Adobe Photoshop CS6 Classroom in a Book

Book Preface

Getting Started

Getting Started

Adobe^® Photoshop^® CS6, the benchmark for digital imaging excellence, provides strong performance, powerful image-editing features, and an intuitive interface. Adobe Camera Raw, included with Photoshop CS6, offers flexibility and control as you work with raw images as well as TIFF and JPEG images. Photoshop CS6 pushes the boundaries of digital image editing and helps you turn your dreams into designs more easily than ever before.

About Classroom in a Book

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Classroom in a Book^® is part of the official training series for Adobe graphics and publishing software, developed with the support of Adobe product experts. The lessons are designed to let you learn at your own pace. If you’re new to Adobe Photoshop, you’ll learn the fundamental concepts and features you’ll need to master the program. And if you’ve been using Adobe Photoshop for a while, you’ll find that Classroom in a Book teaches many advanced features, including tips and techniques for using the latest version of the application and preparing images for the web.

Although each lesson provides step-by-step instructions for creating a specific project, there’s room for exploration and experimentation. You can follow the book from start to finish, or do only the lessons that match your interests and needs. Each lesson concludes with a review section summarizing what you’ve covered.

What’s new in this edition

This edition covers many new features in Adobe Photoshop CS6, such as intuitive video editing tools, which make it easy to create and add effects to video clips and still images; the Content-Aware Move tool, which lets you remove unwanted objects or replicate existing portions of an image; simpler and more powerful 3D controls (Photoshop CS6 Extended only); and the all-new Crop tool, providing greater flexibility in cropping, straightening, and skewing an image. In addition, these lessons introduce you to erodible brush tips, new vector layers, lens-aware adjustments, paragraph styles, and more.

New exercises and lessons cover:

• Using the Timeline panel, keyframes, and motion effects to create movie files from video clips and still images within Photoshop.

• Creating and applying paragraph styles to text.

• Painting more realistic effects with erodible brush tips.

• Creating, positioning, and adding effects to objects in a 3D scene (Photoshop CS6 Extended only).

This edition is also chock-full of extra information on Photoshop features and how best to work with this robust application. You’ll learn best practices for organizing, managing, and showcasing your photos, as well as how to optimize images for the web. And throughout this edition, look for tips and techniques from one of Adobe’s own experts, Photoshop evangelist Julieanne Kost.

What’s in Photoshop Extended

This edition of Adobe Photoshop CS6 Classroom in a Book works with the 3D features in Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended—a version with additional functions for professional, technical, and scientific users, intended for those creating special effects in video or in architectural, scientific, or engineering images.

Photoshop Extended features include:

• The ability to import 3D images and to edit individual frames or image sequence files by painting, cloning, retouching, or transforming them.

• Support for 3D files including the U3D, 3DS, OBJ, KMZ, and Collada file formats created by programs such as Adobe Acrobat^® 9 Professional and Google Earth. See Lesson 12, “Working with 3D Images,” to learn about these features.

• Support for specialized file formats, such as DICOM, the most common standard for receiving medical scans; MATLAB, a high-level technical computing language and interactive environment for developing algorithms, visualizing and analyzing data, and computing numbers; and 32-bit high-resolution images, including a special HDR Color Picker and the capability to paint and layer these 32-bit HDR images.

Prerequisites

Before you begin to use Adobe Photoshop CS6 Classroom in a Book, you should have a working knowledge of your computer and its operating system. Make sure that you know how to use the mouse and standard menus and commands, and also how to open, save, and close files. If you need to review these techniques, see the documentation included with your Microsoft^® Windows^® or Apple^® Mac^® OS X documentation.