Introduction to Photoshop CC

Did you like playing with paints as a child? In this lesson, you will discover how enjoyable it can be to paint in Photoshop. You will find out how Photoshop "thinks" about color and how you can use the brushes in Photoshop to make a simple landscape.

Zoom, Scrubby Zoom, Airbrush, Eraser, Smudge: do you know what these tools and commands mean in Photoshop? In this lesson, you will find out how to navigate your image, so you can edit and paint more effectively. You will also learn how to erase, blur, smudge, and finger paint.

Have you seen ads or greeting cards where most of the image is in black and white but one part's in color? You will find out how to create that effect in this lesson. You will be amazed at how easy it is to transform images from color into black and white or even old-fashioned sepia.

Photoshop needs directions if you want to lift something out of an image. The Photoshop name for pointing is "selection". In this lesson, you will learn the critical skill of making selections. And if you don't like the selection you just made, you will get help from the Refine Edge command.

Photoshop has some great selection tools, but they may have trouble selecting exactly what you had in mind. In this lesson, you will learn to use the Lasso, Magic Wand, and Quick Selection tools to make the exact 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 create your own work of art just by using brushstrokes.

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.

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 will enjoy this lesson. You will try your hand at making type that warps, wiggles, and follows a path, and then you will practice with your own text.

In this lesson, you will learn how to size your images for printing or for the Web. You will find out how to scan an image so 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.

This lesson introduces the three R's of photo manipulation: restoring, retouching, and rearranging. You will be amazed by what you can do—and you will understand why the phrase "pictures don't lie" is no longer true. You will also discover how to use the Clone Stamp panel and "preview" feature.

Are some of your images overexposed or underexposed? 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 it looks perfect.