Photoshop 7.0 for Curious Beginners - Summer 2004

Welcome to Photoshop! This session is offered to give you an overview of some of Photoshop's more powerful features. It is by no means detailed training, but a hands on season that will allow you see for yourself what's possible. Part One – Get acquainted with the work area We'll start by opening an image and exploring the Photoshop desktop with its tools, palettes and menu bar features. Using the paint brush, we'll paint on the image and learn how to change colors and tool options. We'll rewrite history with history palette. We'll also talk briefly about bitmapped mapped images, resolution and file size. Part Two – The File Browser We'll use the file browser to look at a folder of images and learn how it can help us manage our digital image collections. Part Three – Learning to make selections In Photoshop you generally have to select something in order to edit it and it something is selected, the remaining portions of the image are generally protected. You can select parts of an image with geometric tools, freehand or by color. Using the Melon head file, we'll use the marquee tools, the lasso tool and the magic wand. We'll also learn to move, clone and transform selections and crop the final image. Part Four - Photo-retouching Correcting photographs is probably one of the main uses for Photoshop for most of us. In this lesson we'll perform a sequence of steps on one photo to crop, adjust the tonal quality, and correct the color. Then we'll use the rubber stamp, healing brush and patch tool to remove unwanted objects from two other images. Part Five – Layers and composite images We'll learn about layered documents by combining images from several sources to create a poster. First we'll create a new blank file, then open two or three other images and select all or parts of them to drag into the new file. Each will appear in it's own layer, and we'll explore what you can do with layers in terms of positioning, transparency and selective removal of parts with the selection tools we learned earlier, plus the eraser and magic eraser. We'll hide and show layers to simplify editing, and add a text label. Finally we'll explore some effects we can apply to layers, such as drop shadows. We'll end by flattening the image to reduce file size. Barbara Meyer – EdTech Center for Life Sciences - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 164 Burrill Hall – ebmeyer@uiuc.edu