Photoshop offers graphic artists, photographers, video artists, scrapbookers, and hobbyists fun and creative ways to alter photographs and prepare them for print or the Web.

If you understand the basics of the Photoshop toolset, this course will help you explore new and more advanced techniques for creating images, editing photos, and combining existing images in amazing ways. The emphasis is on non-destructive editing—the features in Photoshop that let you easily re-edit and change projects long after the Undo command has expired.

In this course, taught by a 2006 nominee to the Photoshop Hall of Fame, you will learn how to save every single pixel in your original images so that you can make just about any change you want quickly and effortlessly without rebuilding or redoing anything. You'll discover layer styles, which let you add glows and shadows that you can easily change. And you'll learn all about adjustment layers, which let you alter the exposure of your image as many times as you want.

You'll explore Photoshop's new Smart Object feature, which makes it possible for you to change white balance and exposure on a RAW format digital file long after the image is composited with another. You'll find out how to rotate, scale, and warp images—and remove the transformations if you don’t like them.

This course will help you take a giant leap forward in creativity and productivity. It’s also a lot of fun!

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Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

After you've learned how to do basic editing in Photoshop, the most critical skill you can learn is how to use layers. Knowing how to do this opens a whole new world of opportunities for fine-tuning your images whenever you wish. Unlike single layer images, an image with layers can be edited nondestructively at any point. This means you don't have to start over again if you make a mistake or need to change something. In this opening lesson, you'll learn what layers are and how to work with the Layers palette to create, view, or hide layers.

Friday - Lesson 02

Now it's time to actually start using layers. However, to use them effectively, you need to know how you can manipulate them. So, today, we'll practice moving, copying, locking, dragging, and dropping layers in multiple images. You'll see how you can use layers to make an area of a photo pop out from the photo itself. This is a technique called screening back an image, and you'll enjoy using it.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

This lesson is a student favorite. You'll learn how to apply special effects (called Layer Styles) such as drop shadows and embossing so that they can be altered at any time. You'll also get to play with some filters—and discover how you can structure an image project to add filters but still have the flexibility to back off and remove the filters at a later time. By altering the blend mode of an image, you can create either very wild graphics or make simple value corrections to an image.

Friday - Lesson 04

Did the dog eat grandmother's portrait? Or did time and water do that damage? No matter. Using layers makes it easier than ever before to restore some of your treasured family heritage. You'll get ample practice plus links to other sites on the Web that focus on image restoration. Once again, we focus today on nondestructive editing—working in layers so that you can always change your mind about a correction without having to begin again.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

If you use the Levels command to alter the values in an image and then decide a week or so later that you made the image too dark, you're stuck. Each time you edit the Levels in an image, you lose quality. But what if there were a way to edit the Levels as much as you want and not hurt the image quality at all? There is! In this lesson, you'll discover Adjustment Layers. An adjustment layer makes no permanent change to an image—and you can stack them up as you wish. It's more nondestructive editing, and it's a technique that I guarantee you'll wish you'd learned earlier. You won't ever want to apply regular Levels commands to an image again.

Friday - Lesson 06

Layer masks are another way that Photoshop lets you have your cake and eat it too. If you bring a picture of little Johnny onto a new background image and you erase all the stuff that was in Johnny's original background, what happens if you later decided you just have to have that red ball you got rid of a week ago? You'd better hope you have the original image around somewhere. And then you are in for a lot more work. However, today you're going to find out about layer masks. If you use a layer mask, you will keep every pixel that's in the original image, but just hide the parts of the original that you no longer wish to see. If you change your mind about what you need to see, it's as easy as painting over some black pixels in the layer mask with white paint.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Today, to help you see how far you've come, I'll reintroduce some of the compositing projects from my Introduction to Photoshop course. You'll work with Ian and the onions again and learn how you can do these projects nondestructively using layers and layer masking. If you prefer, you can work on your own images instead.

Friday - Lesson 08

Do you like the look of double-exposed images? Would you enjoy creating a seamless composite of your vacation images? Are you into scrapbooking? If so, then this is your lesson! It's one of my favorites in the whole course. Up to now, you have masked images so that you can either see the image in the layer or not. Now, you'll learn how you can let the images partially show. This can give you effects like placing a girl into the ocean so you can see her swimsuit a short ways under the water. You'll also get the chance to use your own images for a special project.

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Photoshop has some special layers that let you create patterns, gradients, or solid colors and change them easily, any time you want. Today, you'll see how easy it is to alter the look of a complex border or change composites. You'll also learn some excellent techniques to create seamless patterns, which is something that many students really enjoy.

Friday - Lesson 10

Now that you've learned how to move Johnny to a new background, what happens if you want to make Johnny's image a bit lighter, but you don't want to make the new background lighter at the same time? You could make a complex selection, of course, but today you'll see that there's an easier way. It's called a clipping mask, and it lets you make any changes you want to Johnny's layer without affecting the layers below Johnny at all. It's a digital version of spreading glitter onto a paper that has a design in glue—the glitter only sticks to the glue. In this case, the new layers only stick to the base layer in the clipping mask.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Smart Objects are the most awesome and significant innovation in Photoshop since the Layers feature was introduced. In this lesson, you'll learn how to take advantage of them. One of the most exciting things you can do with a Smart Object is place a RAW format photo in them. If you take RAW digital photos, you'll be totally delighted at how easy it is to correct and composite a photo but still be able to go back any time you want and change the decisions you made about white balance or exposure. Even if you don't shoot RAW, you'll love the way Smart Objects let you make a protected package out of an image—and prepare you to resize or transform images nondestructively.

Friday - Lesson 12

It's taken a long time to reach the last lesson, but here you'll put together everything you've learned in the course as you see how you can make layers in an image larger or smaller, rotate them, or use the incredible new Warp command. You'll be able to revers any of these changes if you make them into Smart Object layers—you can nondestructively change your mind as often as you need, and any time you want. The fun project here is learning to create a pear that, when cut open, reveals a new fruit—the pearnge (a pear with an orange inside of it). We'll finish up with another chance for you to use your newfound skills with a major project on your own images.

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Sherry London.

Sherry London is a noted Photoshop and Illustrator expert, fiber artist, writer, and teacher. Her art has been featured in magazines and exhibitions. Her published works include Photoshop CS2 Gone Wild, Photoshop Magic, Photoshop Effects Magic, Photoshop In Depth, Photoshop Textures Magic, and Illustrator f/x and Design. She writes the Tips and Tricks column for Photoshop User magazine and is a two-time nominee to the Photoshop Hall of Fame. She has taught for the prestigious Thunder Lizard Photoshop Conference and the Professional Photographers of America seminars, as well as for Drexel University, Moore College of Art, and Gloucester County College. Sherry holds a Master's Degree in Information Systems and has taken doctoral level courses in curriculum design.

Requirements:

Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Windows XP or 2000 or Adobe Photoshop CS2 Mac and Mac OS X; Completion of Sherry London's Introduction to Photoshop CS2 or Introduction to Photoshop CS online course (or equivalent experience) - you should have a good working knowledge of the basic tools in Photoshop and be able to make selections, use the Clone Stamp tool and Healing brushes, and do elementary color correction; Internet access, e-mail, and the Netscape or Firefox or Safari or Internet Explorer Web browser. Note: Photoshop CS2 software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins. You may take this course using Photoshop CS, but there are several activities in which you will not be able to participate.

Student Reviews: