Photoshop CS3 for the Digital Photographer

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.

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 lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
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.

Lesson 2
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.

Lesson 3
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.

Lesson 4
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.

Lesson 5
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.

Lesson 6
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.

Lesson 7
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 . . .

Lesson 8
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.

Lesson 9
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.

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.

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.

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.