Lesson 1: Introducing Photoshop

Transcription

1 Chapter 1, Video 1: "Lesson 1 Introduction" Welcome to the course. Over the next six weeks, you'll learn the basics of Photoshop. You'll retouch old photos to get rid of wear and tear. You'll retouch new photos to get rid of blemishes, heighten the colors, and change the whole mood of the image. You'll create entirely new images, even if your last art lesson was in kindergarten. I'm glad you're here to share the journey with me. Let's get started.

2 Chapter 2, Video 1: "A Tour of Photoshop's Workspaces" Photoshop gives you a number of different workspaces that you can use. A workspace is an arrangement of panels and the tools that go with them. This is the basic Essentials, which is the default. You have a choice of 3D (which we're not going to use), and notice how it's changed the panels that are showing. You can use the Motion presets, and those again will not be used in this class. The Painting workspace is something you'll switch to fairly often, which includes the Brushes panel, the History panel, your Brush Presets, as well as Swatches and the Navigator. The Photography workspace could also be useful to you at times. But again, you've got a different set of panels showing. In the Typography workspace, you have your Typographic control showing. I'm going to go back to Essentials. If you're wondering what the two monitors are up here, that's my own personal setup taking advantage of both monitors on my screen. If I click it, you'll see how much work space I recover, but you cannot see the panels jumping to my second monitor. So I'm going to go back to the Essentials, and this is your base workspace.

3 Chapter 3, Video 1: "Adjusting the Brightness, Contrast, and Other Settings" Let's start first by changing the Essentials workspace into the Painting workspace. Next let's make the picture of Lynn as large as we can by double clicking the Hand tool. Next we're going to choose Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast. Notice there's a field here called Use Legacy. It's not checked. Do not check it. We want to bring the Brightness setting to plus 41. So you bring it up as carefully as you can to 41. And it can take a little bit of fiddling to get it to the right spot. Next you want to bring the contrast up to 100, as far as it goes. I know it's a bit harsh, but we'll take care of that in a couple other steps. Click OK. The next step is to choose the Image Adjustments Photo Filter: Image, Adjustments, Photo Filter. At this point, you want to pull down the Warming Filter to where it says Magenta. Click and click OK. This is just adding a magenta cast, and in any case, I'm just having you blindly follow instructions. There's no real rhyme or reason to what I'm doing. Next just choose Image Adjustments Vibrance: Image, Adjustments, Vibrance. Vibrance can make the image very, very bright without harming it. In this case, we only want to put it to make it less vibrant to minus 63. Actually to minus 61. Let's try that. I think I like that a little bit better. And move the Saturation down to minus 47. Then you can click OK. Notice that what we've done is to make the image much less saturated. In other words, the colors are not screaming at you nearly as much as they had before. The final thing we want to do is to change the entire coloration of the image by choosing Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation. In this case, I want to move the Hue to oh about 37. And what that will do is give us just a slightly green or yellow cast to the image, which I think is a bit more pleasing. I said final thing, but that was really just the final adjustment. The final thing you want to do to most images is to sharpen them: Filter, Sharpen, Smart Sharpen. And in this case, I just want to use the default. And click OK. Now you're ready to make a couple of changes and to see how else to work with this image

4 Chapter 4, Video 1: "Using the History Brush Tool" Let's finish up the editing on Lynn s glamour shot. First we're going to start by increasing zoom level so that we can see all of the pixels in the image. Double-click your Zoom tool. And then it zooms out so that one pixel in the image is taking up one pixel on your screen. The next thing you want is the History Brush tool. You can get to it by pressing Y or clicking the icon on the tools panel. You want to make sure that the History Brush tool, not the Art History Brush tool, is the one that s selected. Once you've done that, you want to automatically reset your tools. To do that, you would Control click on the Mac or press the right mouse button on the PC and choose Reset Tool. You're going to click this little down arrow, and you have to use the right mouse button or the Control key on the Mac in order to not get the tool presets, which is the actual thing that you get when you just click on it. The next thing we're going to do is to paint the model s lips. Once you have the History Brush tool, what it s actually doing is pulling from the original image and putting that color back. And you want to do this in one fell swoop one stroke. Click the mouse; hold the mouse down until you've covered her lips. If you make a mistake at that point, undo and do it again. When you like the way the lips look, that you've covered them all, release the mouse. This is a bit strong so we want to change it. And reduce the opacity. The nice thing is that you have on the Edit command an option to say Fade History Brush. So we're going to choose that. And now you have the ability to take the Fade command, bring it back to 50 percent. And you can see that we're reducing the opacity of this color and making it much less strong. Click OK when you get it back to where you want it to be. And now we're ready to Smart Sharpen again: Filter, Sharpen, Smart Sharpen. Choose the default and click OK.

5 Chapter 5, Audio 1: "Lesson 1 Conclusion" Lesson 1: Introducing Photoshop Congratulations. You're nearly done with your first lesson. Today we looked at the basic commands and tools of Photoshop. You ve learned what the program's workspace looks like, and you ve found out how to rearrange that workspace. As you continue in this course, all these icons and commands will become second nature to you. I promise you that it does get easier, and it does become second nature. Please don't forget to check out the Frequently Asked Questions section. Also, please visit the Discussion Area to introduce yourself and to say hello to your classmates. I really am glad you're taking this course.