually don't want to work with that for my particular preference, so I am going to set that back to Normal Brush Tip.

Now the other thing I am going to have you turn on in here is the Show Crosshair in Brush Tip, this is just going to give you just a more precise cursor, so you know exactly where the center point of that brush is and give you more accurate way of making brush stroke here inside of Photoshop.

The last thing we are going to talk about in this dialog box is the other cursors, go ahead and change that to Precise, this will just going to give you a more precise cursor when you are making stuff like reference points for color and all other different types of things like that. So we're just going to turn that to Precise so that we have a more accurate way of matching up our color points and all of our reference points we are going to set throughout the course of this series.

Let's go ahead now and we'll click Next twice again and we're going to jump into the Units and Measurements panel. In this dialog box, there is only one actual thing that we're going to change here and that is this Ruler Measurements up here. We're going to change this from Inches to Pixels and we are going to be changing this simply because pixels are the universal unit of measurement in digital imaging and it's just a whole lot easier to have not have to mess with the metric conversions and different things between inches and centimeters and all that kind of mess. So go ahead and change that from Rulers to Pixels and we are just going to use that as the basis for all of our measurements as we work throughout this series.

Now we can go ahead and we can click Next, actually three times and we are going to get into the Type options. In the Type options, there are a couple of things that I am going to set up here as well. We are going to make sure that we have Smart Quotes turned on as just a better rule of typography to have that turned on and we're also going to take a look down here at the Font Preview Size. Now by defa