 Welcome everyone to Adobe Photoshop for Advanced Beginners. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm glad to be your host for today's webinar. Thanks so much for joining us. Before we get started with the webinar I want to make sure that everyone is comfortable using the platform we are on today which is ReadyTalk. You can chat into us using the box on the lower left side of your screen to let us know if you have any technical issues, any audio problems, if the slides and the audio don't stay in sync, anything like that. Or you can also use it to chat with us. Let us know from where you are calling and joining today. Let us know if you have questions for our presenters, and we will be capturing those on the back end throughout the webinar. We will keep all lines muted today so we get a nice clear recording that you will receive later and you can share and watch again at your convenience. You can share it to your friends and colleagues who may benefit from this training as well. Your audio is going to play through your computer speakers, and that's how most of you will be listening in today. If you hear an echo it means you are logged in more than once and you will want to close an instance of ReadyTalk. If at any time during the webinar the slides and the audio don't stay in sync, we recommend calling into the alternate phone number. It's toll free. You can dial in at any time if you have any audio issues, and that usually helps correct the problem. So definitely keep that in your back pocket and we will chat that number out again so you have got it. If you lose your internet connection go ahead and click again on that Join Meeting button in the confirmation or reminder email. If you registered just this morning you would have received the slide deck and a Q&A from a prior webinar we did that was on Adobe Basics in that reminder email too so you can refer to that in the webinar. If you didn't get that you will receive it with the follow-up email in the next day or two. We do record these webinars and you will be able to find them on TechSoup's website along with upcoming and other archived webinars at TechSoup.org slash community slash event slash webinars. You can also check them out on our YouTube channel, TechSoup video, or on our slideshare where you will be able to see the slides embedded later today. Again I mentioned you will get this email with all the links within a day or two. If you would like to tweet us you can use the hashtag TechSoup or TechDep. My name is Becky Wiegand and I am the webinar program manager here at TechSoup and I am really glad to be your host for today's event. We are joined by two really fun guys here at TechSoup. You will be hearing mostly from Wes One as I lovingly called him this morning Wes Hohling who is a Senior Web Content Developer here at TechSoup where he spends his days creating content for the web across our site about our products, designing content for us, and he really is a hack with a lot of experience where he has created graphic design content and how to like an intro to Photoshop for nonprofits blog series. He has also run a couple of prior webinars with us, one that was Adobe for Beginners and another one that was an intro to Photoshop. So we will share those links out as well. Today is again Adobe for Advanced Beginners. So we don't expect you to be an advanced Photoshop user for this but we do expect that you have a little bit of experience using Photoshop already and we won't cover really advanced topics. So if you are here for a level 500 course you are not going to be thrilled that we won't be covering that stuff. But if you are a dabbler with Photoshop, this is the right place for you to be because we will cover a bunch of topics in our objectives today that hopefully will help you use it more effectively. We will also hear just briefly from Wes White who is a program manager here at TechSoup and helps manage the relationship with Adobe, one of our donor partners. On the back end you will see Terry McGrath from Adobe who will be on hand to help answer questions about the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of applications. And then Wes White, myself, and Susan Hope Bard here from TechSoup will all be on the back end to grab your questions and help move us forward to Q&A. Looking at the objectives, I will do a quick introduction to TechSoup and Adobe Creative Cloud here at TechSoup. Wes is then going to launch into knowing when to use Photoshop because sometimes it is not the right tool for everything so we want to make sure you know when there may be another tool like Adobe InDesign or Illustrator that may be better suited for a specific task. Then he is going to walk us through the interface showing us some key tools. We are not going to go through every menu and every tool today, but we do have a handy little legend that you will be able to see in the slide deck and use later. He is going to talk about how to use layers. Then we are going to look at learning how to use the magic wand effectively, how to change a background. We will share some additional learning resources, talk about where to get Adobe Creative Cloud and Photoshop in particular, and then we will have time to answer questions. We are using the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite applications today. So if you have CS4 or if you are using Adobe Photoshop elements, some of the things may be applicable to your work. Some of the tools may be applicable, but some may not. So just be aware that that is the platform we are using today. So TechSoup, we are every place on this map that is blue which is almost the entire world, and I am proud to be part of it. Go ahead and chat in to let us know where you are on this map while I talk a little bit about the work that we do here at TechSoup in helping connect technology, donations, resources, and information to nonprofits, libraries, and social do-gooders all around the world. I see lots of people chatting in where they are joining from. We know you can't see the chat, but if there is anything useful that is shared in the chat by any of our participants in the webinar, we will try and share that back out with you. If you are joining us from outside the United States where you may also be able to get Adobe Creative Cloud donations or discounted access, you can join us at TechSoup.global and choose your country to find the donation programs and availability for different products in your own country. We have served in the nonprofit and library sector with $5.2 billion in technology grants and donations, largely from our donor partner companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Intuit, Symantec, and many, many others. So quickly I'm going to just mention where the Adobe Photoshop accesses through TechSoup, and then Wes White will talk about it later on a little bit more in depth, but you can go to TechSoup.org slash Adobe. And you can see Photoshop Elements, which is the installed version that's available. And you can also then see the Adobe Creative Cloud photography package which is primarily focused on the PhotoSuite applications within the Creative Cloud. And then you can look at the All Apps Plan, which is everything Adobe, all in one package that you can access. So with that I'd like to go ahead and introduce our primary speaker, Wes Hollings, who's going to walk us through our objectives for today. The first one is when to use Photoshop and most importantly kind of when not to. So thanks so much for joining us today, Wes. We're glad to have you on. Wes, thanks so much Becky. And yeah, let's get right into it. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is when to use Photoshop and also importantly when not to use Photoshop. So as it's obvious from the name, Photoshop is the best tool for creating and editing photos. And that's for use online or in print. Adobe also provides other really great applications in the Creative Cloud. And that's my personal opinion, that's not just because I work for TechSoup and TechSoup offers. I mean these are really powerful tools. Adobe Illustrator is a great option for creating scalable images like logos and illustrations. So if you need to create a logo for your nonprofit or for an event or if you want something that like you see on our homepage, we have a lot of colorful circles and bursts and rings and things. Those are all scalable vectors, what they call them. Basically they're graphics that you can increase the size of, decrease the size of and they don't lose any of their resolutions. So they look great at any size. InDesign is another great option for anything that's going to be in print. If you want to make newsletters, ads, business cards, brochures, anything like that, that is the most powerful tool you can use to make them. Now that's not to say that you can only use these tools for those purposes. Photoshop has tools for making vectors. Illustrator you can make changes to photos in it. If you need to create a banner ad for example for your nonprofit that you want to use to advertise something across the web, any of these tools can be used to make them. They can all create something that's graphical, something that's visually exciting, and then you can save it to the same format across any of these platforms. So this is more just a guide for picking the right tool for the job. You can use a screwdriver to hammer and nail, but hammers tend to work a little better. So just a quick note about that before we get started. So let's go ahead and meet the Photoshop interface. I'm assuming that a lot of you have at least opened Photoshop before, and it's very common the first time you look at it to say there is so much here. I don't even know where to begin. So let's begin. Looking at the interface, and I've got a photo within the interface here, the colorful tomatoes, on the left you'll see the tools based on which tool you choose if you want to select something in the image, if you want to move something around or crop it or select a color, whatever tool you've chosen on the left will then provide you with a set of options up at the top. If you want to select something, just a portion of your image, you can choose a fixed size that you want to choose or a certain ratio I want to select in a square that's 4 by 3 all the way across. You'll get these options for getting exactly what you want. And on the right there are a series of panels that you can show and hide as you need them to do things like change the font in the text that you're adding to your image or to change the color of the brush that you're using or to rearrange layers which is something that we'll cover later. So I just wanted to make you aware first of what these terms are so that when I use them it all kind of makes sense. Let's go ahead and dive into the toolbar though. Looking on the left and I've kind of highlighted these out here. And this is based on some information that's actually available on Adobe's website. So apologies to Adobe for lifting your information. But hopefully this is something that you can even just print out, keep at your desk next to your computer if it's something you want to reference. You don't quite remember which one's the crop and where the magic wand is for example. And a lot of these we're not going to cover today just because we only have so much time. We're going to basically focus on more of the selection tools which as you can see in the first red box there. Up here you've got Move. If you want to move a layer around in your window. The Marquee tool which is just a fancy way of saying your selection tool if you want to select just a part of it which is something if you've used a simpler program like Microsoft Paint you might be familiar with selection. And other things like that you can see the magic wand is also on there. The fourth one down is the Quick Selection tool. And I'll show you how to get from that to the magic wand and other ways of selecting something. And now to hop over to the panel which is available on the right side. You can see there's a lot of other options here too. History up at the top is a great way to undo some changes that you've made. And this is probably, I mean your mileage may vary but I'd say most common use tool in Photoshop is the undo just because you'll try something not quite right, undo it, try it again, back and forth, rinse and repeat until you get exactly what you want with your photo. A lot of other great options here. I tend to use the Character and Paragraph tools a lot when I'm adding text to it. I want to change the font. I want it to be a certain type face, a certain size, make it bold, or give it a certain amount of space in between. That's something that's available from the Paragraph panel. So just a quick intro to what you can expect from the interface there. Now one thing that we got a lot of questions on from our last Photoshop webinar was how to work with layers. So let's go ahead and switch over to Photoshop and I'll start showing you how to work with layers from those panels on the right. Those bear with me while I swap over to Photoshop. There we go. I'll close this out for now. We can come back to it later. And let's open up. Actually before we get started on that let me hop back over to, let me hop back over to, there we go, getting ahead of myself. Let me hop back over to my presentation for a moment to explain what layers actually are. The best way I can explain layers, if you've never used layers in Photoshop or Illustrator or any of these kind of higher level graphics programs, if you think about animation cells, if you think about watching like a cartoon for example, you've got the background, you've got the character in front, and maybe something in between that the character is interacting with. The way they make cartoons is you'll have a transparent sheet over another transparent sheet over and over and so on and so on, to see those things in the foreground moving. So if you think about the background of a cartoon like this one here, and we've got maybe some birds in the sky above that, and then in front of that is a character. Those are all layers on top of the bottom one, and we can rearrange these as we need to. Of course the background is the thing that's completely opaque, and if we move that to the top you wouldn't be able to see the rest. So if we think about all three of these stacked on top of one another, it looks like a scene even though these are all individual elements stacked in layer format. So now I will swap back over to Photoshop after that tease to show you this. Now at first this looks like it's just a photo of a table with some photographs on it. But in reality if you look over here on the right side, on the bottom right you'll see layer 1, layer 5, layer 6, and then some effects underneath them. These are individual layers because what's actually going on here, this is a photograph of a table with a cup on it. That's one layer. And then each photograph laying on top of it is a different layer. So to demonstrate what I'm talking about, if you look on the bottom left here where it says layer 1, to the left of that there's an eyeball icon which the tooltip tells us indicates layer visibility. It just means that if the eyeball is on there you can see the layer. If the eyeball is gone then you can't. And you can alternate back and forth just by clicking it. So if I click it, that photo of the tree line disappears and you see what's behind it which is the background layer of the table. If I click it back it reappears. And I can do this for any of the layers that I've added. Choosing to show them and hide them. What's great too is if you see the tree photo here in the center on the top, it looks like it's laying on top of the hummingbird. That's because in the layers palette the trees are, that layer is actually above the one for the hummingbird. So as you can see, layer 5 is the hummingbird. Layer 1 is the trees. And just a quick note on the numbers. Those are just numbers that are assigned by Photoshop at the order in which they were added. So they don't actually indicate which order they appear in. It's just the order in which I added them and wanted to rearrange them. So that's why if 1 comes before 5 and then 6 you don't see the rest because that's farther down. But if I move, if I hold and click on layer 5 and drag it up above layer 1 now the hummingbird photo is above the tree photo. So I can rearrange them as I need to if they move it back. You can see what kind of possibilities are available there. If you want the layer that is the most important for the viewer to see you want to bring that to the front. That means it's going to be up at the top and so on all the way down. One of the things we heard questions on before from our last webinar was how to use the magic wand. I'm going to show you a little bit of the wand but also with a caveat that the wand is not always the best tool for selecting something in an image. So I'll show you what I'm talking about here by hopping back to Photoshop and closing out our last image. And I'll select something here to show you. Now I'm going to drag in this photo I have of a desktop computer. This is something that I end up using a lot. I work with a lot here at TechSoup for our refurbished computer initiative program. We have a lot of refurbished and new computers to offer and we need to make sure that the photos of the computers are a certain dimension and have a refurbisher partner logo on it. So they just need some minor cleaning before we put them up on the site. And so to do that I may need to remove a background. In this case it's really easy. The background is already white. If I needed to remove it for another reason it was the wrong color or it's got something else behind it, a shadow, whatever, then I can select a background and then remove that. So this is where the magic wand is a really great tool and I'll show you why. So on the left hand side, the fourth one down in your tools palette, excuse me, tools window, if you click and hold on that one you'll see there are two options. There are Quick Selection Tool and Magic Wand Tool. They're very similar but I'll show you the Magic Wand Tool first. While I'm still holding the mask then if I click and hold on that I let go under Magic Wand Tool then I've selected that. As you can see up at the top on your options you've got a lot of options here and I won't go into all of those but just to say for right now the Tolerance is probably the one that you're going to use the most if you're going to use the Magic Wand Tool. If you've never opened up Photoshop before your default value is going to be 32. It goes between 0 and 255 I believe. And then what that number specifies is how much of that color do you want Photoshop to select for you? If you have a lower number it'll be less tolerant. It won't select more color. If you have a higher number say you put up to 100 or 200 it'll select more of that color. And what I'm talking about here, so I've got it on 33. It's pretty much the default. If I just click where the white background is I might give you a moment for that to show up. And hopefully you can see on your screen right around the computer there's a dotted line just kind of moving around. This is a marquee that they call it. You can see there's also one around the edge of the canvas. That means that I've selected basically everything but the computer. I've selected based on its color values. So I clicked on the white, it's selected all the white. And I'll deselect that to show you again. Now if I click on the computer itself you can see that it's selected pretty much the top. You can see the edge goes around the top of the computer because that color is pretty similar across the board except for the very center there's four dots and then a couple of little specks in the very center. These are colors that are darker than the rest. So based on what I've set my tolerance at I've told Photoshop, select within a certain range that shade of black but nothing beyond that range which is those really dark circles. And if I deselect that, if I make my tolerance higher let's say I'm going to do 250 and I click it again it selects everything. You can see there's a tiny marquee around the entire canvas. That's way too much. I'll deselect that and I'll say let's go with just 64. That's double the default value. I've got a little bit more but not quite enough. And then that's something I would need to play with if I wanted to use the Magic Wand tool. But again there's so many different shades going on with this computer because it's a complex, it's a photograph. There's less than, you know, if you look at a simple color logo there might be two or three colors but in this there's thousands. So it's a hard thing to get exactly what you need just through one click. And that's where the Quick Selection tool comes in handy. If I go back to the Magic Wand tool on the left, click and hold and then choose the Quick Selection tool. Again, different options up at the top. Tolerance is gone. I've got a brush here. So it's set right now at 200 and if I move my mouse down into the canvas you can see it's a pretty large brush. And what the brush does is you basically paint along your canvas to select the thing that you want. It's a little large for the object that I'm working with here. So I'm going to bring that down by clicking the down carrot. See there's a 200 pixel in value there. I'm going to change that to 100. Cut it in half and press Enter. Now I've got a smaller cursor. This is something I can more easily work with. If I select and you can see it's already grabbing a bunch of it. I just kind of move along. And once the cursor touches a new section it grabs that too. I can move it along. Even getting parts that I don't want. So that's pretty good. It's got right along the edge of the computer but it also grabs some of the bottom right and the white. And that's not what I want. With the Quick Selection tool you can choose to not include something you've already included. And it's very easy just by holding down the Alt key and then if I click down here off of it and then just kind of creep into it it'll start to figure out that the white is not the part that I want and I just keep moving along right along the edge. And that's pretty good. Again these are not tools that are meant for a Quick Fix. I mean there's a Quick Selection tool and you can see I'm moving very quickly with this but I'll show you why a little later on. Why this is quicker than some other tools that are more precise. If you've got something that's got very clear edges around it you want to grab it quickly. This is a great tool to use. I'm going to close this one out. Oh Becky's got something. Yeah, what's up Becky? We have a question from Richard just asking how you're deselecting. When you select something and then you're deselecting what is it that you're pushing? Is it a key stroke or is it something you're clicking? Yeah that's a really great question. And thank you for keeping me honest when I use these tools often it's easy to take shortcuts. You got to slow me down. So a very good question and it's something with Photoshop there are a million ways to do the same thing and the longer you use it the more efficient ways you find to do it. So in this case I've still got the computer selected. If I want to deselect here's a couple of ways to do it. There's a select menu up at the top and deselect is the second option on there. You can click that and if you're like me and you want to work quick or you're too lazy or both you can also press Ctrl D and it's Command D on the Mac in case you're on a Mac. So if I'm trying to select something, working quick you select it and it's not right. Quick key stroke it's deselected. You try it again. That's what I was saying earlier about the undo command. It's super handy in Photoshop because that's something I can try, undo, try, undo, try, undo, and try. And then finally that fifth try is the one that I actually wanted. So in this case if I don't click that, if I keep this selected I press Ctrl and D, now there's no selection. And in fact that leads me to one other quick tip. In the case of this computer if I go back to my Magic Wand and I want to select that background I click the white a little too much. Let me deselect that. They bring my tolerance down because I selected too much. Bring back down to the default 32. That looks pretty good. But like I said, I'm only selecting the background. I'm not selecting the object itself. So what you can do, there's another great key command under the same menu for Select Inverse which will basically do the inverse of what you've selected. If I've selected the background I want to select everything but the background. I can click that. Now it's a really subtle change but the Marquee is gone around the border of the canvas. It's now just around the object itself which is great because now I can copy that. I can paste it into another image. I can change the color of it. I can do all sorts of things. I can manipulate that section of the image by selecting everything that's not that part of the image. So very handy to do. Yeah, Becky, what's up? Becky So we had a couple of people notice that your mouse is staying a cursor arrow. Is it showing up as a cursor arrow when you change like brush size on your machine or is it because it could be something with ReadyTalk not converting it to the little brush cursor instead? Or we didn't know if it was something you had in your settings that you wanted it to stay a cursor. So can you clarify which it is? Yeah, that's also really good to point out. I did not know that. Yeah, for me the cursor looks different with each tool that I'm selecting. And for each size of my Quick Selection tool apparently not the case. So yeah, for me it's changing. For you guys unfortunately it sounds like it's just a cursor and I assume that's a ReadyTalk thing. Yeah, and we are able to see the cursor. So we can follow it when you change the brush size in the settings, but it just doesn't change the actual size and shape of the cursor. So we know that that looks different. We did actually test, but I guess we just didn't notice when we tested that it didn't come through that way. So thanks for letting us know. But you should still be seeing everything the way you would with the exception of the cursor changing. But you are able to follow the cursor and see the settings and selections that Wes is making. So just keep an eye on where his mouse is moving and you should be able to follow along. Yeah, thanks for letting me know that stuff. I wouldn't know that you guys are telling me. And of course the other thing that may change is that any mistakes I make are purely on your screen. I'm not making any mistakes as we go. So that's on you guys. Of course. Yeah, of course. So while we are on the subject of selecting backgrounds one thing that we heard last time is the background. And in this case, this is a great example because we have a solid color background. I'll show you how to do something with a little more complex background like a picture of a photo of a person in front of a landscape or something like that. That's a little more complex. But for right now I'll just show you this one. So let's say I'll deselect with Ctrl-D. I'll select my background. So now I've got just the white. Now on the bottom right here back to the Layers panel that I showed you before, if you open an image that's like a JPEG or a PNG, something that's just a flat no layer image. If any image you see on the web basically is going to be a flat image. GIFs, JPEGs, that sort of thing. There's only one layer to it and Photoshop opens it with that layer locked. It's the one layer that the image knows of. When you save an image that has multiple layers in it, you can save it as a JPEG but it will flatten everything. So when you reopen it you won't be able to change those layers. If you save it as a Photoshop file however, you can go back and save those later. So the workflow is that you can open up all sorts of images in Photoshop, create a Photoshop file, save that with everything in it, and then as you need them export them out into whatever format you need. You can create a large image, save it as a JPEG at a certain size for the web for example, and then you'll have that instance of it but the original is still your Photoshop file. So that's kind of down a little bit of a rabbit hole of workflow but I wanted to make sure you knew that because that's why this layer is locked to begin with. And you can tell that it's locked because there's a little lock icon right next to the word background in the layers palette here. It's also italicized which is another clue that it's locked and that's the default for all Photoshop. If you've got CS4, if you've got Creative Cloud, the latest version has always been that way. So the way we can unlock it though if we want to manipulate it, I can just double click it. I'll get this window that pops up that asks me to create a new layer because technically it is. We're creating a new layer from the background. You can name it whatever you want. There's some options here for color mode and transparency. I'm not going to get into any of that. Right now I'll just click OK and everything looks the same. But now I have an editable layer. I still have the background selected too. I've got that marquee going around the border. I've got the marquee going around the object which means that everything but the center part, everything that's white is still selected. I can clear that away just by pressing Backspace. Now I have this checker pattern behind it which means it's transparent. I can save it as a different file format that allows for transparency like a GIF. I say GIF, I don't say GIF, sorry guys. I can save it as a GIF or a PNG file and I can put it up on the web for example. Anything that's behind it, the background of that page or something else that's just layered behind it, that will show up behind the computer here. So that's how you can just quickly clear away a single color background. And just to show you real quickly how I did that one more time, I'm going to close this out. I'm going to reopen it and I'll just walk you through those steps quickly. So I've got this computer. I choose my Magic Wand. My Tolerance up here at 32 seems about good for just a solid color where there are clear edges around the object and the background. I can click the background. Now I've got the background selected. I'll double click the layer for background. It will ask me about creating a new layer from the background so I hit OK. Backspace will clear that out. And then Handy Control D or Command D for UMAC users will give me no selection on an image that has a transparent background and just the image itself. Now again, this is a simple example because you can deal with images that have a lot more complex backgrounds, especially if you're working with, for example, a picture of a person with hair where the hair may not be completely straight. There may be frizzies or someone's got a perm, for example. Those are things you really have to work around carefully and the Magic Wand just isn't intelligent enough to grab those. So speaking of changing backgrounds in complex situations, let me hop back to the presentation here and move along to some other ways you can change or remove a background. So as I mentioned, the Magic Wand is really handy for images where there is high contrast. And what I mean by high contrast is that previous example, it was a black or gray computer against a solid white background, very high contrast between the background and then the foreground. Also, there's a single object in this case. I just wanted to select either the background or the computer. In this case, it was easier to select the background and then just inverse, just swap out what's selected, not the background's foreground. Also, I showed you earlier the Quick Selection Tool which does a lot of the same things that the Magic Wand does just with a higher, which is with a little bit more intelligence. I didn't go into as much detail with that one in the previous example just because it requires a little bit more finesse when you're using that brush tool because it depends largely on your brush size, how much detail you want to pick up. And then once you've selected something, kind of moving along an edge carefully to deselect anything that may have gotten picked up along the way, or selecting anything that may have been missed along the way. So they're kind of two sides of the same coin and that's why on the Photoshop interface on the left side where the tools are, fourth one down, you have both options under the same button. If you click and hold, you'll see Quick Selection and Magic Wand. Now, a quick note about the Quick Selection, I believe that was added. Sorry, Terry, if I'm getting this wrong, I think that was added in CS6. So if you've got a much older version, you may not have that as an option. You will have the Magic Wand at least and that's something that's been, you know, a Photoshop staple for a lot of years. Two other ways that I haven't shown yet that I'll go ahead and show you next. You can select a color range. So any objects in the image that match within a certain range of color that you specify, you can select. And I'll show you that one next, as well as the Pen Tool. Now the Pen Tool is the scalpel where the Magic Wand may be the sword. And in a lot of cases, it's quick and dirty. Grab that background from the computer photo, done. Don't need something so precise. For other things, like I'll show you later, the Pen Tool is, this is going to take a lot more experience, but it's a lot greater payoff when it comes to the quality of removing that background. So with all that said, I'm going to hop back over to Photoshop and I'll close out that photo and bring up something else. Let's bring up something I've prepared just like a good cooking show. I've got the food and I've got it already prepared for you. So this is obviously just a simple photo with some fruit in the front. The background is a little more complex though. This is not solid white. Someone hasn't already done the hard work of removing the background from it. But there are some sharp edges around them. If you look at the mango on the upper right, you can see clearly where it ends and the background begins. But there are also some shadows at the bottom. If you look at the tomato at the bottom, there's a shadow coming off the bottom left and the bottom right of that piece of fruit. So that's something that can really trick the Magic Wand because the color can be similar to both the background and the foreground. It's the same background but with a shade over it. So it's similar and yet it's also dark like the foreground. So it can be grabbed along the way. If I move up to the Select menu, which I showed you a moment ago, also under this is Color Range. Now I've chosen that and it becomes kind of like Terminator Vision. I can see something not quite the same and it's a weird inverse. I move that window over so you can get a better look at it. So right now it's chosen by default just that red color. And it's selected based on a range that I can specify how much of that red to pick up. And that's the fuzziness value here. It's at 200. It's maxed out. Grab as much red as you can. Of course, there's not a lot of red in the mango. I'm beginning with the other fruit. I think it was an apple, a green apple. So there's not a lot of red to grab from those too. But it's grabbed a lot of that tomato. I can scale that down. I'll bring it down to the default of 100. And as I move, hopefully you can see this on your screen. I go down below 100. It's grabbing less of that tomato. Now it's at 22. There's almost nothing there. It's like a snowstorm. But if I bring it back up, I can grab as much as I want or as little as I want of that particular color. Now, if that's not the color I want, if I want, for example, that mango, I move my cursor over. And unfortunately, I assume you guys can't see this. If I move the cursor back over to the image itself, my cursor becomes an eyedropper. That means that I can select the color that I want to grab that range, to base the range off of. So if I click in there and click the mango, now the preview has changed completely. That mango, a lot of it is selected. In fact, I've grabbed some of the apple as well. The thing about the color range is it's not great for removing a background, but it's great for selecting certain colors to change them. That example that I showed you in the beginning of all the different tomatoes of different colors, a lot of it was done with tools like Color Range where you can keep the object there. You don't need to remove anything, but you want to change the hue, the saturation, the brightness, something like that. So this is another way to select something in your image that's not necessarily a discrete object, but you do want to change it based on its color. If I click over to the apple, same thing. I get more apple. I get less mango. I get no tomato. And I can move that slider around to grab more or less of that color as I need to. So again, the color range is important for choosing certain colors, but not necessarily choosing objects. If you want to choose an object, my go-to is still the Pen tool. The Pen tool is a – I could spend the next hour talking about it, but I'll make this a little brief. But we do have a great – I did include a really good video tutorial in a resources slide so that you can spend a little more time learning how it works and all that. So in the meantime, I'll quickly show you. The Pen tool works like this. I can create what's called a Bezier curve. I can click points and then manipulate those points until they wrap around an object. So if I click within the canvas, like where there's a corner, for example, click there, there's a dot. And I click where there's another corner, another one, and then come back, I've made a little triangle. And that's nice, but it's nowhere near accurate. I can add points along the way and move them along. And it begins to create a curve. I can bend those curves as I need to around any object that I need. And this is where if you're selecting somebody's hair, for example, they've got spiky hair, they've got a frizz or something like that, you can really get down to the nitty-gritty. And this is honestly what a lot of folks in the magazine industry do if you've got a model on the front page. You want to get all of her hair blowing in the breeze, but you don't want that background in there of whatever beach she was on or something like that. That's how you get to that, that level of detail. And to show you what I'm talking about, I've created a path already. So if I click my path on the path panel on the right, I was on layers, now it's on paths. Whenever I create a path with a pen tool, this is where it lives. The one that I created a moment ago is listed under Work Path. It's just temporary. If I can delete it, it's not permanent. The path one is the one that I created and kept from before this webinar started. But if you can see on your screen, there's a thin line around all of the fruit. I managed to get underneath the tomato but not include the shadow. If I click on it, you can see there's all those little dots around. And basically, based on the short little demo I just gave, you can see how many dots along the way and how many curves need to be added to get to that level of specificity. The nice thing about the path tool is that once I've created a pen tool, once I've created a path like this, if I hold down Ctrl and I believe it's Command for the Mac, my cursor changes, unfortunately you can't see it. While I hover over the thumbnail of the path, there's a little hand with a marquee symbol on it. If I click that, now I've got that selection. And it goes exactly where I need it to go, no more, no less. And the really great thing about using the pen tool is that it creates not really a gradient or a blur, but just a real, not a hard edge and not too soft of an edge either so that if I copy it and paste it into something else, it doesn't look as poorly photoshopped as if there's a clean edge on it. So if I use that example, if I've selected this fruit, I do Ctrl C, Command C on the Mac, just like in Word, anything else, I want to copy that. And I create a new image by hitting File, New, and then Ctrl V just like again, like in Word or anything else, I want to paste that in. Now you can see I've removed the background from it. There's a little bit of shading on the actual fruit itself that comes from the rest of the fruit in the image, but around the edge it's clean and it's smooth, and I'm not grabbing some pixels here and a bit of shade there and a bit of background there as well. This is probably the cleanest way to grab an image, but it's also one that takes the most precision, and I'll be honest, the most experience too. But there are some really great tutorials online that can walk you through that. Like I said, there's one at the end of our webinar on the resources slide cut from a group called FLIRN, P-H-L-E-A-R-N. They've got a lot of great tools and tutorials, and they've got one that's really useful on how to use the Pen tool in all sorts of different settings like this one, or something even more complex. So I'm going to go ahead and close out of Photoshop again, and bringing back to this, our Resources tab as I mentioned, there are some great resources from Adobe. Some other ones that I've included from previous Photoshop webinars, Lifehackers got a great basics of Photoshop, including things we've covered here and then other ones. FLIRN is on there with how to use the Pen tool because I know I kind of went quickly over the most complex thing, but hopefully you're able to bear with me, and take a look at that because if that's something you really need to do, if you've got a photo of your CEO and they've got a really bad looking background or a word on a wall that you don't want in your newsletter and you want to take that out, that's the best way to get the whole person and nothing behind them. So that's going to wrap it up for my presentation, but we've got a little bit of time for questions. I think I'm going to turn it back over to Becky. Becky- Thank you, Wes. Really helpful, interesting stuff there because I always try to cut my tomatoes out of pictures and they look like little alien heads floating on a green screen when I do it. So I'm learning a lot from this as well. We will have time for your questions in just a couple of minutes, but first I want to go ahead and invite Wes White, West Number 2 today, to the program just to tell us a little bit about where you can get Adobe if you are on an older version or you have used Adobe Photoshop but don't have it on your own machine and want it. We want to make sure you know where you can access this product through TechSoup. So Wes, can you tell us a little bit about where we can find it and then don't worry, we'll get to all those questions in the queue in just a couple of minutes. Do folks hear Wes when he's talking here? Let's see. Go ahead and try one more time. Let us know if you're hearing him. We're going to get him on the line. Sorry about that folks, but we're going to get him up in just a second. Thank you for chatting in to let us know. Wes, who is coming on the line in just a second here. We hear you now. Thank you. Okay, sorry about that little glitch. We had a phone go dead apparently, so thank you. Cool, thanks Becky. So we have three different ways to get Photoshop on TechSoup. The first is just to get to the offers, you can go to TechSoup.org to our homepage and go to get products and services at the top left hand of the screen. Go down to Browse Catalog, by partner and donor, and then click on Adobe. It will take you directly to the page. Or you can go directly to TechSoup.org slash Adobe and that will take you to the same place. On that page we have three different offers which you can see now. Two of them are Photoshop Creative Cloud offers. One is found in the Adobe Creative Cloud Photoshop I'm sorry, Photography Plan, one year subscription, where you can get access to both Photoshop TC and Lightroom CC. The other offer is the Adobe Creative Cloud All Apps Plan which includes several different apps from Adobe including Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign which Wes mentioned earlier, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Dreamweaver, and a lot more. Both of those are access to discounted rates products. So you will pay a $5 Admin fee on TechSoup and then it will take you over to Adobe.com where you will have to pay a discounted price. So for example with the All Apps Plan you will get 60% off that retail price. And for the first year and then for all subsequent years after that you will get 40% off the retail price which right now comes out to around $239.88 for the whole year or 1999 monthly. And for the Photography Plan you will get 20% off the retail price for the first year and then for any years after that you will have to pay the full retail price. And that comes out to around $7.99 a month. Again that includes Photoshop and Lightroom. We also have Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 14 which is available as a donated product for an Admin fee of $27. Now the really exciting thing about these products is that in the past there used to be a lot of restrictions on the Adobe program around org types or budget sizes that could receive these products. But now all of that has been lifted and it's really exciting because now all organization types, all budget sizes can get any of these products including the donated offers which also includes Acrobat Pro 11. So feel free to go to TechSoup and take out these offers. For the Creative Cloud offers you can also get as many of those products as you want. So there are no restrictions on the number of products you can get. For the donated offers you can only get four products per TechSoup fiscal year so that will be new again around June 30th. That's all from me. Thanks Becky. Great. Thank you so much Wes. So I want to go ahead and jump us into questions. So we've got a bunch in the queue already. Let me go ahead and have Wes Holden come back on, Wes One come on back on to talk a little bit about some of these questions that we've gotten that Blair asked for example which of the tools when you were going over InDesign versus Photoshop versus Illustrator which one is really best for putting text on an image? If you want to put a quote or have your meaningful cat in a tree determination poster for your organization what do you use to add that to the photo? That's a really good question. Personally I tend to go back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop. They both handle that task very well. You can load up a photo in both, add text in pretty much the same way. If you've ever added text to a photo in Photoshop and someone gave you Illustrator you could do it pretty much the same way. It's a slight difference in the same way that a language can have a certain little dialect and you still pretty much pick it up. So I'll go ahead and show you how in Photoshop real quick just to show you how simple it is. I'll share this and I'll close my fruit example. Go back to my original fruit example. On the left side there's the T which is your horizontal type tool which is just a long way of saying it's just your type tool. Horizontal of course it goes left to right. You can also type top to bottom but we won't be doing that in this case. So if I just click that I've got the T selected and at the top you can see there's a lot of options just like in Word for example you want to choose your font, the weight of it, if it's bold or italic whatever, the size and then plenty of other options including color and justification and all that. So I'll just quickly choose regular aerial. You can see it's regular. It's 48 point that seems about big enough. I'll choose it left justified and I'll pick a color that's let's say kind of a deep red and I'll just click again. This is a cursor for me. It's just a pointer for it. It sounds like for you guys. So if I click here and then just choose and then wherever I click I can just add the text and I can just tell it eat more fruit. Great. I can change the size after I've added it and then on the right side where the panels are I've got the character panel that I mentioned earlier. I can click that. The fly out comes out and I can choose all sorts of other options like for example it's got it on small caps because I've used that before. I can click that. That gets disabled a lot of other options but it's just that simple and of course on the right side on the layers panel you can see there's the background. There's also the text layer for eat more fruit more text to add, more layers to get added to. Great. I like the simplicity of that. It's nice and easy, something that I could even do which is saying a lot because I can't do a lot of this stuff. We had a lot of people asking or commenting that gee I don't see the magic wand on my toolbar or I don't see the same thing on the panels. Is there a way to customize what you see? And if so can you tell us where people can look to do that? Yeah definitely. So for older versions of Photoshop like I said I'm running Creative Cloud right now. I'm running the latest one which is another benefit of having the Creative Cloud is that as updates come in you get them. You don't have to buy a new version and all that. But if you've got an older one, if you've got a Creative Suite edition for example CS4, CS5, CS6, on the left side there should be the magic wand tool. It might not look exactly the same as mine. The icon has gone through a little bit of change over the years but there should be kind of a 45 degree angle stick with a little bit of a burst at the top. In later versions of Creative Cloud there's an option down here at the bottom to the little three dots kind of an ellipsis to edit the toolbar. You can click that and make changes to your toolbar also under the edit menu. There's a toolbar option there and we can customize my toolbar to say okay I don't need these lasso tools but I do want the crop tools. We can manipulate them there too. If you're not seeing a magic wand tool and again this can vary based on your version. I hate to just kick it over to Google but if you do just search for Photoshop and then the version you're looking for Photoshop, CS4, Magic Wand, a lot of older Adobe documents can point you in the right direction on where that tool is located. Terrific. I think everybody should look at what version they're on and do that search like Wes said if you're not seeing something that he has here. A lot of times they were there but just hidden or moved someplace else. We had people asking about transparency and the background again and how you, what do you do if the background is really complicated or many colors and what did you select to make the background transparent? That was missed by a few people. Sure, yeah. I'm totally understandable. I did move through that pretty quickly. Let me take a step back and look at the fruit example again. So I'm going to remove my layer, the text layer that I added. I've got it selected on the bottom right. There's a little trash can icon. I can click delete layer. It'll prompt me. Is that what I really want to do? Yes, even though it's a good message I need to get rid of it. So I've gone back to my image. In the case of this image I used the pen tool to create a selection around it. Regardless of what tool you use if you're using the wand or the quick selection tool or the color range or even other tools that I haven't mentioned here today because like I said with Photoshop there's a million ways to do the same thing and it all depends on what your purposes are. Once I've selected the thing that I want in this case I won't use the pen tool. I'll just do a quick selection tool just to give you a sense of how much I get compared to the previous version. If I select along I've got that apple. I've got that thing in the background. I'm moving up over to the mango. I'm getting that and I've got the tomato. If you take a look at the marquee that's going around the fruit it looks pretty good especially around the mango. I've got right around the edge. If you look at the bottom though I've grabbed the shadow unfortunately and on the left side of the apple the marquee kind of cuts into the side of the apple so it's not perfect but this is just more to save time and show you about the transparency. Once I've gotten something selected if I want to delete that background I go back to my layers palette. This is something I always end up undoing because I'm working too fast. I need to turn that background layer into a regular layer so that I can remove the background. If the layer is locked to the background layer and I try and delete something it will just fill it in with a solid color, most often white by default. That may not be what I want. If I want to take something from that image and then place it over something else I don't want a white background. I want no background. Just to show you quickly what that looks like if I choose the Select menu and then click Inverse so now I've got the background and not the fruit and I press Delete it tells me what color do you want to fill it with. Transparency is not an option because it's not a color. So I'm going to cancel that. I'm going to turn that background into an actual layer. I double-clicking it, pressing OK. I still got the background selected because I Inversed it and I pressed Delete. Now I've got that transparent background. Of course I still have some of the shadow and it did take away some of that piece of the left side of the fruit so it's not perfect but that's the short, simple way to get that transparency. If I go up to my History palette you can see there's a lot of options here. I can step backwards from that clear by making a layer. Now that background is there again. I'm going to deselect. I'm going to move back to my path and again the path that I drew before the webinar is the one I'm going to select. I'm going to turn it into a marquee. Now I've selected the fruit. Much clearer edge. I will hit Select and Inverse. So I'll grab the background instead of the object that I've traced. Do the same thing as I did before. Press Backspace. Now I've got transparency again and a much cleaner image because of the Thanks to the Pen tool. And I'll press Deselect and you can see the edge of the fruit looks great against the transparency. So that's where transparency comes in. And another quick reminder, once you've gotten something that's transparent and you want to keep it transparent use it for something else. You want to end up placing it over another image later or you want to use it on the web. Save it as a PNG typically because that's a file format you can use to keep that transparency in place even though you can't keep layers like before. Great. That's good helpful advice. We are almost out of time but I want to just add a couple of other questions quickly. Do you recommend the Magic Wand or the Quick Select tool? Which one gives you more control again? We had people confused about which one you think is best for which circumstances. Sure. It really kind of boils down to your personal preference. I mean I know that's kind of a cop-out answer but the fact is the Magic Wand is great for quick and dirty selections like with the background of the computer that I showed you earlier. It was solid white. There was a hard edge around that foreground object. I just wanted the background. It was an easy grab. I just used the Magic Wand to grab that. Quick selection is also handy if it's still more contrast that you want to get a finer edge around the thing that you're selecting which is why you have the different sized brushes. It's not based on color range like the Magic Wand is so in the Magic Wand example just grabbed all the white, done. With the Quick Selection tool you're moving a brush along and it's grabbing everything that it touches with some intelligence and selecting that. So again it depends on the image that you're working with. In my first example with the computer Magic Wand was better. That doesn't always mean Magic Wand is better. And in some cases Quick Selection is the smarter tool and it all comes down to just which one is working better for you as you're working. You switch back, try this one, undo, try the next one, that one works better. Great. Thank you so much for that Wes. We are going to go ahead and jump out of this because we are almost at the top of the hour. We hope you've gotten a lot out of it. We know we didn't get to every question but we hope we answered many of them for you and that we've shared a lot of resources that you can continue your learning once you leave this event. We'll make sure that those links are included in the follow-up email. But go ahead and chat in to let us know one thing you learned during today's webinar that you're going to take back and try to implement, try to use to make your images look better for your collateral, your website, your materials, wherever they're using them. And we'd also like for you to tell us that you're going to share this with your friends and colleagues who may benefit from using it. I'm going to go ahead and invite you to our upcoming webinars. But before I do that I want to remind you that if you're jumping out of the room now be sure to let us know how we did today. Give us some feedback in our post-event survey so we can continue improving our program. But before I do that look at our upcoming webinars and events and we hope you'll join us for some of those. Next week we're going to be spending some time focusing on the technologies that are being used to engage families in early learning settings. So for kids 0-5, what kind of technologies are parents and families using? Great if you work in that sector. Join us for that. Then we'll be talking specifically for libraries on digital literacy training tutorials. So if you're in a library or work on digital literacy training this might be a great event for you to attend. If you're newer to TechSoup or have recently registered and want to get a little bit more hands-on with our donation programs join us for our TechSoup Tour Tuesday on the 29th. And then we'll be spending some time doing a very similar type of walkthrough of Excel for beginners on the 31st. And then beyond that you'll be able to find on our webinar page, upcoming events, and webinars archived. You can see all of these different categories. You can search through to find any content that we've done before in webinars so you can watch those at your convenience. Thank you so much Wes. I really appreciate you taking the time to share your expertise today. And thank you also to Wes too as I called him during this webinar for sharing information about the Adobe Creative Cloud Discount and Subscriptions available. I'd also like to thank Terry McGrath on the back end from Adobe for helping answer questions, and Susan Hope Bard also for doing the same. We really appreciate you joining us today. Lastly, I'd like to thank ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of this platform so we can conduct these webinars for you on a regular basis. If you'd like to know more about this tool and where you can find it, if you need to run webinars of your own, you can check out techsoup.org slash readytalk. Again, once we close out, please take a moment and give us your feedback on that post-event survey. Thanks so much everyone. Have a terrific day and we hope you'll join us again soon. Bye-bye.