Understanding photoshop

Today I got Photoshop on my laptop, so I decided to experiment with it in order to understand how to use it before I start creating my film poster and magazine cover. I have found it very difficult to understand but I have found some tutorials on what effects I want to use so I am going to try and follow them in order to make it as professional looking as possible.  

 



Here I am trying to understand the different layers that are on the
page. The layers include my plain white background and the
image that i have place upon it. So if I only wanted to draw on
layer one then I would click layer one and everyting that I did
would only go onto layer one.

Here I used the slice select in order to crop
the background that is surrounding the phallic
symbol (the knife). I wanted to remove this in
order to make it look more professional, however
once I had cropped it you couldn't tell that it was
a knife. So I don't think I will be using this for my
final piece.

Here is the image after I used crop option on the image in
order to see another perspectivce. However this was less effective,
and I didn't like it so I decided to look at the different blending
options whilst I was experiement. This was to make it look more
sleek and professional.

Here is another image I have decided to start
working on. So I started to crop the image using
the slice tool.

Here I starting pressing different tools so I could
see what they were for, and I found one that
alters the opacity, which I may consider
using on my final piece.



Here is a break down of the tool bar that I have access to
and then a further breakdown of what else the tools
can do.