 Hi everybody, this is Becky at TechSoup and I'm really glad to welcome you to our very first DS2 Tech3. Thanks for joining us on the 30. We'll be doing this every Tuesday and hopefully you'll be able to join us weekly to get quick tips from us on all of the tools that you love and want to learn how to use better and learn about the resources that are available to you through our donation programs as well as getting the weekly roundup of kind of what's happening at TechSoup, what the best new products are that have launched, articles, resources, and how-tos. So we want to make sure that this is useful for you. So thanks so much for joining us. Just to get us started, I'm going to do a quick introduction of our two presenters that you'll hear from today. Again, I'm Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. We will hear primarily today from Wes Holing, who is our senior web content developer here at TechSoup, but he's also a really key part of our graphic design team and he is a, we say, novice turned pro. He is mostly self-taught in using the Adobe suite of products and he's really an excellent asset to us because he has that down-to-earth style of, you know, showing how he learned how to use these tools and being able to really demonstrate how to make some, you know, some small and some large improvements to the way you're using Photoshop and that's what he'll be talking about today. And then after he does his presentation, he'll spend about 20 minutes of our time sharing his tips. And then you'll hear from Jim Lynch and he is our team staff writer and he is really our news gatherer curator. He's the one that's putting together newsletters and kind of seeing the survey of the land of what's coming in, what's the best on the web, what's the best coming out of TechSoup as far as how-to's and resources, and he'll share that in the last few minutes of the webinar. And again, we hope that you'll join us weekly Tuesdays on the 30. That's 1230 Pacific, 330 Eastern time for these events moving forward and you'll be able to find all of them in our course. We created a course just so you'd be able to find all of them available. And I also just before we hand off to Wes to get us started on the tips, I want to share my screen just to show you all of the different types of courses you can find. So let me get to my screen here in our course catalog. You'll see the link at the top of my screen at techsoup.course.tc slash catalog. And this is our learning management system platform where you can find a wide variety of courses. Some are free, actually most of them are free, and then some have a premium or a small fee associated. And it's very similar to our donation of products in our catalog where you find, you know, you pay 4% or 6% or 10% of what the retail cost would be for a similar product. We've done that with our courses as well where you're paying a small fee compared to what you would pay in the retail market. And so you'll see web design best practices, Adobe for Absolute Beginners using InDesign. We have courses down here on Design for Non-Designers and Adobe Photoshop Absolute Beginners. So I would recommend checking these out because, you know, many of them, like I said, are free Adobe Absolute Beginners. So this is a great way to learn about the different tools. And you can do this 24 seven at your convenience when you feel like it. You can skip around, choose what you like, watch videos, do activities, quiz yourself to make sure you're actually learning the skills and increasing your capacity to support your organization's work. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it back over. I'm going to stop my screen sharing. And I'm going to hand it off to Wes who's going to take us through some of his favorite tips and show us the magic of Adobe Photoshop in the next 20 minutes. So thanks so much, Wes. Well, great. Thanks so much for that introduction, Becky. As Becky said, I am self-taught. She was generous by calling me a novice turned pro. I am something of a hack, but a hack with experience. So I'm here to bring you the things that I've learned using Photoshop over the last 20 or not 20 years, 10 years or so. So one of the things that I like to cover in some of the webinars that we've had before are some of the lesser known tools. So that way, people who have never used Photoshop and people who are pretty familiar with the standard tools may still get something out of this together. So I'm going to hop over to Photoshop now and share my screen. So please bear with me while I do that. I like to cover some of the lesser known tools. Photoshop, of course, is your gold standard for any photo manipulation, any photo enhancement. So if you're creating perhaps posters or logos, something like that, maybe InDesign Illustrator might be more suited for you. Photoshop, though, always the go-to for adjusting photos. It's built into the name, obviously. So one thing I'm going to do is open up a photo to manipulate. And if you've been on any of our webinars before, you've seen this poor fellow being used as an example. So I always have to apologize to him wherever he is. It's not a bad photo of him. He's not a bad looking guy, but the photo itself, the composition of it, is really lacking. And this is where I think some of Photoshop's more powerful tools can really come in handy. Now, if you've made any adjustments to photos in Photoshop using some of the more standard tools, you might think that you can adjust the brightness, the contrast, the hue, the saturation, all these other things that you can manipulate the entire image with or just certain parts of it. And you'd be right to start thinking about those right now. Of course, underneath the image menu, we've got adjustments. And this is where all the things that I just mentioned are located. There's the brightness, contrast. You can change level and curves if you're more of a pro user, saturation in there. Obviously, this photo's got a lot of color in one direction. It's got this kind of goldish hue to it, which really doesn't look natural. And that's what we're going to be correcting today, among other things. And you'd be perfectly right to use any of these tools to get that job done. But the one that I tend to like is not under the image menu at all. It's located here under filters. Just a little background. Raw is a file format in the same way that you've heard of JPEGs and GIFs and PNGs as a file format. Those are all compressed, which means that once you've taken the photo with your camera, your smartphone, whatever, a lot of cameras will compress them down to save space. They'll take it. They'll take in every detail they can and then shrink it down by throwing out some of the data that your eye can't necessarily pick up on. Raw is the uncompressed version. It's the the rawest, obviously, the most pure form of that image. And that's what the camera raw filter was originally created for was to create a tool that you can use to manipulate photos that are high res, super high res, uncompressed, full quality. The beauty of it though, you can apply this filter to any image. Of course, the higher resolution, the better because you kind of have more quality to work with. But in this case, I think it really does the job. And I'll show you why. So let's go ahead and hop over to the camera raw filter and you'll see once I've clicked it, I get another view of the same photo. Along the top are some of the tools that it includes. And a lot of these are the standard tools you use with Photoshop, the hand tool for moving around the canvas, white balance tools aren't necessarily a tool in regular the regular panel of Photoshop, but I'll show you what they do here. We've also got some of the standard ones, let's see. So changing hue, saturation, luminance, these are options that were available under the image menu that I just showed. So they're here as well. And some of the really obvious ones, like spot removal and red eye removal. This gentleman does not have red eyes on this, thankfully, but if he did, it's a quick easy change to remove that from the photo. If you work with any animals, any photos of animals, perhaps you're an animal rights organization. A lot of animal photos, especially dogs, in my case, I've got two dogs and I see this show up a lot. For some reason the red eye is still very common, even though cameras seem to be able to account for human eyes, that shows up a lot. The red eye removal tool, great job at removing that. So without any further ado explaining the camera raw filter, let's go ahead and start using it. Those are the tools up at the top if I want to make specific changes and I'll get to some of those later. But first I'd like to adjust the overall balance of this photo. As I mentioned, it's very gold or green or yellow depending on how you see it. So let's go ahead and fix that. The first thing I'm actually going to do is look on the right side here, there's this basic fly out menu. The first one here is white balance. The default is as shot. And if you've ever done any photography or shot any video, you know how important the white balance can be. It's the first thing you do if you're going to shoot any video to make sure that the colors that are coming in through the lens are balanced properly. You're not going to get too much of one or the other color. And in this case, we definitely have too much of a particular color. So if we click that menu, we can see there are three options as shot, which is the default. That's the photo as we've imported the auto, which will take care of the settings on a sort of a guess, an educated guess on Photoshop's behalf. And of course, custom work and then make the changes myself. So let's go ahead and just hop down to auto to start with. As soon as I've selected auto, the colors have changed completely. It looks a little washed out now. It's not quite right, but it's definitely better than where we were. So what I can do is once I've chosen auto, I can make my own corrections. We've got the first slider here for temperature and the second one for tint. And temperature is exactly like it sounds. So the left is cooler until the right is warmer. We've got blue and Marty yellow on the right. And I can scale that as I need to. So right now, it's definitely shifted more toward blue, which is right because if it were if it was too gold to begin with, we want to shift in the other direction, but it's shifted a little too far. So if I grab that slider and move it up a little bit from 42 to let's say somewhere around negative 30, that's a little healthier. That's a little more natural. I can also change the 10th a little bit too, which has a similar similar feel. So if I bring that one a little more close to the center, let's say positive 19 or so, that's looking a little better. And in case I've forgotten how it looked before, if I want to compare camera raffle to make that super easy by just pressing the P key, I can switch back. That's the original. Definitely wrong. Switch back to the modified version. Looks a little healthier. It looks a little more human. Below that are some other options that I mentioned before, including the contrast. You can adjust the highlights, shadows, the whiteness of whites and the blackness of blacks. If you really want to get something to really pop, you can bring out, you can highlight those two to make the whites brighter and the blacks darker. There's also of course just like with white balance, there's the auto feature here. So I'll go ahead and click that. And so it's automatically picked a little bit higher exposure. It's just bumped up a couple of things like the shadows and the whites. It brought the blacks way down. But again, it feels a little washed out. I feel like the exposure is a little too high. And for me, this looks like if there was a lot of light reflected back at him. That's how this would look to me, which means that it's a little overexposed. So again, I can bring down the slider to about a little less than 0.4, maybe just 0.15. And then just some of the other color or the other settings as well. If I want more shadow, that might be better. Let's say some more highlights. And again, I can always hit P to see the original and the current. I kind of like how that looks. Down below here, I'll also mention a couple of other nice features that kind of get overlooked because a lot of times all you need to make are corrections for things like hue and saturation, brightness, darkness, that sort of thing. Clarity is really useful, but you can easily be corrupted by the dark side of the force on this one. Clarity is a filter that you see a lot if you're looking at magazine covers where perhaps someone is, you know, God forbid, north of the age of 30 and they don't want to show any age lines on the face, you can use clarity to sort of blend some of those features down. It's essentially the equivalent of in the old days using a soft filter or a soft lens on an actor in a movie, you're doing the same thing here. So just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to bring this way down. This is like a ridiculous level of soft filtering. You can barely see the lines on his forehead, any definition around his nose and mouth, underneath his eyes, and the whole background is completely blurred. It's way too much. And if I bring it in the other direction, complete opposite, too much, now he looks like he's haggard. I mean, this if he's traveling, this is the worst trip on earth. The image is very oversaturated. It's dark in dark places. It's far too much, but you can imagine a situation in which maybe more toward the center, if you just wanted to soften the features, maybe come down by 10, or if you wanted to have a more gritty, real feeling to evoke a certain emotion, a certain feeling, you might want to bump it up, maybe 10 or 20, depending on the image. It doesn't need it here. I don't think we're just using this one for demonstration purposes. The detail isn't too high or too low. So I'm going to leave that one where it is, but always consider the clarity maybe something that you want to use if you have an image that may be a little too blurry ahead of time or just needs to be softened up a little bit because there are details that are a little maybe too distracting. So I think where this is now in terms of color is okay. If I were not in a demonstration, I might adjust the temperature a little bit more, the tint just to get it just right to make it look a little more human in the background to look a little less solid in one color. But for now, I think we're doing pretty well. The other thing I'd like to call out for the camera raw filter that is very handy are some of those tools that I mentioned up at the top. The real benefit of using something like Photoshop or an equivalent photo editing program is its non-destructive editing capabilities. And if you've not heard the term non-destructive editing, it means what it sounds like. Any changes you make aren't fixed permanently. So if I want to adjust the saturation and I want to adjust the lighting and I want to adjust certain details of a photo, I can do that and then later come back to it, undo it or change those changes and the rest of my changes are defective. That's the beauty of it. If you've used something very basic like Microsoft Paint, you know that it's all or nothing. And the next change you make is made if you undo and you undo again, then the previous change is gone as well. But that's the nice thing about these kinds of non-destructive editing programs is that you're not necessarily committed to those changes if you decide later on, well, that's not quite right or this other change changed it too much. You know, you can always, you have that versatility to go back and forth. So one of the things I'm going to show here is how to make some minor changes to his face. Now, quick side note, the ethics of this, I always have to call out, you should not make any changes to people's appearance if it's not based in reality. That's kind of my shorthand for it. If there's something on, a piece of debris was on a person's face and you took the photo, retake the photo, by all means, get rid of it. If you are, you know, adjusting it to meet more of a perceived social standard, you know, maybe not. So, you know, always be very considerate with this kind of thing when you're doing it. But in the case of this demo, I'm going to do it anyway. So let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit here. I've got the zoom tool down at the bottom left. I can also use the zoom tool up here in the upper, excuse me, bottom left, zoom tool in the upper left. So I feel like I've zoomed in a little bit here to where I can start making some changes pretty comfortably. The hand tool is also up here. Now that I've zoomed in, I can click and drag and move the canvas around. This doesn't affect the photo. It just affects the viewable area that I'm working with. And so if I want to remove, let's say, he's got a couple of birthmarks on the top of his forehead there. Nothing really offensive, but just for the sake of demonstration, let's go ahead and get rid of those. What I can do is use this adjustment, excuse me, the spot removal tool right here. It's the wonderful paint brush and the flecks around it. If I click that, I get a dotted circle. And this is the spot that I'm going to remove. I can change the diameter of that circle by changing it on the right here. There's the size slider. I've got it about nine. You can see if I bring it way up to about 50, it's huge. And that's way too big for that birthmark. So let's bring it back down to about around 10. You don't have to be perfect on it. It's just however big you need to feel comfortable without overdoing it. So just bring it around over on the birthmark if I just click. Now I've got two circles. I've got one where I clicked and then another one that Photoshop added. And that second one is Photoshop sampling from somewhere else in the photo. It takes a nearby area and then tries to approximate how it should fill the spot that you've clicked. So if you think about any kind of photo you've got of somebody's face or a landscape with maybe trees and a meadow or an animal or an ocean, anything like that, and you want to change one small part, the absolute best place to sample for that fill area is right nearby because anything else in the photo is probably going to be completely different either in texture or in color or in brightness or anything else. So Photoshop is scanning just the nearby area and saying, well that looks pretty close to the spot you just clicked. I'm going to fill it in with that and sure enough if I zoom in a little bit it does look pretty natural. It's definitely a clone but it's smooth with the rest of the image. So let's zoom out again and I can do the same thing with this birthmark up in the top. And again it's sampled from somewhere else and if I don't like where it's sampled from I can just click and drag and move it to somewhere else. It'll smooth around the edges too so that it's not a hard edge circle right in the center. If I click off of it let's say go to the hand I can see how it looks and I mean I'm no expert but that looks pretty smooth to me. So I want to keep making other changes. I can do that as well. Let's say I want to fill in this part of his mustache. Rather than just click once and get a circle I can click and drag and get sort of a paintbrush move. If I let go again it's sampling the same shape in a nearby area and I'm going to click and drag that over to a more full spot in his mustache so I can fill in that part. Same thing over here with some gray hair and now this time I'm going to grab my hand tool and move over. This time Photoshop, oh man do that, Photoshop has taken, sorry one second, Photoshop has taken a sample from elsewhere in the photo that it thought was appropriate. I'll zoom out and you can see it's sampling over here in the in the background which is not what I want. I'm going to click and drag that back into his hair so I can get the right texture, the right color, and let's be honest just some hair to fill in a spot that had hair. If I zoom back in that's looking pretty good. Now those are just individual spots. What I can also do is make particular adjustments to select areas whereas before we change the entire composition of the photograph we change the the tint and the temperature and the contrast and all these other things. If I want to just affect certain spots I can do that as well so what I'll do is come up here to the adjustment brush and let's just reset some of these here so that I'm not making wrong changes so those are all zeroed out. So what I can do I've got some spots like on his chin around his mouth and on his nose that seem to have some light reflecting from below that there may be like a neon sign in front of him or something that maybe some halogen lighting some something that's not natural fluorescent lighting that kind of thing and again this is where we get kind of in that gray area of what's ethical to change. Obviously that light is not normally reflecting on someone's face but if it wasn't that instance and you want to correct for it you know maybe that's okay. So I'll leave that to your discretion but again just like with the the spot healing brush I can I can click and drag and select an area and it's got a pin there so that I know that it's it's marked and I can adjust things like the temperature if I bring it up or down you can see that it goes a little bit yellow a little more blue if I bring it up just a tiny bit and maybe bring down the contrast a little bit I can begin to adjust that area and and make it a little less exposed which I think let's not I mentioned that let's maybe bring down the exposure bring the contrast back to normal maybe that'll be a little more normal a little more natural to his skin tone I think that's better and just as proof of that we can also hop back to the original yeah there's definitely some some reflection there and if I bring it to my correction it looks a little more healthy and I can do that over here on the side too with this part and if you'll notice as I draw this it's already changed and that's because I'm applying the same modifications to that area that I applied to the chin in this case it it seems about right it may not always be the same universal changes as you make changes throughout your image but in this case they kind of apply to both and whatever changes I make now if I want to bring the exposure down farther it applies to both which is really nice and so if I zoom back out that's that's my modified image here if I again again if I switch back to the original you can see the changes that have been made that gold is gone the the birthmarks on the forehead are removed the the the mustache has been filled in some of those brighter patches on his chin and cheek are also changed and we can hop back over there to as as proof of that so again I've made all these changes within the camera raw filter if I wanted to change them further I can I don't need to necessarily be stuck with that one change that I made in the beginning to remove the gold if I wanted to then adjust the color on his chin so those are the non-destructive types of edits you can make in Photoshop there are a lot of others that I don't unfortunately have time to cover today but that's one that I think is a great place to start if you don't want if you if you're worried the changes you make are going to be sort of set in stone and the good news is they aren't so all the changes I made within the camera raw filter are made and I can just press okay and watch magically as there we go that's now my new photo and I can always go back to camera or filter make additional changes but they won't be the same I won't be able to affect the same changes as before after I press okay so definitely be confident in your changes once you hit okay and I'm coming up on just about the end of my time here so I want to say thanks so much for for sticking around for this brief tutorial we've got a lot of other great photoshop from our from our talented webinar manager Becky that I've also participated in so I encourage you to check all those out as well as some of the great courses that she's that she mentioned at the top I've helped out a little bit with those but she's definitely along with our our learning management system guru Susan Hope Bard made some terrific courses for you to check out to go from from from novice to to pro just like just like I did so with that I want to say thanks so much for for sticking with us and I'm going to hand it over now to to Jim Lynch our resident news expert to give you some insight on the latest and greatest around TechSoup and technology for non-profits community so thanks a lot and take it away Jim all right here we go hi everybody I'm Jim Lynch I'm our staff writer I'm gonna do a screen share here and show you a few quick hits what we got going here all right first off just wanted to tell everybody one of the most popular things we do at TechSoup is to offer this really really steep discount on something called grant station if you haven't seen it before grant station is essentially a searchable database where you can locate funders for the grants that you need to get to stay alive in your organization so the grant station price is usually you know 700 dollars and TechSoup members can usually get it for 300 but we usually do these two-day events where you can get it for 99 dollars and so this event is going to happen May 16th and May 17th so that's a quick hit so the next thing that I wanted to alert you to is that fiscal year is coming up in a couple months and essentially we do a big rush most non-profits or organizations have their fiscal years on July 30th and so that's a time when this is a piece that I did to explain what a fiscal year end is anyway it's where you got to wrap up everything in your financial calendar basically do your 990 spend down your budget so that you come on July 1st with a clean slate so there's there's a list of all the various things that we all have to do during fiscal year end and one of them is basically take care of the stuff that you want to buy before they end of that year this is a pretty this is a pretty fun piece because it has horror stories that we collect on our facebook page we're going to send you all these links or we have sent you all these links so that you'll have them you can take a look at them at your leisure the last thing I wanted to show you is a piece that we just ran on tech soup for libraries that's at tech soup for libraries dot org we've done a series on how to make mobile devices and computers easier to use for seniors so if you're dealing with people who are you know novices at using digital devices then we have just run this great great series that was originally run by a tech support member called community technology network and these are these are how-to things that essentially just step you through android and apple ios things that will make these devices like mainly tablets and and phones much easier to use and it's designed for seniors but for anybody who is having trouble seeing screens and having trouble navigating their their device it's a three-part series it's all on tech soup for libraries and one thing we have at tech soup is we have this creative commons licensed content so you can take this content and use it however you want you can reprint it you can put it on your own website you can make flyers with it you can just give us attribution to say where it came from and we'll be happy so that's it for me so back to you becky thanks jim so we are all at the top of our 30 minute half hour quick ps tuesday tech 30 so thanks so much for joining us and we hope you'll come back again next week on the 30 on tuesday and we'll be talking about i know in design and illustrator coming up as well in the adobe suite we'll also get to acrobat dc in may and then we'll be talking about lots of other products and and tools and themes to come so keep an eye on the calendar check out the full courses available and join us again soon thanks so much everyone thanks jim thanks west and have a great day but bye