Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard tool for working with digital images of any kind. Images may originate from a digital camera, from scans, from stock photo libraries, from existing Web-ready artwork, or even graphics that are created purely in Photoshop.

Photoshop has a tremendous breadth of uses in various industries ranging from photographers to graphic artists. The program is so flexible, it is is used for both adjusting photographs and creating graphic elements.

As a beginning-level study, this tutorial will primarily focus on the photography aspects of the program as used in a journalistic sense.

What Adobe Photoshop can do:*

• Crop or resize images
• Adjust tonal properties such as lightening a dark image
• Color correction of images
• Dust and scratch removal
• "Improve" photos that might just look OK
• Sharpening and improving clarity
• Opening or saving in a variety of file formats

What Adobe Photoshopt cannot do:

• Make a very blurry photograph clear
• Increase the size of a very small image found on the Web to a large one with no quality loss
• Salvaging a bad photo that is very dark, or even worse, very bright (It can improve some photos, but it is limited in its abilities to salvage poor-quality photos)

* Photoshop can actually do quite a bit more than these listed items, but for the purposes of this tutorial the focus will be using the program as a photography tool in a journalistic sense.