Using Photoshop for Business Introduction and Lesson 1

Why use Photoshop? Photoshop is a great tool for adapting photographs so they better suit your purpose Photographers use this program all the time to touch up photographs but businesses will also use it to enhance photos that will appear in advertisements and brochures

What are we doing today? We will be learning how to: Select a photo for editing Select an object within that photograph Blur a background Change the background from colour to black and white

Step 1 – Get your photo Open up Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 Go to File  Open and find the picture you want to edit

Step 2 – Creating a background layer Now that you have your picture, go to Layer  Duplicate Layer and duplicate as background copy

Step 3 – Selecting your item Now you want to choose the Quick Selection Tool Ensure that the plus (+) tool is clicked (top left) and click auto enhance Now, holding down your mouse, draw around the item you want to separate from the photo It will predict what you are trying to select but if it selects more, you use the minus (-) tool to remove the extra selection If you click on the percentage (%) number at the bottom Left of the picture and increase the number, you can zoom in on your picture to be more precise in your selection

Step 3 – Selecting your item

Step 4 – Make corrections to your selected object You can make corrections or adjustments a number of ways, most notably through the enhance or filter menus Depending on what you are trying to do, play around with some of these functions We want to make one thing colour with everything else black and white so you will probably leave your selected object in colour

Step 5 – Selecting the background When you are finished adjusting your centre object, you want to select the background Select the background by clicking Select  Inverse Now you can adjust the background of the item

Step 6 – Blurring the Background Now that you have selected the background, to blur it click on Filter  Blur  Gaussian Blur By increasing the numbers, you increase the amount of blur

Step 7 – Changing the background to black and white Changing the background colour scheme can be adjusted through the filter tab Filter  Adjustments  Gradient Map Choose the black / white option Now you have created a dual colour / BW photo

Step 8 – De-selecting and Saving To get rid of the crawling ants that denote your selections, click Ctrl-D To Save, click File  Save As  Select the location you want to save it in (Create a file on your M Drive called Photoshop Pictures and save it there) Change the format to JPEG Click OK

The Results Here is an example of what you can do !

Your Assignment You are to adjust 2 different photographs to include a portion colour and a portion Black/White Some of the photos objects must be clear but backgrounds must be blurred Have Fun!