Adobe Photoshop CS6 Introduction To Photoshop

Hi everyone, welcome to educator.com, I'm Michael Brown.0000

I'm your instructor in this course; basic and intermediate Adobe Photoshop CS6.0004

In this in-depth Photoshop training course, I'm going to teach you all of the tools, techniques and features that you'll need not only to dramatically and flawlessly improve your photographic images, but to create amazing photo composites, graphic designs and even video in Photoshop CS6.0009

In this lesson, I'm going to talk a little and show you how to learn Photoshop, as well as give you a start to finish demo in taking an image from the camera, and running it through Photoshop and utilizing all of the techniques, and show you how easy it is and how quickly and efficiently you can take an image from good to great.0031

I know Photoshop seems to be, from what everybody tells you, a very intimidating program, but let me tell you for sure, Photoshop is not a difficult to understand program at all.0053

It's simply a program that's very large and has a lot of stuff, so the key to learning Photoshop is in simplicity, breaking this program down into easy to understand basic pieces, and not only that, but showing you how the pieces interact with each other so that you're able to utilize each tool, technique and feature in a quick and efficient manner, to create the best results you possibly can.0066

And that's what this course is all about.0096

All that you need to do almost anything you want to accomplish in Photoshop can be broken down into four very simple categories.0101

The first category is, and the most important by the way, selections; what a selection is?0109

It's isolating an area for specific adjustments or retouch.0116

It allows you to protect the part of the image that you don't want to affect, and add and make you changes within the selection and also show you how to make the edges of the selection proper for each situation so that your finished alteration blends flawlessly into the remainder of the image.0120

The second category is corrections, and they're really pretty simple; exposure and color.0144

There are three or four basic techniques that you use to apply this, and you do this either to an overall image, or to a selected area.0151

The third section, retouching--I'm sure you've heard of and seen that people put heads on other things and clone out problems and such, retouching is altering, correcting or otherwise modifying areas, and there are only a few tools that you use to actually do this, but the key is in how you use those tools.0161

So once again, the real world situations that I will show you how to apply these tools, will help you learn how to retouch quickly, efficiently and flawlessly.0184

And the fourth section is manipulation, in which you are sizing an image up and down, distorting areas over the overall image, or combining all or parts of other images to make composites.0196

This is with a physical manipulation and all four of these tied together, and that's Photoshop; selections, corrections, retouch and manipulation, that's all you need to learn.0211

Now, Photoshop itself is actually three separate programs in one, and together, the three parts become a flawless and very easy to use workflow, and the first part is a program called Bridge, which is the editing, sorting and organizing program that is self-contained within Photoshop...0227

And with just a click of a button, you can pop back and forth from Photoshop into Bridge, and Bridge is really a wonderful program to itself--it's so easy to edit and sort, I just love it.0252

The second program is Camera Raw, you start out by organizing and editing to find the images you want to work on, you open them up into Camera Raw, which is a program that allows you to make preliminary adjustments that are non-destructive.0266

That means it doesn't alter any physical pixels inside of an image, it just makes mathematical algorithms which are applied to the image when you open it up into Photoshop, but are saved within Camera Raw so that you can always go back to the original image if you want, a really cool feature.0283

And then of course, there's Photoshop, the big dog, and this is where you do your primary creative work, and we're going to make that as I already showed you in the four simple categories, and all together these three separate programs--Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop enable you to create a very smooth, streamlined workflow with anything you want to do in the program.0303

So, let me go, and we're going to start right now and take an image from start to finish, so right now, I'm in Photoshop, that's where we are, this is Photoshop's workspace, and I'm going to go to the File menu and I'm going to pull up Bridge.0330

And here we have Bridge, and I have several frequently used folders right here, and in my...let's see, the Desktop folder here, I'm going to navigate to a specific folder which contains the images that I want to work on--double click, and here's all the images in a thumbnail display.0345

Down at the bottom, and I pre-rated--you notice this little three star and four star, I went through these images right here and picked, well let's just go and do it real quickly.0368

Here's your first image, it's a little dark but we don't worry about that, I don't like it too well, I don't like the high angle, so we've gone to a lower angle.0381

I'm a little bothered by the person walking in here, so that one didn't work.0389

This image, I like it, I have a little problem up here in the corner but no problem, there's no people, everything looks fine, this image looks a little better, and you can even compare side by side.0394

Here's the two images side by side, I can see that this one's a little straighter, and it's a little less cluttered than this one, that's why I rated it four star--that becomes our best image, and so very quickly, I've got the image that I want.0407

I could've gone with these other ones too, but see there's a guy in the picture here, there's people in the picture here, and people in the picture here so we come back to our previously rated four start image and that's it, that's Bridge, we got it.0425

So we just double click the image...and it will open up into--this is Camera Raw, and here's several tabs, but the primary tab is right here for adjustments.0439

Now, the first thing you can see right off the bat, is that I made a mistake in--let me go back to Bridge real quickly and show you.0454

This first series of photographs--you notice there's this blue tinge?0466

That should be white, I miss-set my ISO...not my ISO, my white balance, I had the automatic but it was set off on the wrong point, and over here when I changed it to daylight, you notice how I got very yellow, so either way it was either bluish or yellow so it was a little bit off.0470

So we'll double click that again, reopen Adobe Camera Raw, and the first thing we can do, and it's so simple, we correct the color.0493

There's a color temperature slider, look, I just move it over, and there it is.0503

Now this--I like it a little yellow because it's interior, there's all this warmth, so we've already corrected the color.0509

Right now we're going to take clarity which is making things just a little bit sharper, just zoom it up so you can see, when the clarity is down, clarity is up it just pops that image just a little bit, so we're good there.0515

I'm going to move in here, I'm going to jack up the saturation just a little bit, and I'm going to take the highlights and move them down...just a little bit.0531

And open up the shadows just a hair to bring in a little more, and that's all I'm going to bother to do, just preliminary, very quick, it's all ready to go.0545

So we're going to open up the image now into Photoshop, there we've got it...let's get that out of here, get the layer comps out, zoom it up one time, and you can see with the adjustments I managed to pull some out of this--let's go back and look at Bridge again, I want to show you real quick.0555

See how the other one here, see how that was burned out?0575

Now, once I've made my changes, see this little thing up here?0579

Notice that image, it's over exposed and blue, this image, it's now the way we want it and with the changes, those are in there mathematically, they can be removed if you want to.0582

So we've already corrected--and look what happened, we've pulled all of this glasswork out of that chandelier and the windows are down a little bit.0595

Now, we can even go a little further with that, I'm going to duplicate my layer (there's layers here) go up to this menu, and we're going to do a feature called shadows and highlights--look what that did, popped the heck out of the shadows, so I opened it up a little bit in the shadow detail--there's where we were, get a little more of that wonderful ceiling in there, and I'm going to take the highlights down just even a little bit more...0602

And snap the contrast just slightly...take that down just a hair on the shadows, and there you go, and we started there, and we went to there in one movement, nothing to it.0628

Now we want to look at this image artistically.0640

I see that...it's distorted because I was aiming up--notice how the lines in the building go upwards?0643

Now artistically some people may want that, but I also see I want to get that piece out of here, I want to get that little bit out of there, and I'd like to get part of this news stand out of there, so we're going to go to our cropping tool, and there's a new feature; perspective crop.0650

All I do, is I crop it and I just take the lines of the crop and line it up with the distorted lines--watch this.0666

Just move it over until it's lined up, take this side, move it over until it lines up with the particular distortion, and there we have it, we click OK, and look what we've done.0677

There was where it was, now it's this way, and it's all cleaned up--I don't mind this part of the news stand in and we've cleaned out the other stuff--the only thing it did is it distorted the archway, it kind of squished it, so we're going to solve that.0693

Image, Canvas Size, we're going to increase the height to about 17...and now we're going to take this particular layer, and we're going to do a transform--we're just going to stretch it to get the arch back the way we wanted it, the way it should look properly.0707

And there it is right there, a semi-circular arch, click OK, re-crop it...go back to the regular crop tool, we've cropped the image down, I'm going to pull it down a little at the top too...there we go.0727

One other feature I want to do to this image--let's just go ahead and bring it up here, you notice that there's a lot of noise in the image.0744

Now I could've done this in Camera Raw as well, we're going to go and Filter, Noise, Reduce Noise.0752

We're going to take the noise feature, and we're going to put in a little bit...let's see, preserve the details...remove the noise just a little bit more...0760

And let it cook...and there it is, the noise has come down some, more noise, less noise.0782

Now I did shoot this at a high ISO so it's going to be...you want to leave a little noise in because I don't want to take the detail out of it.0791

There's still a lot of detail in this picture--look, you can see the guys, you can read the name of the restaurant...tracks right there, that's how much detail we have in this image, and there you go!0799

I can crop it again and pull it up just a little bit to try to make it a little more of a dramatic image...right to there...pull that down slightly, crop it in, and there you go, and I'll show you that we went from opening the image at this point, to cropping and finishing it at this point, all in very little effort in Photoshop CS6.0817

So, I want to leave you in this lesson with a very important axiom, and that applies throughout this entire course.0842

If you don't use it, you will lose it.0854

That is absolute, you need to practice and keep using something so that it's burned in and you continue to improve at it.0858

Don't just take the course, walk away and come back at a later date three months from now and expect that you're going to remember everything.0865

OK, so come and join me in a fascinating and fun journey of learning, that's going to dramatically expand your artistic vision and creativity forever.0873

Let's move on and get started in Photoshop CS6.0882