Recently, Andy Hunsucker wrote an article on his favorite Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. If you like keyboard shortcuts and other Photoshop tips, enjoy this entertaining video, "101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes," by Deke McClelland for Adobe TV:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/dekepod/101-photoshop-tips-in-5-minutes/
You may already know that Photoshop blend modes can immeasurably enhance your creativity and playfulness. You may be familiar with the artful aspects of blend modes; however, most Photoshop users don't know they are corrective, too. Understanding how they work is a key to using them to your best advantage.
NOTE: This article was originally posted as an appendix and supplemental material to Photoshop: In-Depth Healing Tools in conjunction with Carol Rhodes.
With digital camera photographs, there is very little preparation involved to work with them in an application like Photoshop. Many times, it is as simple as plugging a cable into the camera and then into your computer. The rest of the process is frequently accomplished automatically, or with very little direction.
However older photographs must be scanned in for the computer to be able to use them. You might think, "I'll never need to work with old photographs, I have my digital camera." But considering photography has been around for more than a century, and digital photography has only been the standard for a decade or so, there are millions of printed photographs still around that are deteriorating everyday. If you want these photographs to last into the next generation, you need to preserve them digitally.
The problem with print photography is that it was growing and changing constantly throughout it's lifetime. Many of the developing techniques used by early consumer cameras are unstable, and the chemicals used can breakdown over time. Look at any old photograph. The 'sepia tone' effect that we associate with older photographs is actually the deterioration of the chemicals used to develop the photograph. Left unchecked, eventually the image will be unrecognizable.
Considering that many print photographs are stored in shoe boxes in closets and under beds, it's even more important to preserve the images we want to last forever.
In this article, we will examine scanners, including what types are available to consumers, and what features to look for. Finally, we will discuss the best practice to follow to ensure you get a good scan.
At IT Training & Education, we're always looking for ways to improve our STEPS curriculum. Occasionally, even when we find a great topic to cover, we find that for whatever reason, either time or technical, we simply can't cover it in our workshops. But now, IU students, faculty and staff have access to a wealth of lynda.com content for the fall semester, and lynda.com can cover some of these more specialized topics.
In this series of articles, we will explore some of these topics and point users to specific lynda.com courses that can enhance your skills after working through IT Training & Education workshops.
The first lynda.com workshop we will examine is Photoshop CS4 for Photographers (make sure you're logged into lynda.com through IT Training & Education to gain access).
In this workshop, professional photographer Chris Orwig takes us through Photoshop with the eye of a photographer. While many topics such as Curves, Levels, Layers and Masks will be familiar to participants who have taken Photoshop CS4: Retouching and Color Correction, Chris Orwig also covers things like monitor calibration, Camera RAW and printing images, which are all essential topics to a professional or aspiring professional photographer.
While the standard STEPS workshop is 3 hours in length, this lynda.com course includes almost 15 hours of content, covering many topics in greater depth than we have time for at IT Training & Education.
And the best part? You can still ask questions relating to the topics covered of your IT Training & Education subject matter experts. So you get the best of both worlds. In-depth training, taken at your own pace, along with an expert (or in this case, experts 
) to answer your specific questions.
Photoshop CS4 for Photographers is not for beginners however, here are some IT Training & Education STEPS workshops you might want to take a look at before diving in:
IT Training & Education Recommended Prerequisites(or suggested skills):
It's difficult to create a perfectly straight photo when taking a picture. Most of the time a small rotation isn't that noticeable, but it's possible that a rotation could cause problems for other corrections, especially if the tool you're using requires things to be lined up properly, like the rectangular marquee. We can also easily introduce an unintended angle when scanning images as well.
Straightening an image is fairly straightforward in Photoshop. This is where the Ruler tool comes in. With the Ruler tool, we can map out the angle that the image is currently at, and then we can rotate the image using that method.
Let's see how to do this now.
Learning how to use the tools and panels in Photoshop is really only the first step to mastery of the program. Knowing the order to click things is a good start, but knowing how to replace some of those mouse clicks with keyboard shortcuts and modifiers will enhance your productivity with the program, and make you more confident going forward.
The best habit for a budding Photoshop artist to get into is to keep one hand on the keyboard at all times. For an expert, Photoshop is a program that requires coordination between both hands.
Open up Photoshop while you read this post, and try out these shortcuts as you read. Getting the tactile sense of these shortcuts will help you remember them. Also, many of these shortcuts and modifiers will work in other Adobe programs.
When I teach a workshop on Adobe Dreamweaver or Fireworks, I'm always amazed by a question that participants don't ask. (No, not: "Why can't you and the laser pointer get along?"Â That question, I'm afraid, has no answer.)
The question that's never asked is: "How do you come up with these colors?"Â And by "these colors", I'm referring to the 6-digit hexadecimal codes that we use throughout the Dreamweaver and Fireworks workshops to designate specific colors for display on the web:
Many times in our images, we find damage that is too intense to replace with the basic healing tools. When this happens we can sometimes replace these damaged pixels with information from a different image, and occasionally with information from the same image. In the previous exercise with this image, we repaired the background. This time, we will see how to repair the damage over the right arm, using the left arm as a basis for our correction.
Use this exercise file to follow along:
View this video tutorial to see how we can use information in the image to repair it.
When installing the CS4 applications available from IUWare, you might have missed some important additional content that is also available. In this post, we'll explore what is available in these Extra Content installers, and which items should be considered essential. If you have purchased the disc version of Design Premium, this extra content will be available on the Content disc.
First of all, let's find out where to get this Extra Content. It is available from IU Ware at the following address: http://iuware.iu.edu/list.aspx?id=196
NOTE: You should have any CS4 applications you wish you use installed before downloading and installing these files. Fonts in these packages can be installed without installing CS4 applications.
Here you can download all of the Extra Content that is available. It is separated by program, but we will see shortly, that some of the files inside are duplicated. First, let's list what programs have Extra Content available, and what can be downloaded.
Trying to import a Photoshop file containing a subject with a transparent background into InDesign or Illustrator can be frustrating. You need to extract the subject from an image and place it into an InDesign or Quark XPress document, like this:
     
In your page layout program, it might appear that you have done all you need to do by copying and pasting selections or by using a layer mask and importing it. Sometimes, even if the transparent part of the image displays correctly on your monitor, it may still come out all wrong in the printout. That's because you need to create a clipping path in Photoshop before you import it into InDesign or Illustrator.
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