Photoshop Practice Directions

Overview: We are going to learn some basic Photoshop skills today. We will cover:

Options Bar

Toolbar

Adjusting Levels
Adjusting Contrast

Cropping
Setting Resolution

Directions: Begin by learning how to open up photos in Photoshop. To open Photoshop — look on your dock for the program that is colored blue and has the letters "Ps" in it. Click that and Photoshop will open up.

If you want to open photos in Photoshop you can click on File and Open or right-click a JPEG and then use the "Open With" option and then select Adobe Photoshop.

Open any THREE IMAGES (besides your PORTRAIT or SELF PORTRAIT) that you have taken this year.

IMPORTANT: The next step will be to "Save As" and Rename the file so that you do not lose your original image. If you don't do this you will never be able to recover your original if you make changes to it in Photoshop.

Rename your files Practice 1, Practice 2, Practice 3.

NOTES:

You will be taking notes while we work on this project today. I expect everyone to open up a new blog post titled "Photoshop Notes" to record specific Photoshop skills we will practice today.

You will be toggling back and forth so be prepared. Some of you may prefer to have them both open next to each other, the screens are certainly big enough to have both open if you want.

Once that is done, just wait for me. Please be aware that we will be working together for most of the period. And then I will ask you to practice what you learned in the time left before class is over.

Overview of Skills:

Basic Color Correction:

1. Open the photo in Photoshop (there are multiple ways to do this, use whichever way you remember)

2. The first thing we want to do every time is to SAVE AS and rename your photo and save it in the correct folder. For right now that folder is your folder on the J:drive, so don't forget to click the camera on your desktop and connect to the server. We do this so we always have the original file in case we make a mistake.

3. Go to - Image -- Adjustments -- Levels

A box should pop up on your screen. In that box is a drop down box that has RGB in it. Use the drop down box and go to BLUE

Move the black and white slider tools (the hershey kisses) and move them as needed to be underneath the mountain.

go to GREEN

repeat

go to RED

repeat

Adjusting Contrast (lighten for print)

Now go to RGB (still under Levels)

On this step you move ONLY the middle one which is brown (do not move the black or white slider) just slightly where the photo appears a little lighter than perfect. Photos print darker than they appear on the screen so you need to lighten photos a little bit.

Now - here are some new instructions: I will show you this quickly today, but I wanted to give you the instructions here as well.

4. The final step, go to Filter -- Sharpen -- Sharpen

You should only do this one time

5. Crop and make sure you have the correct resolution as requested. Today you do not have a specific Height and Width (that will change later). Remember you can enter the resolution setting when you make your crop.

6. To change a photo to black and white go to: Image -- Mode -- Grayscale

when the pop up appears asking if you want to discard the color information, hit yes or okay. Soon you will be asked to produce a Black and White image. Today two of your images will be in color. To make the black and white image, you should use the Grayscale feature.

Assignment: Edit and post your practice images to the following specifications:

Today you should post the photos that you color corrected and cropped onto your blog. Make a new blog post titled "First Photoshop Practice."

• One photo titled Yearbook should be saved at 300 resolution and it should be horizontal.
• One photo titled Newspaper should be saved at 150 resolution and it should be black and white. 
• One photo titled Web should be saved at 72 resolution and it should be vertical.