Adobe Photoshop/Photoshop Elements
First Editing Steps

Photoshop stands above all other graphics editing programs. It has a remarkable array of editing tools. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a darkroom. It is great fun but can also be a bit confusing. Photoshop runs on Windows and Macs. We survey only a limited array of its capabilities in this seminar/course. One drawback of Photoshop is its cost. If you intend to work professionally with images, you should "bite the bullet" and buy it. It is the campus standard for office and faculty users doing image editing for College applications. But if you know you will not be doing image editing professionally, you should consider using Photoshop Elements as a substitute. It is a very good fit for home computers. It does a wide array of Photoshop's standard actions. In fact, all the techniques we cover in this seminar/survey course can be done (sometimes with a different tool) in Elements. But, as an editing program, Photoshop is more powerful. It is interesting, though, that Elements does some functions better than Photoshop. Elements is designed (on Windows) to be a picture collection management system. Many Photoshop users use Elements to manage their collection and Photoshop to do advanced editing. Elements makes this easy. The latest version (4) combined the editing functions of the earlier Elements system with the photo management functions of what had been a different product, Adobe Album. (On the Mac, Adobe does not compete with the built-in free iPhoto program that comes with all Macs. It works with iPhoto.) IPhoto is a better collection management program than Elements. In addition, Apple now sells a program called Aperture that is an amazing system for managing images. Aperture is designed for professional photographers. So Adobe Corporation only provides the editing components of Elements for the Mac. This version is very good, however. The Mac version has a number of features that don't appear in Windows, but these are not discussed in this seminar/course.

In general, the Mac continues to be a much better system for image management and editing, particularly because of the better built-in systems for coordinating and calibrating screen and print color matching as well as the ability to handle very large collections with ease (say 10,000 files averaging 5 MB each and up). However, Windows is perfectly suitable for consumer or prosumer use. In general, Windows is the better choice if your primary computer needs are reports, lists, accounting and other workplace "paperwork" functions and the Mac is better if your primary needs fall into "creative content" including graphics, video, sound, layout, etc. But both machines are capable of functioning in each others territory.

Adobe Corporation produces Photoshop and Elements as well as many of the other leading graphics and multimedia packages. They produce two leading desktop publishing program, In Design and PageMaker, and one of the leading web authoring system systems, Go Live. They recently acquired Macromedia, so now they own Dreamweaver and the interactive web multimedia program Flash.

One of the best ways to get started with Photoshop is to run through the tutorial developed at the Multimedia labs of Cal Poly. Click here to jump across the Internet to their tutorial. They have good tutorials aimed at a college-level understanding of many computer topics.

This document is a very brief description of some of Photoshop's technique. For each, we also include information about using Elements instead. This is not comprehensive. Most any book on computer graphics will actually be about Photoshop. There are several tools that only get a brief mention here. It is easier for you to learn their basic use by experimentation. Make sure you practice using each of these. Check the Help files to answer any questions. If that does not suffice, see Dr. Fry.

In the following (and in other places in the seminar/course), much of the content you must learn is written into a tutorial-style introduction to using the program. It is important that you read through the material first before trying it, then again when you try it, and then again afterward.

Beginning "by a nose"

Photoshop and Elements are often called "digital darkroom" systems. They are aimed at retouching, resizing, improving, combining, and/or editing images. They are not designed for doing original drawings. (Ask IT about programs designed for doing original artwork.) To get a sense of Photoshop or Elements, begin by loading a few images and making changes. This section walks you through that.

1. Download the image of the little girl at left. (I apologize to her and her parents for what we're going to do to her picture.) Put her image file (girl.jpg) in a folder. You probably ought to use this folder for all the example work you do with Photoshop (or Elements). Make a second copy of this file in the same folder. Name that file girloriginal.jpg You'll open both so that you can compare your "edited" version to the original after you try things. 2. Load Photoshop or Elements and get into editing mode. This is a bit different in the two programs. Click the links for opening Photoshop or opening Elements for a brief description of what happens and how to get started in each program. You will get used to this. In Elements, use Standard Edit, not Quick Edit mode. Note that you should avoid double clicking the image file to get into a program. In multimedia work, we're constantly shifting a media file from one program to another. One key to doing this well is to load files by first loading a program and then using File -> Open, or some variation of this, to open your file. The moral is that we open files from within our programs. We NEVER double click a file and let it open some program and then open the file. 3. So do that. In Photoshop, pull down under File to Open and select the file girl.jpg. Then open girloriginal.jpg. You should now see two copies of the girl's image. Arrange them next to each other. Look at the screen. Whether you are using photoshop or Elements, you should see the girl twice and tools down the left side and some other windows on the right side. In the example below, I show the Elements view and have circled the first tool we're going to use, the Lasso. There are several Lasso tools in these programs. To choose a variant, click the tool (or on a Mac, hold the left mouse button down fro a a second). A menu appears. Select the ordinary lasso. Note that the lasso tool (and several others in both Elements and Photoshop) have a small triangle in the lower right of the tool icon on the toolbar. This indicates that this is actually a pop-up of several tools. If you don't see the one you want, pop it up to look for the desired tool.

What we have in mind here is to make her nose smaller. Not that she has a big nose. We just want to see that it is easy to "adjust" features in a way that looks like, perhaps, God made her that way, not you. Photoshop (or Elements) is amazing at this. It is used on every picture in every magazine ad. You know no model looks "that good." Well, the way that's done is with Photoshop.

So, for the girl, after you've chosen the lasso, move the tool over to the bridge of her nose, between her eyes, and hold down the mouse button and drag around the nose. Close the region. Stay about the distance away from her nose as in the example. Let go of the button in the end. (Actually, when I do this, I do quite a bit of zooming in and out. I like working on a bigger image. Maybe it's just that I'm older. Anyway, you can use the zoom tool -- it looks like a magnifying glass -- to zoom in. Just click it on her nose. To zoom out, hold down Alt and click the magnifying glass anywhere on her image.) It is OK, perhaps even better, to not be perfectly smooth in this. In the end, you're marking where an effect will end, and nature doesn't use really smooth lines.

Now for the most fun part. "Pinch" her nose. Do this by pulling down under Filter -> Distort -> Pinch. Adjust the slider for the amount. I show what it would look like at 65. That's too much. Use 30 or less. The image below shows what you get when you use 30 and then remove the selection marking by pulling down under Select -> Deselect. There are many "Filters" in these programs. Notice also that all these instructions are exactly the same in Photoshop and Elements. I also did the examples for you with some of the images from a Windows machine and some from a Mac. Everything is exactly the same between the two in every step.

You might notice that in all these screen images, I've been cropping out some of the girl's images to get these small enough to write in this text. Look at the two images at left. Doesn't the nose on the left look like it could be real? As you try out these tools, you can do Undo once or more than once to step back through things you no longer want. Both programs have have a window that will give you a history of everything you've done. You can click back to any earlier step. (In Photoshop the window is called History, and in Elements its called Undo History.) Check it out.

Next, lets make her lips fuller. (I know they're just fine, but this is just for fun and to see what happens with a negative pinch.) Try this on your own: 1. With the lasso, select the lips. (The region should start at the point halfway between the bottom of her nose and the top of her upper lip and go around outside the lips and circle halfway between the bottom lip and bottom of the chin and back around. 2. So Filter -> Distort -> Pinch again. This time do about a -25 pinch. If you overdo it (try), it looks quite painful. 3. Again do Select -> Deselect. Notice selections are "sticky" in these programs. You need to do some work to get rid of them. Selection is really important in this. More about that later ... So our "retouched" image is on the left with the original on the right. You'll need to do all the above and post your girl image to the server.

Click here to go to the top.

Next steps in Photoshop or Elements >

Page maintained by Dr. Robert Fry. Last updated 6 July 2007.