Introduction to Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the premier photo editing software tool available. Whether you are working on a webpage, Powerpoint presentation, or a document to be printed, Photoshop can be used to enhance your images. Participants will learn about image file types, cropping images, compositing (putting several images together), ghosting images (for use as webpage backgrounds), using layers, creating masks, applying filters, and formatting text with bevels and other effects.
Why use Photoshop?

We live in a mediacentric society that increasingly relies upon multimedia in its varied forms to both inform and entertain us. It is natural for people living within this media-saturated culture to want to create some of that media-- and Adobe PhotoShop is the perfect tool for that task.
With PhotoShop, you can:
Create original artwork
Design graphics for a webpage or website
Make "ghosted" images that can be used as the background for webpages
Correct flaws and imperfections in a photograph
Create a photo collage: a composition made up of several different photos
Create a deceptively realistic photo that is not real
Alter photographs for political / propaganda purposes
Design smashing layouts for a classroom newspaper, brochure, or flyer
Have a ton of fun being CREATIVE!
PhotoShop is a program that is so rich, complex, and powerful, people literally spend most of the waking hours of their life using it, and are still always learning new tricks and techniques! Thankfully, however, the learning curve for PhotoShop is not steep, and users can create very appealing products with a short introduction to the concepts and tools of PhotoShop. That is one of the primary goals of this workshop!
To help spark your own creativity, I have provided documentation of how I created the images used in this online curriculum in the last section, "Graphics Techniques." Every image in this curriculum that is not a "screenshot" is clickable to the provided documentation.
Two of the best known image formats (because they are widely used on the internet) are:
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) retains 24 bit color (millions of colors).
• extension is .jpg
• Can compress JPEG up to 4:1 (lossy compression, some detail may be lost)
• Can compress in PhotoShop.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) developed by Compuserve.
• extension is .gif
• Limited to 8 bit color palatte (256 colors)
• Needs to be in INDEXED COLOR format
• Best for simple graphics
• 3 variations of GIF: transparent, animated, and interlaced
PhotoShop 7 includes support for web transparency, missing in previous versions. This is most useful to web designers making graphics with transparent backgrounds.