Manipulating your Digital Photos with Photoshop

Whether you have digital photographs or photographs that you have scanned
electronically, you may find that there are times that you would like to manipulate them. This manipulation may include cropping the photo, getting rid of red eye, erasing dust spots or repairing scratches. This seminar will walk you through the process of correcting “not so perfect” photographs as well as working with images to create panoramas, digital contact sheets and customized picture packages as well as save files in the appropriate file format.

NOTE: There are direct links to help documentation for the information covered in
today’s class. In Photoshop CS2, go to: Help > How to Enhance Photos
Before you begin: It is best practice to save a working copy of your photograph in
Photoshop (.psd) format before you begin working on it. Typically digital cameras save your images in a .jpg format. Because JPG files are designed to be compressed (relatively small files), you will notice that if you leave the file as a JPG, you will begin to lose image quality during the editing and resaving process. JPGs are referred to as a lossy file type “with losses” to image quality. They are small files without the requirement for full recoverability. Later you can save to a specific format for either print or the web. Keeping the file in .psd format gives you the flexibility to export to various file formats to keep imagines consistent from one medium to the next (ie. .jpg for the web, .tiff or .eps for print) Choosing an Image Mode You can convert Photoshop images to a number of images or color modes, such as grayscale, RGB or CMYK. The mode you specify controls how color information is defined in the image. By selecting a particular color mode, you are choosing to work with a particular color model (a numerical method for describing color). You should specify an image mode based on the range of colors that you want the image to display and the image’s intended use, such as screen or print. Color modes determine the number of colors, the number of channels, and the file size of an image. Choosing a color mode also determines which tools and file formats are available.