Photoshop

Photo Editing and Correcting:
With the advent of digital cameras that could rival film cameras in quality of image, it was essential to give the digital photographer a dark room to edit, enhance and publish his work. Several quality programs are available to serve this need. Adobe's "PhotoShop" and "PhotoShop Elements" are recognized as the best of the lot.

What is the difference between them? PhotoShop is a professional publishing program designed for the printing of commercial art work and magazine photos. Images can be saved in the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) format needed for commercial printing. It also has a few very special editing tool needed for this level of work. PhotoShop Elements is for the home photographer. It has been designed for home use on personnel computers (MAC and PC).
If you take one or two photos a week, it is not the program for you. It is a very detailed, powerful, editing and archiving program and requires the user to understand the basic principles of both photography and painting. Simply changing the contrast, brightness, and size of a photo are easier with many low cost or free program included with your printer or scanner. Most printing services offer free software to preform these operations when ordering prints. PhotoShop is for saving that once in a lifetime picture that didn't come out or for the photographer who want prints for display.

The current version of PhotoShop Elements is version 4, however for this demonstration we will be working with Version 3. There is little if any difference in the two versions. Adobe has added new plug-ins for more cameras to download images directly and some new textures in version 4.
We will start with a video of the miracles of PhotoShop that comes with the program. . It will describe the addition of PhotoShop Organizer (Album) which was added to PhotoShop as an upgrade to Version 2. It allows you to sort and tag all your images in a orderly fashion for easy searches. Images can be found by date, subject, person or any tag you create. It then groups the images so you can easily find the one you need.

The video, then gets to the real meat of the editing of photos using the "Editor" It shows how to correct "red-eye", background lighting, under and over exposure, removal of objects, and fine tuning photos. Using PhotoShop tools to correct a photo is like using a jewelers tools and the simple editing programs offered by commercial printer is like using a sledge hammer.

PhotoShop offers several tools to correct each defect. It allows you to correct one color at a time. It allows for correction of highlight areas, shadows areas and mid-tone ranges separately.
After the video, we will demonstrate some of these features. The manual for PhotoShop is over 400 pages long and still doesn't cover all the features and tools.