Introduction to Photoshop CS6

Did you like playing with paints as a child? In this lesson, you'll discover how enjoyable it can be to paint in Photoshop—where you don't need to clean up after yourself, and there's no odor of turpentine. You'll find out how Photoshop "thinks" about color and how you can use the brushes in Photoshop to make a simple landscape. You'll even blend colors on your image as if they were made of oil paints or watercolors. This is a fun lesson!

Zoom, Scrubby Zoom, Airbrush, Eraser, Smudge: Do you know what these tools and commands mean in Photoshop? You will! In this lesson, you'll find out how to navigate your image so that you can edit and paint more effectively—and give your eyes a rest too. You'll also learn how to erase, blur, smudge, and finger paint. These techniques are fun, easy ways to make dramatic changes in your images, whether you're altering photos or creating a work of art from scratch.

Have you seen ads or greeting cards where most of the image is in black and white but one part's in color? In this lesson, you'll find out how to create that effect. You'll be amazed at how easy it is to transform images from color into black and white or even old-fashioned sepia. You'll also discover some tricks with the History Brush tool and history snapshots, so you can experiment while you're creating a hand-tinted image and quickly undo whatever steps you don't like.

If you wanted a friend to hand you an orange from a fruit bowl, you'd probably just point to the one you want or describe its location. Photoshop also needs directions if you want to lift something out of an image or point it out in some way. The Photoshop name for "pointing" is selections. In this lesson, you'll learn the critical skill of making selections. You'll see how easy it is to isolate portions of your image so that you can add a filter or change the colors. You'll also create vignettes, which are photos with an opaque center that falls off to a very soft edge. And if you don't like the selection you just made, you'll get help from the Refine Edge command.

Photoshop has some great selection tools, but until now, all of them have had trouble selecting exactly what you had in mind. You can see the flower, so why can't Photoshop? In this lesson, you'll learn to use the Lasso, Magic Wand, and Quick Selection tools to make the selections you want as you practice putting two images together.

You can paint in Photoshop—even if the only thing you can do with paint in "real life" is spill it! Photoshop lets you create fabulous brushes from images and customize them in many ways. You can modify the new bristle-tip brushes to help you turn photos into art or to create your own work of art just by using brush strokes.

Gradients are fountains of color. One of the current trends in photography is to colorize areas of a photo with a gradient. You can spend hundreds of dollars buying gradient-colored stock photos—or just use what you learn in this lesson to create them yourself! Even portraits can be much more exciting with a gradient added to them.

Whether you want to add type to a scrapbooking layout, make large type for display, or learn a little bit about Photoshop's Layer Styles, you'll enjoy this lesson. You'll try your hand at making type that warps, wiggles, and follows a path. Then you'll see what you can do to text on your own.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to size your images for printing or for the web. You'll find out how to scan an image so that it's large enough for your needs, but not too large, and how to crop images that have more than you really want to see.

In this lesson, you'll focus on the three R's of photo manipulation: restoring, retouching, and rearranging. You'll be amazed by what you can do—and you'll understand why the phrase "pictures can't lie" is no longer true! You'll also discover how to use the amazing Clone Stamp panel and the "preview" feature on the Clone Stamp brush cursor. Plus, you'll learn about the content-aware tools that help Photoshop make more intelligent guesses as to the fixes you want.

Are some of your images overexposed, underexposed, or tinged an ugly yellow? In this lesson, learn how to correct exposures and colors to make them more attractive and truer to life. Photoshop can't work miracles all the time, but if you have an image that's a bit too dark or a bit too light, you can fix it up so that it looks perfect.