If you want to work with photos or graphics, Photoshop is the program you most need to learn. Artists, photographers, designers, and hobbyists all rely on Adobe Photoshop for creating and editing images. Discover the fastest and most effective ways to use Photoshop from a 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 CS3 has a host of impressive new features for photographers, and you'll meet a number of them—including the newest way to fix JPG images that come from your digital camera. 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.

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Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. 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 One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

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 we finish this first lesson. You'll also find out how to download the images we'll use in class.

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 also Photoshop's most basic tools, so you'll want to know how to use them even if you never really need to paint anything. For example, you'll use brushes to heal and fix images later in the course. So we'll spend today's lesson practicing with the basic Brush tool. Although you won't need any art talent to use Photoshop's brushes, many students discover latent art ability that completely surprises them!

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Today, you'll learn how to scroll around your image so you can more easily see the pixels as you edit. You'll learn how to erase, and you'll meet one of Photoshop's neatest tricks: the Erase to History command. This command helps you combine images or to bring images back to the way they looked when you first opened them. The other piece of magic you'll discover is how to colorize images or create the always-popular sepia tones.

Friday - Lesson 04

In this lesson, you'll learn the critical skill of making selections. Selecting simply means isolating a specific part of an image so you can make changes to just that part. 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 a vignette, which is a photo 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. And if you don't like the selection you just made, you can use the fabulous new Photoshop CS3 Refine Edges command. We'll go over that today, too.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Photoshop has some great "smart" selection tools, but until CS3, all of the selection tools have had some limitations. You can see the flower—why can't Photoshop? Photoshop CS3 has fixed that with the new Quick Selection tool, and you'll get a chance to try it out in this lesson as you practice putting two images together.

Friday - Lesson 06

A lot of students are surprised when they see how much control they can have over how a Photoshop brush performs. We'll go over several different options in today's lesson. You'll learn how to make a brush change colors as you paint, and how to make a brush seem to dance across an image. You'll even create brush strokes that look like stitches on a quilt, following the direction of your cursor. You'll also learn how to use a brush to create a stamp from any section of an image, and then use that stamp anywhere else in your image.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Gradients are fountains of color that blend all the hues in between a starting color 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 when you add gradients to them.

Friday - Lesson 08

If you enjoyed the Erase to History command, get ready for this super-charged version—the History Brush tool. This incredible tool gives you an unlimited do-over on your photo for as long as you have the image open on your screen. You can add filters and generally experiment with any feature that Photoshop possesses, but still get back to your original image or to a version of the image in the recent past. In this lesson, you'll learn to use the History Brush to make stunning black and white with color images, to color correct an image, and then to make a totally wild impressionistic art image from a photo.

Week Five

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

In today's lesson, you'll learn how to "right size" your images, whether that right size is for printing or for the Web. You'll also unlock the mysteries of printing so that your prints have the best chance to profit from your new Photoshop skills. You'll find out how to scan an image so it's large enough, but not too large, and how to crop an image that shows more than you really want to see.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Today you'll learn the three R's of photo manipulation: Retouching, restoring, and rearranging. You'll be amazed at what you can do—and you'll no longer trust the phrase "pictures don't lie." You'll also discover another incredible new feature in Photoshop CS3—the Clone Stamp palette. This new addition lets you copy imagery from anywhere in an open image and brush it into your picture while changing size and orientation.

Friday - Lesson 12

Sometimes you mean to take an image with a yellow colorcast—sometimes, you don't. If you didn't mean it, then you'll enjoy learning about CS3's new ability to edit JPG files inside Camera Raw to help your images look their best. You 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 your photography looks perfect. Of course, if you forget to take off the lens cap, even Photoshop can't help you!

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, fiber artist, writer, and teacher. Her 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 writes the Tips and Tricks column for Photoshop User magazine 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.

Requirements:

Adobe Photoshop CS3, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, or any version of Adobe Creative Suite CS3 that includes the Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Adobe Photoshop CS3 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 (on PowerPC® G4 or G5 or multicore Intel processor)

Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).

A minimum of 512MB RAM (at least 1GB recommended); 1024x768 monitor resolution with at least a 16-bit video card; 64MB video RAM

Student Reviews: