David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

The Very Basics

You'll find very little nerd terminology in this book. You will, however, encounter a few terms and concepts that you'll see frequently in your computing life:

• Clicking. To click means to point the arrow cursor at something onscreen and then—without moving the cursor at all—press and release the clicker button on the mouse (or laptop trackpad). To double-click, of course, means to click twice in rapid succession, again without moving the cursor at all. And to drag means to move the cursor while keeping the button continuously pressed.

  When you're told to Shift-click something, you click while pressing the Shift key. Ctrl-clicking (in Windows) and ⌘-clicking (on the Mac) work the same way—just click while pressing the corresponding key on your keyboard.

  Note

  On Windows PCs, the mouse has two buttons. The left one is for clicking normally; the right one produces a tiny shortcut menu of useful commands.

  Desktop Macs come with a mouse that looks like it has only one button but can actually detect which side of its rounded front you're pressing. If you've turned on the feature in the Keyboard & Mouse pane of System Preferences, you, too, can right-click things on the screen. You can right-click on a Mac laptop by clicking while resting two fingers on the trackpad.

  So if you have a Mac, and you see the phrase, "Right-click the photo," well, right-click the photo. If nothing happens, then you haven't turn on this feature in System Preferences. If you can't be bothered, then Control-clicking achieves the same effect.

• Keyboard shortcuts. Every time you take your hand off the keyboard to move the mouse, you lose time and potentially disrupt your creative flow. That's why many experienced computer fans use keystroke combinations instead of menu commands wherever possible. Pressing ⌘-P (on the Mac) or Ctrl+P (on the PC) opens the Print dialog box, for example.

  When you see a shortcut like ⌘-Q, it's telling you to hold down the ⌘ key, and, while it's down, type the letter Q, and then release both keys.

If you've mastered this much information, you have all the technical background you need to enjoy Digital Photography: The Missing Manual.