photoshop

By Scot Hacker, Scott Squire, Jeremy Rue   ·   Updated Jan 15, 2011   ·   Print Print

Introduction

 Photoshop CS3 extended splash screen

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.

Filed under: Photography, Web Development

Comments

1) Julian D, February 22, 2008 at 9:49 a.m. [Link]

Thumb Up!

2) Delia Cristea, May 12, 2008 at 1:11 a.m. [Link]

Thank you for the good and understandable tutorial. I have had problems using the features of Photoshop because of the very hard interface this tool has. I also had problems regarding resizing with Photoshop. I wasn't quite satisfied with the results that I got. A friend of mine suggested reshade as a great resizing tool and I must agree with it. this tool that I found at http://reshade.com offers high quality results. You can try it out online for free and I would be happy to receive feedback about it.

3) Emmanuel Eichler, July 31, 2008 at 5 p.m. [Link]

For those who would like to practice their photoshop skills, I'd like to invite them to sign up at http://photoshopcontest.com.
We've been maintaining and updating the site for a while now and have daily contests for you. If you have questions feel free to ask in our forums.

4) Castle Steps, September 23, 2008 at 8:53 a.m. [Link]

I am currently learning how to use photoshop for my job at a hotel in Prague ( http://castlesteps.com )and I found this tutorial very helpful. Does anyone know of another website with more in-depth tutorials, especially ones which focus on the use of filters?
Thanks

5) Aamy Williams, May 20, 2010 at 5:03 a.m. [Link]

I am use Adobe photoshop CS3 for convert psd to html. Really its amazing software It's depth is too much. I think in photoshop what you know is very small because it is in depth.

6) Karen Gatti, April 1, 2011 at 11:58 a.m. [Link]

Do you have any recommendations on great illustrator trainings? I like photoshop, but looking to expand to make graphics for some of my websites.

Karen

7) Jeppe Udesen, September 26, 2011 at 1:40 a.m. [Link]

I study as a Multimedia Designer and I'm working with Photoshop and Illustrator daily. For Karen Gatti's question, for working with illustration, I would recommend reading some tutorials about Illustrator since Photoshop is mainly for photos and web graphics. So Photoshop is pixel graphics while Illustrator is vector graphics. You can read a lot more about this on http://drawapixel.com

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