Starting to work in Adobe Photoshop The Adobe Photoshop work area includes menus, toolbars, and panels that give you quick access to a variety of tools and options for editing and adding elements to your image. You can also add commands and filters to the menus by installing third-party software known as plug-ins. Photoshop works with bitmapped, digitized images (that is, continuous-tone images that have been converted into a series of small squares, or picture elements, called pixels). You can also work with vector graphics, which are drawings made of smooth lines that retain their crispness when scaled. You can create original artwork in Photoshop, or you can import images from many sources, such as: Photographs from a digital camera Commercial CDs of digital images Scans of photographs, transparencies, negatives, graphics, or other documents Captured video images Artwork created in drawing programs b Note: Typically, you won't need to reset defaults when you're Starting Photoshop and opening a file To begin, you'll start Adobe Photoshop and reset the default preferences.