If you already have more than a basic knowledge of using Photoshop you can take a look at the Photoshop Secrets Special FX. It's a tutorial CDROM with 19 lessons that are packed into 2 hours that will teach you exactly how to use the special cutting edge effects that the advance Photoshop users' use. Photoshopsupport.com features the best and latest Photoshop graphic tutorials for free. It also offers tips and tricks for beginners as well as advanced Photoshop users. It's like a site where your fellow Photoshop users can meet and share all the cool stuff and tricks they've discovered while using Photoshop. On this site you also get links to upgrades and guides as to what upgrades suit what you want to get out of Photoshop. You will totally benefit from this awesome resource. Other sites like Adobe.com and CBTcafe.com (Computer Based Training Cafe) have detailed tutorials for the babes to Photoshop use. There are tutorials with easy to follow written instructions and visual examples, so you see and understand how everything should be done.

Photoshop training is one of the best investments you can make in your professional career. Whatever field you're working in, Photoshop training can help you reach your full potential. Anyone who works with digital images and graphics knows that the Adobe Photoshop line of software is the tool of choice for graphic designers and professional photographers around the world. The Photoshop interface hasn't changed a great deal since the earliest versions, so users can easily upgrade to Photoshop CS2 from any previous version. Photoshop CS2 has powerful new features that will aid designers in all fields. You can literally use Photoshop CS2 to create any visual effect that you can image-if you can dream it, you can create it with Photoshop. Like previous versions of Photoshop, CS2 is available for both Macintosh and Windows. And the best thing about the new version is the price: Photoshop CS2 costs less than previous versions of Photoshop.

CROPPING. Select the "Crop" tool icon from your Tools bar, then drag it downward diagonally from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner. Release the mouse and then use it to manipulate the image size with the crop "handles." Hit "Enter" or "Return." RESIZING. Go to "Image" in your top menu, then choose "Image Size." Enter the dimensions you need and hit OK. (You can radically change the outer shape of the image by un clicking "Constrain Proportions" at the bottom of the page and entering different dimensions, then clicking OK.)

Strike a balance The Gradient Editor automatically places a midpoint between each colour stop to create a smooth linear blend between colors. You can tweak the effect of this blend by moving the midpoint to offset the mix between the colors. Using this technique you can create tight, dramatic blends between colors instead of gradual ones. The opacity stops run along the top of the preview bar. A black opacity stop indicates 100% solid, a white opacity stop indicates that that part of the gradient is 100% transparent and grey stops indicate values in between.

Photoshop offers blending options unsurpassed in the design industry in your "Layer Style" dialog box, you will first find "General Blending" options, which are often enough for any task. Experiment with the Blend Modes and their opacity to see just how incredibly flexible the normal Blending Options can be.To find your advanced blending options in Photoshop, double-click a layer or click the "Add a Layer Style" icon at the bottom left of your Layers palette, and then choose "Blending Options." Your "Layer Style" dialog box will appear.At the bottom of the Layer Style box, you will find, under "Advanced Blending," something called the "Blend If" tool. What is the Photoshop "Blend If" tool, exactly? Blend If is a "smart" blending tool. You can use it to blend images or create a more transparent image with almost infinite precision. This one tool is so flexible and handy it behooves any serios Photoshop designer to learn to use it, and use it well.

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company's chief executive said Tuesday.The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com. Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the Photo Bucket media-sharing site.

When you want to add an adjustment layer quickly, the best way to do it is to click on the shortcut option that is located at the foot of the Layers palette. You can also go to the Layer - New Adjustment Layer in the main menu. If you use the Lasso Tool when making a selection on your original layer, any adjustment layers you design will only affect the selected area. A mask protects the unselected parts of an image on each new adjustment layer. You can build your image adjustments effectively and slowly if you combine the effects of multiple adjustment layers. You also have the option of turning them off and on when you are ready to fine-tune the overall effect. Use the thumbnail icons to quickly identify your adjustment layers. These thumbnail icons are attached to the corresponding layer and they are labeled so you can see which layer applies which effect.

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Learning Photoshop can be easy with David Peters

There are only two things you have too know about the ExtendScript Toolkit program right now: Select target application, ExtendScript must know which application you are writing the script for. In the top left dropdown menu select Adobe Photoshop CS2 and if asked if you want top start it choose yes. Running script, to run a script you have written you press the button that looks like a play button. Reference documents All objects have different properties that can be set and methods that can be executed and right now you probably don't know any of these, this is where the reference documents come in. The reference document for JavaScript contains information about all objects available in your scripts. Start with a blank photoshop document of size 1024*768 and white background. Choose the brush "rough round bristle" from the toolbar. Create a new layer and draw some lines. Right click on the new layer and choose "blending options". Choose the values. DROP SHADOW INNER GLOW BEVEL AND EMBOSS; For "texture", choose "satin" as the pattern. TEXTURE Now add some motion blur to this layer from filters > blur > motion blur. Similarly, add gaussian blur also to this layer with the radius around 72. Not so catchy yet. Well try this. Change the background color of the default layer as black by choosing Edit > Fill from menu. Now look at the output. Ahh, that looks much better, isn't it ? You can add some text to this texturized background if you wish.

Color Model: When you hear the term color model we are referring to the method from which we define or classify the color we are to work with. Examples of such are RGB, LAB, CMYK, etc. Color Space: A color space is simply a variation of your color model. For instance, within your RGB framework some common variations are, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and so on. Some of these spaces are better for display e.g. sRGB and Wide Gamut RGB while other color spaces are more suited to printing e.g. ColorMatch RGB and Adobe RGB. Now, it is important to note that every device in our workflow utilizes it's own unique color space. Meaning, while your monitor, scanner, and printer will base their color spaces basically on what we can see their actual gamut (range of colors) will differ. This is where we lose our consistency across devices. This is the problem we must attend to.

Adobe's Photoshop is the number one choice digital photo editing software application among today's professional photographers, graphic artists and web designers. It is not only the best but easier to work with than you might think. Many shy away from Photoshop because there are intimidated by the complexity. With the help of a good Photoshop tutorial you can begin to learn Photoshop within minutes and be on your way to restoring those old photographs and preserving your family's memories for year to come. There are less expensive digital editing applications but the problem is that they often have very limited capabilities when it comes to doing high quality digital photo restoration. Those cheaper digital photo software packages often utilize a one size fits all approach to photo restoration and they just don't have the functions to deal with all of the types of damage you may encounter in renewing your old photos.

To use the dodge tool, select it in the toolbox, choose your settings in the options bar, pick a brush from the pop-up palette, and drag in the image to lighten the chosen tones. This tool has an effect on click, but does not do any additional work until it's moved (unless you click the airbrush button). However, repeated stroking over the same area does have a cumulative effect. If you choose Edit > Fade immediately after using this tool, you can change the opacity of the strokes you have just applied.

The spot healing brush made its debut in Photoshop Elements 3, but now an enhanced version of it is available in Photoshop CS2. The spot healing tool is different from the existing patch and healing tools in that it does not require you to make a selection or define a source point before using it. As you can see in the screen shot above, Photoshop CS2's spot healing tool has more options than the version in Photoshop Elements 3. You can select a blending mode for the healing, and choose between proximity match or create texture. You can also sample all layers which allows you to use the spot healing tool on a new layer for non-destructive editing.

The easiest way to make teeth whiter in a photo is with your Dodge Tool. (Among your tool icons, it's the 7th down on the right hand column. If you don't see it there, right click on the icon and you'll find two hidden choices; one will be your Dodge Tool.) On the horizontal Tool Options Bar under the Menu, choose "Midtones" for Range, and 40% for Exposure. Also on the Tool Options Bar, choose the appropriate brush for this particular retouching job. Use your Magnifying Glass Icon in Tools to zoom in to the area you want to affect. Then run your brush over the teeth you want to whiten several times, slowly, without releasing your mouse. If you find that the Dodge tool whitened too much, you can either click "Edit," then "Step Backward," (to start over), or "Edit", then "Fade Dodge Tool," which will allow you to fade the whitening enhancement to your exact preference.

Inside every program are things that people don't often do, tools that aren't used as much as they should be. The same applies to photoshop. In this case these aren't being used enough. Turning a Photo Into a Work of Art. Everyone likes to have nice things to look at. Most of us like to have pictures on the wall, and something that looks different from what other people have on their walls is a definite plus. Unless you're blessed with artistic talent, though, this can be very expensive - until now. Use one of Photoshop's many Artistic or Brush Stroke filters to turn your photos into "new masters," then print them out on quality art paper. Designing Web Banners and Buttons. Photoshop comes with a predefined web banner sized canvas. Photoshop's sister application, Image Ready, comes with several - and lots of tools for animating text and pictures. You can also create interactive buttons that enhance a web browsing experience.

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Free Photoshop Tutorials – Get Photoshop Tips

Click on the Brustic to open the Brush Preset picker, and scroll down to see the default set of brushes. Towards the foot of the list of default brushes you'll find a variety of unusually-shaped brush tips, including brushes shaped like stars and blobs. Click on the picker's menu icon to access other, specialised sets of brushes. You can use the picker's menu to display a thumbnail of the brush stroke, or set it to show the brush tip and name. The numerical value indicates the brush's initial diameter in pixels. You can customise this to suit your requirements. When you select a new set of brushes, you can either replace the existing default set or append the new set to it so you can use both.

There are few things worse than having hundreds of cool brushes gone in an instant. It's happened to me on one occasion where my hard drive fried out and I didn't save all my customized Photoshop stuff. So I'm going to help you avoid any tragedies and tell you how to save your brushes. Once you've got an amount of brushes made (I personally like to create 'sets' of brushes that all kind of work together, or just happened to fit my mood that day!), go to 'Edit' then choose 'Preset Manager'. A window with all your current brushes will pop up. You can click on each little square individually. What you're going to want to do is shift+right click on the series of brushes you want to save. Once you've done that, click on 'Save Set', give the set a name and save it to your computer (of course these brush files are what you're going to want to back up!). There, you're done!

To demonstrate the way the interface changes as you use it, try selecting the type tool from the toolbox (the one that looks like a capital T). You will see straight away that the toolbar changes entirely to allow you to set font name, font size and so on. In the history palette, your use of the type tool will be added to your history, and a new layer will be created for your text and shown in the layers palette.

The problem with many of these applications is that they use pre designed templates which the user pieces together to form logos that really are not that original and sometimes appear a little generic. While these applications allow the user to quickly begin creating graphic designs and logos they often simply do not produce designs that are original and in demand by web design clients. If you take the time to learn adobe Photoshop there will be no limit to the logos and graphic designs you can put together. Although the interface can seem a little overwhelming at first, learning Photoshop is not difficult if you have the right tools and take the time to practice.

Do you have old photographs that are faded, worn out, crinkled or even torn? Of course you do, everyone does. Many of these photos are likely very old family photographs that are simply irreplaceable should something happen to them. In the past it was very expensive and time consuming to have old damaged photographed restored. It usually required a photo restoration expert and sometimes the results were not really that great. Digital imaging, and more specifically Adobe Photoshop, has revolutionized the process of renewing and restoring old photographs. It is amazing the results you can achieve with Photoshop. Old and damaged, even torn, photographs can be restored and renewed to their original colors and vitality using the tools available in Photoshop.

Customers get to proof their enhanced images in online private galleries, with web links, user names and passwords sent by e-mail, before deciding whether to purchase. Enhanced images are available for immediate download after secure online purchase through Roman Cart. No money up front and no obligation to buy -- that's how confident Caledonian Digital is in their ability to deliver.

The tools we use in Photoshop are levels, curves and saturation for changing contrasts; and, color balance to bring the image back to the way the natural eye would see the color. Here is what we tell our photographers in the Handbook of Reuters Journalism... Photoshop is a highly sophisticated image manipulation programme. We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and colour. For us it is a presentational tool.The rules are - no additions or deletions, no misleading the viewer by manipulation of the tonal and colour balance to disguise elements of an image or to change the context. Photoshop is a powerful image processing program with many more tools to help photographers produce the best quality image they can for the type of photography they do.

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Learn Photoshop the fast and easy way

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How do I learn Photoshop?

Hey guys! I don't really know much of Photoshop. So essentially, i'll need to start with basics.. Can anyone suggest me a really nice book (as in, a guide) to learn it? How long would it take to get to know all the tools and start working on digital photographs?

Photoshop is a huuuuge program, but if you start with just photo editing, it'll be simpler.
Scott Kelby has a lot of books out that are okay, but there is a lot in the way of free internet tutorials that I found fantastic.

Using whatever search engine, look up these essential features:
layers
curves
quick mask
liquefy filter
select color range
photo filters
layer masks
clone stamp
record action
shadow/highlight tool
sharpen using high pass

With these tools at your hands, maybe 65 percent of the full power of photoshop is yours. There are a lot more special tools, but these few basic ones will get you started.
As you gain familiarity, you can explore more!

Next stage of playing:
channels
custom brushes
refining edges

Adobe Photoshop, called simply Photoshop by most, is a leading graphics editor developed by Adobe Systems. It is used to create and manipulate images, both for personal and commercial use. Photoshop can be used in multiple operating systems, including Microsoft, Macintosh and Linux. Since 1988, Photoshop has evolved from containing basic editing tools to the now more advanced functions, including the warp tool and the grain reduction filter for photos taken in low light. Because of this, there is a need to learn the basics and constantly re-learn additional features of the software; hence, the continuously increasing number of free Photoshop tutorials available.

The Adobe Photoshop program itself offers tutorials. First, check out the manual. This contains explanations on the basic tools of the software. The program also comes with ReadMe and ReadMe First! files that also contains helpful information. When you open Adobe Photoshop, you can also go to Photoshop Help under the “Help” tab. If you are using Windows, the shortcut would be to click F1. You can then choose from a set of basic Photoshop topics, such as making color adjustments, drawing, applying filters, and using layers.

Free Photoshop Tutorials also abound on the Internet. The advantages of using the Internet to look for free tutorials are that these resources are more updated that those found in books or those built-in with the program. The Internet also provides almost unlimited information for various topics and useful tips from other users like you. Also, you can access these tutorials at your own time in the convenience of your home.

The most trusted source of free Photoshop information is the Adobe Website, which can be seen at http://www.adobe.com. Adobe Online offers free tutorials, how-to guides, interactive online courses and online seminars. Adobe Online also allows registered users access to Photoshop Knowledgebase, which contains answers to technical questions. Adobe also offers customer service, which can vary depending on your location.

You can also join several online Photoshop forums. These allow Photoshop users to interact with one another and answer each other’s questions. Adobe also has an online forum for its products, including Photoshop. Aside from this, there are other forums on Photoshop and other similar software that you can join.

If you still want more information, you can also search the Internet for other sources. Using a search engine, you can find numerous websites offering free Photoshop tutorials. Free Photoshop tutorials are available in multiple formats, including text, audio, video, or combinations of these. Depending on your availability, tutorials may also be conducted in real-time or may be accessed on-demand.

Some websites offer a list of free online tutorials from different sources, such as [http://www.tutorialkit.com] and http://www.photoshopsupport.com. Other sites offer free tutorials that can be accessed on their webpages, while some websites send the tutorials directly to your e-mail. Some websites also offer online tutorial and training courses, which you can try out for free for a set trial period. You can also avail of tutorial courses using chats and call or video conferencing, which can be conducted one-on-one or with a group. These live tutorials are more interactive, allowing you to ask questions during the process and provide feedback to the other users.

Of course, there are also disadvantages to searching for free Photoshop tutorials online is that you cannot always be assured of the quality of the tutorials. Majority of these tutorials are not certified or supported by Adobe Systems. Also, some websites offering free Photoshop tutorials advertise that their tutorials are free when, in fact, they aren’t. Users looking for free Photoshop tutorials should be on the lookout for these sites and should proceed with caution.

Mario Churchill is a freelance author and has written over 200 articles on various subjects. For a free photo shop tutorial and or to purchase a video photo shop tutorial checkout his website.

Many thanks for reading our Learn Photoshop article

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Learn Photoshop