 Welcome to our webinar, Photoshop for Beginners. I'm Susan and I'm going to be your host today. Thanks so much for spending your valuable time with us. We appreciate the work you do in your communities. We do want this presentation to be relevant and important to the work you do. So as part of your registration you gave us some feedback regarding your experience with Photoshop. We really appreciate that information. It helped us customize this webinar to meet your needs. During this webinar you're going to have the opportunity to ask questions and learn a little bit more about Photoshop. In addition, at the end of this presentation there's going to be a survey which is super important for you to complete. It will help us understand what you've learned and help us continue to improve our presentations. Now we want to make sure that everyone is familiar with and comfortable with using ReadyTalk. In the bottom left-hand corner is a chat box. You can use this at any time if you're having problems viewing the slides or hearing the audio. The chat box is also for your questions. At the end of this session today we'll have a Q&A session. So during the presentation you can feel free to chat in your questions. We have folks that will be flagging your questions so they can be answered later. All the lines will be muted so that we can record this presentation for later viewing. In a few days you will receive an email and it will have a link to the recorded presentation as well as any of the resources that we share today. If you lose your Internet connection you can always reconnect using the link in your registration or reminder email. If you registered more than an hour ago you can also access the presentation slide deck that was sent with the reminder email. There's a link within the email. If you're hearing an echo through your computer speakers or having any issues with the audio you can also call in using the toll free line listed in your registration email. As I mentioned this presentation is being recorded. You'll be able to find this recording at TechSoup's webinar page in a few days. This is where we share all of our webinar recordings and announce upcoming events. And we encourage you to check it out at www.techsoup.org, slash community, slash events, dash webinars. You can also view recorded webinars and videos on our YouTube channel. As I mentioned in a few days you will receive an email with a link to this presentation and also a list of resources that are mentioned. If you're following along with Twitter you can tweet us at TechSoup or using hashtag TechSoup. Again my name is Susan Hope-Bards. I'm the online training producer here at TechSoup and I'm happy to be your host for this webinar. Thank you again for joining us. Also here with me is our expert and primary presenter, Wes Holing. Wes is a senior web content developer at TechSoup Global. He writes about Adobe for TechSoup and contributes to TechSoup's amazing and talented design team. I have with experience Wes creates graphic design content and how-to's like TechSoup's recent intro to Photoshop for nonprofit's blog series. It's actually a five-part series. It's very good. He's also presented other webinars on Photoshop which you can find on our webinar archives. Links to his blog series and previous presentations will be included in your post-email. Also joining us on the back end is Ali Bestikin from TechSoup who will help us capture and respond to some of your questions. Before we get started with our speaker, let me give you a quick, a few quick tips about TechSoup. We are located here in San Francisco. That's our headquarters. We want to know where you're joining us from. So take a minute and go into your chat box and tell us what city and state or what country you're joining us from. While you're chatting in, I'll go ahead and tell you a little bit more about TechSoup. We're a 501 C3 nonprofit like many of you joining us today. I see folks from Maryland, St. Petersburg, LA, and Boston from all over. What we do is we work to empower organizations around the world to help them get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help them achieve their mission. You can see from our map here that we serve almost every country in the world. We partner with 62 NGOs around the world. The need is global, and we've launched a new website for countries outside of the U.S. at www.techsoup.global. This site is for folks outside of the U.S. who would access tech donations. A few points about our impact to date. We've helped get more than $5.2 billion in technology products and grants to NGOs around the world. These tech products and grants come from more than 100 corporate and foundation partners. Now before I turn the range over to Wes, we want to ask you about what you want to learn today. So take another minute and type one thing that you would like to learn from this presentation today. How to use letters, great, creating flyers, photo manipulation. Yes, these are all things that we'll be covering today. Great, excellent. All right, now it's our pleasure to turn this over to Wes. Wes, take it away. All right, thanks so much for that introduction, Susan. And once again, welcome to everyone who's joining us from around the U.S. and around the world. This is really flattering to be able to talk to everybody about Photoshop. I'm a bit of a nerd about Photoshop, so any chance I get to talk about it, I'll take it. So let's go ahead and just get right into it. This is of course an intro to Photoshop. If you've never used it, you're more than welcome here. If you've used it a little bit, maybe we'll cover some stuff that isn't as familiar to you, but we can certainly touch on anything that you guys are asking for as long as we've got the time. So the first thing I'd like to do is just walk you through, quickly walk you through the interface for Photoshop because if you've never opened Photoshop before, it can be a little daunting. So let me switch over. Let's see, share my desktop. Okay, hopefully everyone can see that because I can. I'm looking at Photoshop right now. So once again, if you've never used Photoshop, there's a lot of icons, a lot of menus. But just to give you a quick run-through, of course, at the top here we have the menu just like any other Windows and Mac application where you find a lot of familiar commands, creating a new image, opening an image, a lot of other things in the image menu that we'll be covering later. On the left, you've got your primary tool. So some of the ones that we're covering today, we've got the move tool. We may use the marquee which is the ability to select the entire image or part of an image. And the rest of that I would recommend if you're really interested in learning more of these tools. We have a webinar that I hosted previously that was all about the more intermediate level of Photoshop where we get into a lot of the tools for adjusting the finer points of your image. But today we'll be doing a little bit more broad manipulation. So tools on the left, whenever you select a tool on the left, for example, I've just chosen the crop tool, you'll get options up at the top. For example, with the crop tool you can specify the width which is right here, this 127 pixel, the height which is the 75 pixel, and the resolution which is the 72 pixel. So this is always your chance to fine-tune it before you apply it. And then once you've chosen your tool and you've selected your options, you can also have the opportunity to fine-tune it even more on the right side here. We've got our panel. So once you've chosen, for example, you've got your image open. I was given the command subtly to slow down. I will slow down. Thank you, Allie. I'm just so excited. I'm sorry guys. Anyway, you've got options on the right as well for manipulating text, for example, with the Character panel, the Paragraph panel. All of these give you the granular control that you want in Photoshop that you might not have in other image editing applications. So that's a quick and fast apparently run-through of the interface. So let's go ahead and just open an image and see what we can do with it with Photoshop. So I'm going to open this image. Let's see if it opens now. One moment, let me close Photoshop and reopen it. That seemed to work before. So bear with me while I reopen Photoshop. And that was another error. Okay. Let me try the old-fashioned way with File and Open. Sorry folks, this worked in rehearsal I swear. There we go. So we've got a photo of a dog. We can use to talk about the difference between canvas and an image. So I'm going to let that load up. It looks like maybe for some slower bandwidth folks that may be necessary to see what it is I'm looking at. Like I said, I'll give that a minute to load in while I talk about the difference between canvas and image. So if you think about the image as how it looks versus the canvas as the actual width and height of the image itself, think about a canvas like your painting. You can choose your colors for painting. You can choose what it is you're actually going to paint. Think about Bob Ross painting Happy Little Trees. That's all what goes in the image itself. But the canvas, of course, is something you decide pretty early on. Are you doing an 8 by 10? Are you doing a 5 by 5? That's the difference here. And Photoshop treats it a lot of the same way. So with canvas and image, both options are available up under the Image menu. You just click Image. In sort of the middle of that menu we have both Image Size and Canvas Size. So I'll show you both of those and I'll start with just Image Size. So by clicking that you get a little preview of the image itself here. On the left we can zoom in and out of that as we need. So you can really see exactly what changes you're making to your image as you make them. Of course it's great to know what you want to end up with when you're making these changes. You don't always know that. So in all cases it's best to err on the side of caution if you don't quite know how big the finished product needs to be while you're working on it. By all means do this at the end. But if you do know, if you want to begin there, that's okay too. So we can choose from these options here on the right side. It defaults to the number of pixels. But you can always change that if you know the inches that it's going to be, if it's going to be something in print for example, or if you're not in the US centimeters, millimeters, you have a lot of options here. You can also do it as a form of percent. So of course the default 4% is 100 because that's the size that you're starting with. And then you can always change that to something smaller. And you can see once I punch in 50%, the preview shrinks down by half. So if I choose okay on that, I've chosen 50% of the original size. You'll see the image itself shrinks down. And maybe that'll take a moment for your screen to refresh if the ones here are in a guide. So the image goes to 50% of what I specified if I'd chosen pixel or centimeter or inch or anything else. Same result. So that's the difference between, or that's image size. Canvas size though, I've chosen image size to be a very specific set of pixels or a percentage. Let me back up a moment. Going back into the image menu, I chose canvas size which is right underneath image size. I'll let that load up. Hopefully that's showing up for you guys. If I specify a different size here, let's say I choose, I'm staying on pixels if I choose 1500 width and a 1000 height that will bring the edges of the image down into the image itself. It'll basically crop anything that exists outside that specific measurement, 1500 width by 1000 height. And I'll click okay and you can see on the image itself what happens to the image when I choose a smaller canvas size. And it wants me that I'm shrinking down basically. The image itself won't resize to a particular percentage, but it will crop everything beyond the size that I specified. So you can see it's kind of a tighter zoom on the subject itself once that loads up for you guys. I'm not sure if you're experiencing any lag like we're seeing here, but I'm trying to fill the time while the Internet catches up for us. But as you can see from what the original was versus what it is now, as opposed to image size where you shrunk the entire image, canvas size will either crop to or expand beyond the size that you specified. Let me back up a moment and I'll show you the opposite. So I'm going back to the original size, and I'll go back to image, canvas size, and I'll specify a larger canvas this time. I'll say 3000 by 2000. And you can see the arrows beneath it are now going outwards rather than inwards. The last time they were pointing to the center, this time they're pointing outwards. This tells me that there's going to be more canvas space around the actual subject of the photograph. So if I click OK, once that shows up for you folks, you'll see there's basically the equivalent of a map. Like if you're framing a photo on your wall, you've got space for a mat. This is something that I had to do. I framed a wedding photo that we wanted to hang in our house. We needed room for the mat, so I created a canvas size that was larger than the photo itself so that when we printed it out at the printer, there was space for that mat that wouldn't just cut into the photo itself. So this is an important consideration when you're adding things to your canvas. You have a logo or you have a photograph or something. You want to create extra space around something. You can always expand the canvas size without having to sacrifice any quality or having to crop or anything like that. So let's head on back. Now my ReadyTalk controls are, I will just stick in Photoshop if ReadyTalk is not cooperating. That's an excellent question. We just got a question in what version of Photoshop I'm using. I'm in Adobe Creative Cloud. The latest version of it I believe is a 2015. I think they use year numbers for the versions when it gets into Creative Cloud. It's an excellent question because you want to know if what I'm talking about is compatible with your version of Photoshop. Everything I'm going to cover today is compatible with your version. I'm not going into anything that's super high-tech. There will be no discussion of 3D or anything too elaborate. So the commands will all be in the same place. Any place this is where commands may not be, I'll flag it for you too so that you don't have to hunt or assume that maybe you don't have that ability. Let's go ahead and we'll move on from canvas and image size to color modes. One question I get a lot or that I have to ask rather when I'm producing an image for folks here is what purpose the image will have? Are you using this online on the web? Is it going on Facebook? Is it going on your website? Or is it going to be something that's printed? Are you making a booklet, a pamphlet, a fly or something like that? It's an important consideration from the beginning because it will determine your color mode. If you don't know what color mode is, that's quite alright. It's a little esoteric, but the difference is, and I'll show you up here in the image menu under mode, we have a lot of options. And some of these are a little technical, but I'll just point out two that I think are important. By default, anything that you're working on on the web is going to be anything that's on a screen, I should say. It's going to be RGB and that stands for red, green, and blue. It's the way that the screen projects any color at you through a red, green, blue spectrum. The other option I'll call out here is CMYK. And anyone who's had any history with printers may know this one. This is cyan, magenta, yellow, and the K stands for black. Let's go figure. There's a lot of things as to why. I don't know if there's an actual reason why, but because the screen displays color differently, of course, than a printed page does, those colors need to be loaded in a different way for you to visualize them. Now, if I choose on this image, if I choose CMYK, the difference is negligible as far as the screen goes. But if you're going to send a photograph or fly or something like that to a printer, then they need it in CMYK almost every time. So it's something to consider beforehand. Or if you've made something in RGB it's not too late. You can always convert it within Photoshop to CMYK by choosing this option and then saving it before you send off your file. It's just that easy. And like I said, within Photoshop you'll see almost no difference. But if you send an RGB file to a printer which you get back, you will definitely notice the difference. These blues don't look blue or these reds don't look red or something. Your logo colors are off. Branding is important. It's always a very important thing to consider. So that's the introduction to color modes. Click this just so that you see that when you do change it, it warns you about a color profile. And that's okay. If I click OK, I doubt anyone who's viewing this webinar can tell the difference because I can't see it on mine. So hopefully neither can you. Now let's go ahead and move over to making adjustments to an image. I'm going to close out the border collie here so that I don't want to save. And drag in an image. Let's use this photographer. I think that's appropriate for what we're talking about. You can see it's a photograph of a woman taking a photograph. And it's a very white photo. She's obviously out in a snowstorm. So what I'd like to address with this one is the difference between brightness and contrast. It's one of the most important things to consider if you're adjusting a photograph. And of course they're different, but it will make the difference between a photograph that's light and pop or has some kind of darker tone to it. And neither is right or wrong. Of course it's just whatever message that you want to relay to your audience. If you are talking about a serious topic, you may not want something that's bright and colorful. But on the other hand, if it is going to be a fun event, you want people to come to a dark, grim image is not the way to go. So you always have the option of adjusting your photograph's brightness and contrast as needed. And both options are again available under the image menu. And this time instead of mode, we're going to go down to adjustments. And brightness and contrast is the first option. So if I click that, we get a little window on the right. So if you can't see on your screen much detail outside of the woman herself, that's the way it should be. Everything is pretty whitewashed on account of the snow. But if we bring down the brightness, let's say we enter minus 25, which you might see after it loads in a little, you begin to see a little more detail come up from behind her. We're telling Photoshop to bring forward some of the detail of the darker image, the darker components of the image. And it's brilliant. Photoshop can do all the math on what it should bring forward and what it shouldn't. I brought it down 25. If we do a negative 50, we do even more than even more of the background comes out. If I go all the way, we can see there's actually quite a lot going on behind her. There's the trees. There's the houses. But if you can look closely, I'm not sure, hopefully this will come through on your screen. It's also pretty pixelated. There's a lot of detail there that's bringing forward, but it's not perfect. The photo was probably taken where it was very snowy and it was very hard to get a lot of detail, but it wasn't meant to be shown with the camera that was taken. So you want to be careful not to go too much in any one direction because it will start to look a little funny after a while. Now if we go the other direction, if we go back to zero, we bring it back to what we started with. That's the stock photo there. Now we'll bring the brightness up 50. We've lost a lot more detail in the back. And even the subject has begun to be washed out around the edges because of the whiteness of the photograph. And again, you can go too much with this too. If we bring it up to 100, we can barely see her. It's hard to tell. She's even in a snowstorm taking a photograph. She's just a poorly photographed subject. So just consider that with brightness, it is the overall lightness or darkness of the image. It doesn't affect the contrast, which is what I'll get to next. So let me bring that back down to zero. And then we'll switch over to contrast, which is of course the tab right below it. Contrast will adjust the brightness. It will adjust the difference in brightness between parts of an image. So if I bring this down, the contrast down, 25 doesn't do a whole lot. You might not see a difference there, but if I bring it down 50, and I'm going to switch back and forth on the preview, so hopefully this will show up for you guys so you can see the difference because it's subtle. If you look at the darkness of her jacket versus the whiteness of the background, this is without any change to the contrast. And if I choose preview back on, the darkness of her coat becomes lighter, and the whiteness of the background becomes a little darker. It's changing the balance between the darkness and the lightness rather than applying a brightness or darkness overall. So these are, if you don't have a good handle on the difference between brightness and contrast or when to use which, that's totally fine. That's why Photoshop gives you sliders. You can adjust it until it looks right. And just for contrast, no pun intended, I'll bring up the contrast on this one up to the max, up 50. And you can see in this case it's the opposite. Her darkness has become darker and the background has become whiter. And it's not necessarily a foreground background thing. It's just relative to elements within the image, the lighter parts and the darker parts. So I will cancel that and we'll return to the basic part of our image. One other thing I wanted to talk about is the difference between tint, tone, and shade. So of course a lot of these terms we use pretty regularly, the tone of something or you know, touching shade, things like that. But when it comes to photographs, it's very specific terms. Now if I can bring up, let's see, let me go back to, here we go. Here's all the slides that I was missing earlier, but just in time to find the color wheel. So if you'll allow me to indulge in a little bit of color theory, I will. And of course I have the mic, so you guys have no choice. So hopefully this is entertaining for you. The center of the color wheel that I'm pointing out here is the hue. And if you consider hue to be just the most basic form of that color, it's red, it's blue, it's yellow, that's your hue. The tint will add white to whatever image or whatever color you're adjusting. It will become lighter and it will become desaturated. And a little bit of what we were talking about a moment ago with brightness and contrast is that difference. So saturation being that balance between more vivid, more highly contrasted colors versus just lightening them in general. So adding white will lighten and desaturate a color. And if we follow out on this wheel, tone will add both white and black or gray if you think about it and to a certain degree to however much you ask for. Can both lighten and darken and saturate and desaturate a color? And then shade on the outside is just adding black. Obviously it will just darken it and it will saturate that color. So why do I go into so much detail on this? It's an excellent question. I'm glad you asked. That's because Photoshop makes it easy to adjust these two. I know that was an indulgence in the higher points of color, the theory of it. But Photoshop, you don't have to do all that, although of course you can with some really, really high level detail. But for our purposes today, we're just talking about these three, about the tone, the contrast, and the color. So I'm going to come back to this slide. But for now, let me switch back over to Photoshop. And I will close that image and I'll bring up, let's bring up, hmm, I will use this wasp image. There we go. Give that a moment to load up for you folks. And while it does, I'll go ahead and describe it because why not? We've got this very colorful photo of a wasp on some wood with a very blue background. So this one's got a lot of color going on which we can of course manipulate. Now this photo looks great. Like I said, the colors really pop. They're very crisp. They're very clear. I wouldn't personally adjust this because I like how it looks. But the photos you take aren't always the photos you expect. Or you might find online that you like, but it doesn't quite serve your needs. As I mentioned before, if you want it to be a little darker or a little lighter depending on your audience, you can make those adjustments. So I'm going to make a quick adjustment. I won't walk through it because we're going to assume that this is a bad image that we got. So I'm going to adjust the color. Let's say we got it with a lot of orange. So I'm just kind of skipping through that step just to assume we opened this image and there was too much orange in it. The subject looks great. It's very crisp and very clear, but the colors are off. Photoshop has options under the Image menu again. Right near the top, we have Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, and Auto Color. These are usually my first steps to making an image look good that may have some tone problems. Again, I can take a photo. I can think it will look good at the time I took it, but I get it back later. There was no natural light. We only had artificial light in the office or something where the light that was cast on the subject just doesn't look great. This is a quick and dirty way of changing it, so that's of course the first place I go to because it's simple. If this doesn't look right, of course there are a lot of options to get it just how you want it with the brightness, the contrast, the color balance, any of those things. Those are all located the place that I mentioned earlier under the Adjustments menu. I won't be getting into a lot of that today though. If you're really curious, I did explain a few of these in our previous webinar. But for today, if I just go back down to Auto Color and click that, it looks great. The blues are back. The yellow of the wasp is there. The wood looks like actual wood color. And hopefully that's shown up for you folks with that much lag. But Photoshop is able to determine based on the colors that are present in the image if there's way too much of something. I mean no photo necessarily needs so much orange, but it also balances out what's in it versus what it should be. These are really handy features. And I'm going to undo that so we can go back to our orangey version. And if I choose Auto Tone, well, that didn't do much. Sorry. The change I made was to the color. I shouldn't choose Auto Tone, but it leads me to a good explanation of what the difference is. So coming back to our slide, the time to use each of these. So for Auto Tone, it'll make your light colors, the lightest color anywhere, any pixel in your image will make it white. It'll make the darkest color black. It'll cut out on the spectrum anything that's outside of that and assume that what you want, that light should be lighter and what you want that's dark should be darker. The time to use that is when the contrast looks flat. And if you remember the example of the woman in the snowstorm where we adjusted the contrast down, she was the darkest part of that image. She became kind of washed out. The background was brought up a little bit so that there was less contrast between the subject and the background. This will help account for that. It'll bring the darker parts darker and the lighter parts lighter. That wasn't our problem with the B though. That was adjusted with Auto Color, which I'll get to in just a moment. But first, Auto Contrast. This does something similar to the Auto Tone but the difference here is highlights versus shadows. Highlights and shadows are just the upper range of your image, not the mid tones is what they're called. So the highlights are only the brightest colors and the shadows are the darkest. It doesn't touch the mid tones. Whereas Auto Tone, if everything is skewed too bright or too dark, we'll adjust the mid tones accordingly too. This is also good for when light and dark values kind of appear flat. The difference between using the two is something you just kind of have to try it and see if it works and if it doesn't try the other one and if that doesn't work, you just keep tinkering with the more manual ones like I showed you with brightness and contrast or some of the other options like hue and saturation. It's amazing the things you can try, get wrong, and then get right with Photoshop. And lastly, the one I showed the example of first, which was Auto Color. This will balance the color based on the image's shadows, mid tones, and highlights. This is great for when all the colors skew in one direction. So I mentioned the example of taking a photo indoors where you've got maybe some halogen lights or fluorescent lights, and it casts a particular, maybe a pale glow on your subjects. You want them to look alive and youthful and happy. You can do that with Auto Color. The last thing I wanted to cover before we get to some questions is how to save an image because this is something I run into a lot when I've got to create something for somebody else. So let me switch back over to Photoshop. So I've got the B photo open again. I'll give a moment for folks to let that load. So I'm going to do a couple of things that we've done already. I'm going to adjust the color with Auto Color. So now we're back to a healthy looking B against the wood against the blueness of the sky. I'm going to go back to the image menu and size this down a little bit, let's say 25% of its original size. So we've got a smaller photo now. Once I've made any adjustments I wanted if I wanted to change the brightness and contrast or anything else, I can go ahead and do that and maybe add or change the cam to size. Once I've done that, I have a couple of options when it comes to saving this image. If I'm going to save it for print or I need to keep it in high resolution for any reason, I would choose under File menu. I can save a copy, save as just like any other application like Word or Excel or anything where you've got a file menu. I have a lot of file type options down here. JPEG which you might be familiar with from using the web, we've also got GIF on there or GIF. I'm not going to get into that debate today, but of course that's also on there. PNG, these tend to be your more web-friendly formats. A lot of other options on here too that will preserve a lot of detail if you have a very high resolution image. TIFF tends to be a go-to if it's going to be something that you need to print. You have a top-notch camera. You don't want to lose any quality. You want to make these really significant changes and save it without losing anything. TIFF is usually a good way to go for that if you're going to end up sending it to a printer. So that's one way. I'm going to cancel out of this to go show you the other way. The other way which I tend to use more often than just a file, save as, and I'll show you why. Under File, now in my version, this is the different version-wise which I'm glad someone asked that earlier. In the version that I'm using, I'm in Creative Cloud, the latest one, the Save for Web has been moved to a sub-menu. So I'm going to show you where it is for me. If you have a version previous to I believe 2014 Creative Cloud, if you're operating on any of the Creative Suite versions, it'll just be right under Save As. I believe it's Save for Web and Devices. That's what it's called or something to that effect. Save for Web is definitely a part of it. So for me though, it's under Export, Save for Web Legacy. So it's been kind of relegated off to the side. I'm not sure why, but I'm glad it's still there because I use it a lot. So if I'm going to save this for use online, if I'm going to post it to Facebook or Twitter or put it on our website, then this is where I would go. So once I've clicked that, I've got a few options here. I can choose on the upper right we've got presets. Some of the file formats that I mentioned before are present here. So there's GIF, there's JPEG, and there's PNG. So depending on what the subject is, we'll determine what it is I should be using. I would say just a good rule of thumb, if it's anything that's been illustrated, GIF and PNG are good ways to go. If it's a photograph, if it's something that's real, then JPEG is definitely the one. And in earlier days of smaller bandwidth, you would have had to make choices between the quality, so high, low, medium, things like that, for example, for the JPEG. With greater bandwidth these days, you don't usually have to make that sacrifice. But if I choose JPEG on high, you can see the quality here is 60. I can bump that up. If I need to, it will make the file size a little larger, but it will also retain a little more detail to the image. And if I haven't specified an image size already with the steps that I showed earlier under the image menu, I can still do that here. I can specify a smaller image size if I have a very specific size in mind. If I just need it 320 wide, you can see that the number below it changed to 219, and the preview also adjusted to meet that size. So this will save it for use on the web in a resolution that's right for any screen. If I just click Save, I can choose where to save it. And of course, it will save it as a JPEG, which is what I've specified. So let me switch back over to our slides. I've included some of this information and information on all the other steps in the slides too. So if I had to skip over a few in the beginning, it's all still there. But let's go ahead and move along to our conclusion for at least for my presentation of it. I've included a few resources here as well, places to learn more about how to use Photoshop. Adobe's support is free and it's fantastic. They've got a lot of videos and a lot of articles. It's basically they put their manual online. So if you have Photoshop or you want to know more about what Photoshop is capable of, it's all there for you to look at. There's a great site called Vandalay Design. It's also put up a tutorial on the basics, a lot of things I covered, and then of course a lot more. Lifehacker also has a great article on learning the basics of Photoshop. All the images that I used today came from a great website called Pixabay, which has completely free images that most of them look great. They are all Creative Commons License Zero, so you don't even have to attribute them. Mound Project is one that I didn't get to show you today but has a lot of icons that are free for use with attribution, or you can pay to use them, I think like $5 an icon if you don't attribute. And the Creative Commons search is always your friend for anything that you need to attribute, but is also free photo-wise. Of course, here's a couple of credits for the images that are in these slides. And now I'm going to go ahead and open it up to questions, and Susan will take it from here. Susan Thank you so much. We do have a lot of questions, and I thought perhaps we could start with some overall definitions of things like resolution, and pixel, so as to help people frame and understand it. Susan Yeah, absolutely. Let me adjust my mic and I'll switch back over to Photoshop for a couple of those explanations. So let's start with pixel. When it comes to an image, if you think about a printed image, something in a magazine, for example, that might measure 5 inches by 4 inches, you've got a 5 by 4 image. The resolution of that image is made up of pixels per inch. So in the case of any image you see on the web, there is an arbitrary number of 72 pixels per inch, or dots per inch, or DPI. So if you think about your printer in your office, you can choose how much quality comes out of it. 72 DPI or pixels, it's interchangeable, is what you're looking for on a web photo. That basically means pixels per inch. So every inch of space is made up of 72 pixels. So you can imagine the higher the number, if you go up to 300 for example, it's going to look a lot better in print than a 72. It's going to be less blurry, it's going to be less pixelated. And 300 is not just the number I picked out of the air. That is of course the number that you're usually printing to with, let's say, an office printer or something like that. You can get really high on that dot per inch measurement if you read something super high quality printed. But those tend to be the two numbers that I alternate between. If it's print, I go 300. If it's on the web, it's 72. So with that explanation, I'm going to go back over to my B image. I'm zoomed in at 100%. You can't see any pixels and that's what you want. You want it to look like. This thing it is, not some pixelated version of it. Under the view menu, I can zoom a lot. I can zoom in, zoom out, etc. So I'm going to zoom way in on this. So I apologize for anyone that's got to catch up on that lag if there is any. But I'll go ahead and keep chatting while it zooms in. Hopefully you can see as I've zoomed in 1600% from 100%, it's made up of tiny squares. And these are all the dots that I was talking about that make up that dot per inch measurement. These dots are pixels. So every pixel is a different shade, color, all that, to make up a larger image. If you look at old computer technology where maybe video games look very pixelated, Oregon Trail for example, those pixels were larger. That was a larger dot per inch resolution than of course this super fine photo of a B. So hopefully that will explain a little bit about that. I think you had another term you wanted to explain? I think you got the resolution and the pixels. And keeping this image up, one of the other things folks are asking about is how you change that background or remove a background from the image. That's a really good question. And there's not one straightforward way of doing it. Let me show you the easiest way. That might be the best place to start. So if you're going to remove a background from an image, the first thing to consider is how complex the background is. It's a photo of three people in front of a white wall. The white wall is almost entirely one color. There's nothing unique and distinct behind it. You can select that part of the image fairly easily without selecting something you don't want or leaving anything out. In the case of our B here, we've got a pretty solid blue background. There's a little bit of detail with the webbing that's coming off of it on the right side. And then it's a very clear line distinguishing the wood and the background blue color. The first thing I would say you can try is the Magic Wand tool on the left. Magic Wand will select anything of the same or similar color. Now how much to select and how much to leave is up to you. Thankfully Photoshop gives you a choice. There on the top here there's the Tolerance section. The default that Photoshop uses is 32. And of course it will remember what you've done last. So your number may be different. But it starts with 32 and it's just a range I believe up to 255 from 0 to 255 of how much to include or how much to leave out. So best thing to do, start with a default and then just click in that section. So you can see we've got a lot. It went right up to the edge of the canvas and it goes right along the edge of the B and the wood. It did leave out this part here right behind the B I guess abdomen. I'm not good with B anatomy. But you can select everything in one click. It also included some of this wedding because we selected a higher Tolerance. If we selected something lower it may not have. Once you've selected that you can hold Shift and if you can see it's very little detail but there's now a plus sign underneath the Magic Wand. That means that I'm going to add to my selection. I can click in that remaining blue spot and now I've got that part of the blue as well. There's a few stragglers like this little section here of the web, some parts up here. So you can adjust your Tolerance as you need to to get all of those things and maybe leave out some other things. But that will select the entire background. Up in the Edit menu we have the Fill option here. This will fill whatever you've selected with whatever you want it to go in there. So if I choose Fill, I believe the default is the foreground color which the foreground and background are over here on the left. I'm going to skip that for now because I don't want to get too in the weeds on it. But you can choose a specific color. You can choose a shade of black, white, or gray. Or you can choose what's called Content Aware. I won't get into that but we did cover that in the previous Photoshop tutorial. But for today I'm just going to choose something simple. I'm just going to go with white and select OK. So now we've got a white background on this for whatever we need. If we're putting this photo in something else, we don't want that blue background to be cutting into some text or something like that. We can remove it like that. Now it will go against perhaps a white piece of paper and then we can have text going over it and make it a cleaner design basically. Now if I deselect everything, you can see there's still little stragglers. There's that webbing here. There's little bits of blue down below. You can remove these as well by using the eraser tool. The eraser tool is just what you imagine it is. You can see when I hover over it I've got this big circle. That is the size of the brush that I'll be using. We're going to think of an eraser as a brush but you can change the size of that in the upper left in the same spot that we changed the tolerance for the wand. On the upper left there's a 65 right here. That's the size, 65 pixels of our brush. If I scale that down, let's say, and a lot of Photoshop is guess and check. So let's say we'll just scale it down to 20. About a third the size it was before. That looks pretty reasonable. I can just click. Pardon me, let me change that. I go back. I forgot that the color that Photoshop uses for the erase is the background color. So I'm skipping ahead. Let me slow down a moment. On the bottom left I mentioned before there is your foreground which is this reddish color and then the background which is your orangeish color. If I click the background I get the color picker and I can choose from here which color I want to replace. So if I click all the way to the upper right I can get pure white. I'll click OK on that and I can just paint over it basically. So we're just replacing that web with the background color and a few of these little stragglers over here too. You can just kind of repeat that with different brush sizes, different colors as you need to go. It's not perfect but it will get the job done and there's a lot more advanced ways to do it that you can get a real fine level of control over. What if you make a mistake doing that, Wes? Man, I don't know because I never make mistakes. Now obviously if you've been watching closely or not even closely you've seen me make plenty of mistakes. But it's an excellent question. Photoshop is a little unique in its undo, redo commands. If you are in Word and you type something wrong and you type wrong again and you type wrong again you can just undo, undo, undo and it's done. Photoshop works a little differently in that it will undo and then redo if you use the keyboard shortcut twice. You can switch back and forth and the reason for that is that people who work in digital imaging a lot just want to see what it looks like with and without, with and without. You just switch back and forth, back and forth to know what you're doing is right. But that doesn't mean you can't undo more than twice. If you move to the upper right we've got this history panel. You click that and here's everything I've done. All the not mistakes that I've made are right here and you can just choose as far back as you want to go. So you can see if we scroll to the very top, open is the first thing. The very first thing we did is we opened this image. I adjusted the color then I used the auto color to fix my mistake. I changed the image size. I've done a lot of things. So if I scroll back down the last few things I did were to use that eraser. If I just click above that deselect you can see the eraser commands are now italicized and gray. And in the actual image the web is back. So just because you've gone back doesn't mean you can't go forward. You can choose your levels of history as you see fit. If you've changed the brightness and again and again and again. Now it looks too bright. Everything's kind of washed out. You can scale back to where it looked about right. One other topic that a few folks wanted to talk about was layering. Yeah layering is probably what sets Photoshop apart most from just that any other basic image editor. A lot of other image editors will allow you to make adjustments like I've shown you today with brightness and contrast or color. And that's great but if you want to add something unique to your images or create something like a flyer or whatever that's where layering is your best friend. I'm going to close out the B image because I've thoroughly ruined it. So let me bring up something else and we can use that as a better example. So here's a photo of a camera. It's got a great contrast between the subject which is the camera itself and then the dark wood of the table that it's sitting on around the edges. It's also dark. So if I wanted to add some text to this for example this would be a great one to use because the text itself will still be visible because the background is so consistently dark. But the subject of the photograph will still stay present because it's so light. And I'm going to use the text example because it's also going to create a layer. So you can try and work in two lessons at once. On the left side there's this T command which is your type tool. So if I click that just like before with the other options like cropping or selecting or anything like that the eraser we've got options at the top. You can choose your font just like in Word or Publisher or anything like that. You can choose your font, the weight of it if it's bold or light or italic or anything like that. Your font size so if I want 24 points, something big like 72 or something tiny like 10 and you can specify the numbers in between too. If I want exactly 13 that's still an option. And I'll skip the anti-aliasing and all that for now. We've got left, center, and right just like Word. And we've got the color of course. Red might be a little harsh for this so I'm going to go back to white. And 24 might be a little small so let's bump it up to 36. So I've chosen my options. I'm ready to add some text to it. So if I click on the image and type, oh this is still small. Let me change that. So once I've typed it I can accept my changes by hitting Escape which is counterintuitive I know, but Escape will accept your changes. I can come back over here to my character palette and change from 36 to something larger let's say 72. So the word camera has now appeared bigger. It's still really small. Now from this drop-down menu 72 is as big as it gets but that doesn't mean it's as big as I can get it. I can choose let's say 200. Now we're getting something bigger. Let's say 300. Yeah, that's a good size. I can read that next to the subject. So once I've chosen that obviously if the C is getting us now getting cut off and this is where your layers come in handy. You're not stuck with this. If I choose the move tool on the upper left which is the arrow one, on the bottom right here is the layers palette. And this is on by default if you've never opened Photoshop it will be on for you. If you don't have it available it's always available under the window menu. Layers is right there. You can see it's checked which means it's accessible. So I've got this layers palette and camera is the layer that's highlighted. So if I've chosen move I can just drag that around and move it to where I need to. If I add anything else to this image shape or another image if I paste something into it Photoshop will always add these things as more layers. The best way to think of layers is like if you imagine like something that's laminated over something else. You've got a laminated circle on a big sheet of laminate over a piece of paper. You can move that circle around on a piece of paper. And that's just what I'm doing here. I've got this piece of text and I'm dragging it around the canvas. There's a lot more to do with layers when it comes to blending. You can adjust the properties of them to make them. The contrasts different, the hue, the saturation, all those things. I don't have time to get into a lot of that today. But the basics of layers are that you can add elements to your image, move the more energy you need, hide them, show them. Like I said, it really is what sets it apart from something you may be using now that doesn't have that option. Great. Thank you for covering that. We did have a couple of definition questions in terms of rest or vector. I think some of that we can cover in our wrap up SAQs because we are nearing the end of our hour. So we did cover a lot of information today. And we know this was Photoshop for beginners. We wanted to lay a good foundation. Lots of you have other questions about other things, how to do things in Photoshop, and we are hopeful to maybe offer another webinar with next steps. What we would like you to do right now is take about 15 seconds and type in one thing you learned today. Go into your chat box and type in one thing you learned today. And as you are doing that, I am going to remind you that we have a survey at the end of this. When you close out of your webinar, please do answer the questions on that survey because that will help us determine next steps. Great. So I like that people love the magic wand, Wes. Excellent. Also a couple of other things. We will have some more webinars coming up next week. We have two. One is 15 ways to improve your library's Facebook page. And the other one is what you need to know about Know Your Customer. And then in January to start out the new year right, we will talk again about getting technology donations through TechSoup. I want to thank Wes again for doing this webinar and providing all of his expertise. This has been very informative for me as well. And we also want to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk. So everyone, you will receive a copy of this presentation and all of the resources that we used in a few days and it will be posted on our webinar page on our events. Special thanks to Allie on the back end for pulling the questions for us. So thank you everyone and have a great rest of your week.