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Courses >
Graphic Design > Photoshop CS3 for the Digital Photographer
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 |
In
our first lesson, we'll take a tour of the Photoshop CS3 work space,
and I'll show you how to download the images you'll use in class. This
class starts from the beginning so that even the inexperienced user
will come to a level of comfort with editing and enhancement. We'll
jump right into editing today as you learn how to crop and rotate your
images.
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| Friday - Lesson 02 |
Digital
images come in all sizes! In this lesson, we'll discuss image
resolution, pixels, and resizing pictures for excellent results. You'll
learn how to optimize your images for printing or quick transmission
with E-mail. We'll also discuss the many file formats digital images
can take, and how to use them to your best advantage.
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| Week Two |
| Wednesday - Lesson 03 |
One
of the most powerful features in Photoshop is layers. In this lesson,
you'll have a chance to create a new file and copy another image into
it, exploring the basics of layers as you go. You'll also see how to
set and change color options for many of the Photoshop features, and
how to adjust color in your images in a variety of different ways.
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| Friday - Lesson 04 |
Light
is the essence of photography, but it isn't always cooperative. In this
lesson, we'll discuss ways to enhance and even create better lighting
after you've taken an image. You'll see how to use Brightness and
Contrast to improve your images, and you'll have a chance to work with
Levels and Curves, two of Photoshop's best features for correcting
lighting and color tones.
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| Week Three |
| Wednesday - Lesson 05 |
People
use their photos for many creative projects, and text often plays a big
part in those projects. Photoshop gives you many text tools to choose
from, and we'll explore a few of them in this lesson as we add text to
images. We'll even create text from the images themselves! You'll also
begin your study of Photoshop's powerful selection tools, with the new
Quick Selection tool, the color-based Magic Wand tool, and the flexible
Lasso tool. You'll also see how helpful it can be to feather the edges
of your selections.
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| Friday - Lesson 06 |
As
we continue our study of Photoshop's selection tools today, you'll find
out how to create silhouettes and creative backgrounds to set those
selections off. You'll practice using the Marquee tools to select
perfect squares and circles that you can use to frame and highlight
your images. And we'll work some more with feathering so you can see
the difference it makes, especially when you want to create soft,
blended backgrounds in your images. You'll also discover how to use the
Marquee tool to create borders and frames around your pictures. To wrap
up our study of the selection tools, we'll also explore the many
options in the Select menu.
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| Week Four |
| Wednesday - Lesson 07 |
Distortion—it's
not something you might think of as desirable in photography, but with
the options in Photoshop, you'll find distortion can do wonders! In
today's lesson, you'll see how to use Photoshop's distortion tools to
slim a waistline, trim loose edges, and accentuate the positive in your
pictures. We'll also look at tools you can use to perfect portraits.
Although you can use these tools for fine-tuning any type of image,
photographers often use them on the detail work associated with
portraiture. You'll see how to smooth away wrinkles, remove red eye,
and even turn gray hair brown! If only these improvements were so easy
in real life . . .
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| Friday - Lesson 08 |
It's
time for more advanced work with layers. Today, we'll take some time to
see how layers work from beginning to end. We'll build a business card
with photos and text, and then I'll show you how to show and hide
layers so you can modify your business card in a snap. We'll also work
on a collage so you can see how to use adjustment and fill layers to
your advantage.
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| Week Five |
| Wednesday - Lesson 09 |
In
this lesson, we'll discuss some of Photoshop's retouching and
correcting tools, and you'll practice your skills using the Red Eye
tool, the Clone Stamp tool, the Patch tool, and the powerful Healing
Brushes. You'll also have a chance to experiment with CS3's improved
RAW Editor while I explain why you may want to shoot your pictures in
the RAW file format.
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| Friday - Lesson 10 |
Panoramic
images are a beautiful way to show off wide scenic shots. In today's
lesson, you'll see how Photoshop can help you to seamlessly blend
several images into one big panoramic image. You'll learn how to resize
your smaller images before you start, and then how to add a colored
border when you're finished so you can make the final product just the
size you need for framing. With all these skills under your belt,
you'll spend the rest of the lesson creating a customized photo card
with your own captions.
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| Week Six |
| Wednesday - Lesson 11 |
As
photographers, we try to take pictures in sharp focus and with color
and lighting that represent exactly what we see when we take a
picture—but sometimes things don't work out as planned and we need a
little help. Photoshop's filters provides hundreds of options you can
use to correct or enhance a picture after you take it. In this lesson,
we'll explore the artistic filters and a few filters you can use to
sharpen or blur your images. Then we'll look at how to capture
screenshots that you can use to document your work.
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| Friday - Lesson 12 |
Photoshop
gives you lots of options for editing images and in this, our last
lesson, we'll turn to the task of restoring old and damaged
photographs. You'll see how to reverse the effects of time, as well as
how to add hints of color to black-and-white images.
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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 Beverly Schulz.
 Beverly
Schulz is a freelance photographer and a graduate of the New York
Institute of Photography's Professional Photographer's program. She
teaches a number of classes in digital photography and has more than 25
years of classroom instruction experience. Her writing and photography
have been published in a number of magazines. She has traveled
extensively and participated in onsite photography workshops as well as
independent photo quests. In addition to teaching and photographic
work, she provides consulting services for digital photographers and
clients.
Requirements:
Adobe Photoshop CS3
(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); minimum of 512MB of RAM; 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).
You
should feel comfortable acquiring digital images, either with a digital
camera, using images scanned onto CDs, or scanning film prints. We'll
briefly review basic computer skills, such as using a mouse, creating
and accessing folders, and downloading and saving files, but you should
already be familiar with these skills. Note: This course is written for
the Windows user, but Macintosh users will find the software is quite
similar and are welcome in this course. However, no support can be
provided for Macintosh-specific issues.
Student Reviews:
"I LOVED this class. Perfect for my needs at this time. The
writing style was easy to comprehend—it felt very comfortable and
friendly."
"I really enjoyed this class and learned so much. It was a very informative class and I am still trying to absorb everything."
"This class has been great. I was looking for more detail
regarding the tools in Photoshop and that is exactly what I received.
Although I still have a lot to learn, I now have a strong foundation in
which to proceed. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and teaching
gifts."
"This course was excellent. It fit well with my life. I
liked the fact that you could work at your own pace. The instructor and
TA were exceptional. I loved the online discussion area and how the
lessons were laid out."
"This was my first online course and I was extremely
pleased. The course was full of valuable information and was written in
an easy to read and comprehend way. I learned a huge amount and will
definitely do this again."
"Very helpful! Great class!"
To purchase this course, click the Enroll Now button below:
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Adobe
Photoshop CS3 is a powerful software solution that provides support and
specialized editing tools for digital photographers and graphic
artists. In this class, we'll focus on how to select and use the
professional techniques that are most helpful to photographers.
Designed for those with no image-editing experience, this class will
take students from novices to accomplished users.