This course includes many photographs, almost all taken by me (© Nigel Ward). Most of them are quite large and are designed to be downloaded over a fast (DSL) Internet connection. If you only have a modem connection, you're going to need a lot of patience... In order to work with these images, right-click them and choose Save a Copy in order to save the image to your computer (if you are working in the CIV computer rooms, then you should save the image to your personal folder in the way that I have shown you). Remember where you saved the image, then open it from within Photoshop.

Before you get started, here's a useful tip: Photoshop uses a lot of floating 'palettes' as well as a toolbar, and the screen can easily get very crowded and begin obscuring your picture - you should hide all the palettes when they are not needed by pressing the TAB key - press the TAB key again to show the palettes when they are needed. Also, even if you are used to using menus rather than keyboard shortcuts in other programs, it is worth getting into the habit of using keyboard shortcuts for common operations in Photoshop, for they can save you a lot of time. Here are the shortcuts that I recommend you learn NOW - try to use them systematically rather than using menus or palettes. The shortcuts for zooming in and out are particularly useful - it's important to realize that zooming doesn't actually change the size of the picture, any more than looking at a bird through binoculars makes the bird bigger. It just makes it seem bigger.

Photoshop 5 versus Photoshop 6

In 2002, the CIV has version 5 of Photoshop running on 10 computer and version 6 running on 10 more (ultimately we hope to run version 6 on all 20 computers). This course was originally written with version 5 in mind, but the two versions are similar and where they differ I am adding notes to this effect in the lessons concerned. Here are some of the differences that I have noticed:

Undoing Mistakes

Brilliant student though you may be, it's just possible that you may make a mistake or two during the course of these lessons. Luckily for you, recent versions of Photoshop (versions 5 and above) have very powerful 'undo' features.  Edit > Undo or Ctrl-Z will undo the LAST change that you have made but you can undo up to 99 steps by using the History Palette (in the Windows menu)!

If you want to to revert to the image as it was when it was last saved then choose Revert in the File menu.

Save your work regularly

You should be able to produce some beautiful, high-quality work in this class and you won't want to lose it, so save your work at least every 10 minutes (Ctrl-S). In this way, even if your computer crashes, you can be sure you will never lose more than 10 minutes' work...

Work-in-progress should normally be saved in Photoshop's PSD format which will save with no loss of image quality and record all the details about the image. However, PSD files are very large and therefore once the image is finished you should save it in a compressed format such as JPEG. When saving in this form, there is a small loss in picture quality - you can control this by adjusting the balance between small file size and high picture quality - a setting of about 7 is recommended for this class. 

Use meaningful names when you save - it will make it easier for me to locate and grade your work.

A note about resolution

If you were to look at a computerized image with a magnifying glass, you would see that the image is made up of tiny squares. These squares are called picture elements, or 'pixels' for short. Picture 'resolution' refers to the number of pixels that make up the picture, and thus the level of detail that the picture contains. The images that we will use in these lessons are usually about 800 pixels wide and 600 pixels tall (note that this gives a ratio of 4:3 which corresponds to the shape of your computer screen). The resolution of such a picture is 800 x 600 = 480 000 pixels or about 0.5 megapixels (1 megapixel = 1 million pixels). This is a good size for learning to use Photoshop (assuming your screen is set to a resolution of  at least 1024x768), but this would be rather large to include on a web page since it would take a long time to download over a conventional modem connection (the jpeg file size would be about 200KB). Pictures on web pages should not normally exceed about 100 000 pixels or about 40KB.

Pictures that are destined to be printed, on the other hand, need to have a much higher resolution, for printers are capable or reproducing much finer detail than computer monitors. Many digital cameras have a resolution of 2 or 3 megapixels (file size more than 1 MB), and this will give a good result when printed even up to A4 size.