Introduction to Photoshop CS4

About This Course

Learn to use Adobe Photoshop CS4 to edit images, process photos, and create original graphics. Whether you're a photographer, graphic artist, or just want to alter old family photos, Photoshop is the program for you! Discover the fastest and most effective ways to use Photoshop from an expert and columnist for Photoshop User magazine (who has twice been nominated for the Photoshop Hall of Fame).

This course will teach you how to use Photoshop with detailed, step-by-step instructions that you'll have no trouble following--even if you've never used a computer for graphics before!

Photoshop CS4 has a host of impressive new features for photographers, and you'll meet a number of them. We'll begin with an introduction to the Photoshop environment. Next you'll learn how to create simple digital paintings. Then you'll be editing your own photographs to remove red-eye, get rid of dust and scratches, and correct image exposure. You'll also learn how to switch the backgrounds on images and how to remove wrinkles and blemishes from photos, just like they do in magazines.

By the time you finish this fun, hands-on, project-oriented course, you'll be well on your way to expressing yourself with the most exciting graphics program ever developed!

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Sherry London.

Sherry London is a noted Photoshop and Illustrator expert, an artist, a writer, and a teacher. Her fiber art has been featured in magazines and exhibitions. Her published works include Photoshop CS2 Gone Wild, Photoshop Magic, Photoshop Effects Magic, Photoshop In Depth, Photoshop Textures Magic, and Illustrator f/x and Design. She wrote the Tips and Tricks column for Photoshop User magazine for many years and is a two-time nominee to the Photoshop Hall of Fame. She has taught for the prestigious Thunder Lizard Photoshop Conference and the Professional Photographers of America seminars, as well as for Drexel University, Moore College of Art, and Gloucester County College. Sherry holds a Master's Degree in Information Systems and has taken doctoral-level courses in curriculum design. She is also a two-time nominee for the Photoshop Hall of Fame.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Today your journey begins. Whether you're an aspiring graphic artist or a weekend photographer, Photoshop is an adventure that can take you places you never dreamed. Even if you've never touched Photoshop before, you'll be able to open, edit, and save files before this lesson ends. You'll also learn how to download the images for the lessons.

Friday - Lesson 02

Photoshop's painting tools are a lot of fun to use. In fact, many students say that the brushes are Photoshop's nicest surprise. The brushes are Photoshop's most basic tool, even if you never want to paint anything. You'll use brushes to heal and fix images later in the course, so, in this lesson, we'll start with just the basic Brush tool and the various ways you can choose colors. Although no art talent is needed to use Photoshop's smart brushes, many students discover latent art ability that completely surprises them.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

In this lesson, you'll learn how to scroll around your image so you can more easily see the pixels as you edit an image. You'll find out how to erase, blur, smudge, and finger paint on your images. You'll also discover how to recover from mistakes by using the History Brush tool.

Friday - Lesson 04

Making a black and white image from a color one is a much sought-after skill. Today you'll find out how it's done. You'll even learn how to add back a little of the color to create a nice effect. Creating sepia-tone images is another popular topic, and you'll be amazed at how easy it is in Photoshop. In addition, we'll cover some of the tricks you can do with the History Brush tool and history snapshots.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Photoshop needs to be told if you want to make a major change to a specific part of an image. In this lesson, you'll learn the critical skill of making selections. You'll see how easy it is to isolate rectangular or circular portions of your image so you can add a filter or change the colors of that area. You'll also practice creating vignettes, which are photos with an opaque center that falls off to a very soft edge. It's a great technique to use on a portrait when you don't like the original background. If you don't like the selection you just made, you'll get help from the fabulous new Photoshop CS4 Refine Edges command.

Friday - Lesson 06

Photoshop has some great selection tools, but until now, all of them have had trouble selecting exactly what you had in mind. You can see the flower, so why can't Photoshop? Today you'll learn how to use the Lasso, Magic Wand, and Quick Selection tools as you practice making composites by putting two images together.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

This is the lesson that makes students ask for more. It comes as a surprise to many that you can have so much control over the performance of a brush. You can make brushes that change color as you paint and that seem to dance across an image. You can even create brushes that look like stitches on a quilt and that follow the direction of your cursor. Learn to create brushes from any section of a photo and use them as a stamp anywhere else in your image.

Friday - Lesson 08

Gradients are fountains of color that encompass all the colors in a blend of a starting and an ending color. One of the current trends in photography is to colorize areas of a photo with a gradient. You can spend hundreds of dollars purchasing gradient-colored stock photos—or just use what you learn in this lesson to create them yourself. Even portraits can be much more exciting with a gradient added to them.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Whether you want to add type to a scrapbooking layout, make large type for display, or learn a little bit about Photoshop's Layer Styles, you'll enjoy this lesson. You'll try your hand at making type that warps, wiggles, and wraps around a circle. Then you'll see what you can do to text on your own.

Friday - Lesson 10

Today you'll learn how to size your images for printing or for the Web. You'll find out how to scan an image so it's large enough for your needs, but not too large, and how to crop images that have more than you really want to see.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

In this lesson, we'll focus on the three R's of photo manipulation: Retouching, Restoring, and Rearranging. You'll be amazed by what you can do—and you'll understand why the phrase "pictures can't lie" is no longer true! You'll also discover how to use the amazing Clone Stamp panel and the new "see-through" feature on the Cone Stamp tool.

Friday - Lesson 12

Sometimes you mean to photograph an image so it shows a yellow color cast; sometimes you don't. In this final lesson, you'll see how to get rid of an unintended color cast. Photoshop can't work miracles all the time, but if you have an image that's a bit too dark or a bit too light, you can fix it up so that it looks perfect.

Requirements

Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Windows) or Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Mac), Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended, or any version of Adobe Creative Suite CS4 that includes the Adobe Photoshop CS4 or Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended software (software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins); Microsoft ® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista™ Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit editions) on Intel ® Pentium® 4, Intel Centrino®, Intel Xeon®, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor; Mac OS X v.10.4.8 or higher (on PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor); Internet access; e-mail; and the Internet Explorer or Netscape or Firefox Web browser; A minimum of 512MB RAM (at least 1GB recommended); 1024x768 monitor resolution with at least a 16-bit video card; 64MB video RAM.