Crash Course to Photoshop

One of the CA 155 projects requires students to work with Adobe Photoshop to design a promotional poster for an imaginary TV show about their life. This is a challenging assignment, and the difficulty is compounded for students who are using Photoshop for the very first time. While we do provide numerous in-class demos and 1-on-1 instruction, it is still a difficult piece of software to learn. With that in mind, I produced this introductory "crash course" video to provide to students as a supplementary resource. The goal was to include just enough information for them to get comfortable with the interface and begin experimenting with the tools they would need to use for the project. Additionally, I wanted to design the video so that it would be easy for students to skip back and forth to the sections they are most interested in.

This guide introduces the basics of the Photoshop interface and shows you how to do several basic functions that will be necessary for your poster design projects:

• Importing images into Photoshop
• Manipulating and rearranging layers
• Selecting a subject and removing the background of an image

A copy of the files used during the video demo is available for you to download: Click Here!