Photoshop CS4 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
Photoshop CS4 is an excellent package for photographers to enhance and edit digital images. In our first lesson, you'll see how to download the images we'll use in class and take a tour of Photoshop CS4. Then you'll get a taste of what you can do with the program as we start at the beginning, with cropping and rotating images. If you've never used Photoshop before, have no fear— this course is designed to make even the inexperienced user comfortable with image editing and enhancement.

Lesson 2
Digital images come in all sizes! But what does that mean to us? Today we'll discuss image resolution, pixels, and recommendations for resizing pictures with excellent results. You'll learn how to optimize your images for the best print 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 with Photoshop.

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 color options for many of the Photoshop features, and you'll discover how to adjust color in your images.

Lesson 4
Light is the essence of photography, but it's not always cooperative. Today 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 photos for many creative projects, and text often plays a part in these. Photoshop gives you plenty of text tools to work with. In this lesson, you'll explore them and practice adding text to your images, including text made from the images themselves! You'll also begin your study of the powerful selection tools, with the Quick Selection tool, the color-based Magic Wand tool, and the flexible Lasso tool. While we're exploring these, you'll see the power of feathering selections.

Lesson 6
As we continue our study of selection tools, you'll learn how to create silhouettes and creative backgrounds to set your selections off. We'll see how the Marquee tools let you select perfect square and circles for use in framing and highlighting your images. You'll continue to work with feathering and see the difference it makes, especially when you want to create a soft, blended background in your image. You'll also see how to use the Marquee tool to create borders and frames around your pictures. To wrap up our study of Selection tools, we'll explore the many options in the Select menu.

Lesson 7
Distortion: It's not a word you often think of as desirable in photography, but with the options in Photoshop, you'll find that it can do wonders! You'll see how to slim a waistline, trim loose edges, and accentuate the positive with distortion tools. In this lesson, we'll also look at tools to perfect portraits. Although you can use these tools for fine-tuning any type of image, many people 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 it were so easy in real life!

Lesson 8
It's time for more advanced work with layers. Today you'll take time to see how they work from beginning to end. With layers, you'll build a quickly modifiable business card and a collage. Along the way, you'll learn how to use Adjustment and Fill layers to your advantage.

Lesson 9
In this lesson, we'll discuss Retouching and Correcting tools, which come in handy when your photo subject shows up with a bit of red eye or a less-than-perfect complexion. You'll perfect your skills with 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 Photoshop's improved Raw Editor, and you'll see why you may want to shoot in raw format.

Lesson 10
Panoramics are a beautiful way to show off wide scenic shots. Some lenses naturally give you panoramic images, but did you know that you can also create one of these shots using several separate photos? Today you'll see how Photoshop helps you blend these to provide seamless panoramic imagery. You'll learn how to resize images and add colored borders to make your images just the size you want, and you'll have a chance to try out CS4's new Content Aware Scaling, which lets you resize a photo without having to crop it. With all these options under your belt, you'll see how to create customized photo cards with your own captions.

Lesson 11
As photographers, we try to take pictures in sharp focus and with color and lighting the way we see them—but sometimes we need a little help. Luckily, Photoshop is there with lots of options. In this lesson, you'll explore artistic filters, techniques for sharpening and blurring images, and ways to capture screen shots for documenting your work.

Lesson 12
As you know by now, Photoshop gives you lots of options for editing images. In 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. Think those old photographs will never look any better? You'll be amazed at what you can do with all the skills you've picked up during this course!