Notes from the Tuesday Photoshop class running through October & November 2008:

From Class 1:

Badlands

From Class 2:
We went over the Toolbox on several photos and were able to get some pretty impressive results. Emphasis on understanding the layer mask.

We started with this photo of a traveler.

Then we used this photo of a canal in Amsterdam.

And we finished with this photo of a historic cathedral.

Class 3:

We started by cleaning up this photo of Golden Gate Bridge.

Then we cleaned up this photo.

After the break we addressed three challenges:

1. Isolate color on a black & white image
2. Inserting an image onto a background
3. Removing an item from a photo.

We got through the first one by using this photo and making everything but the roses black & white.

Then we tackled adding an image to a background by using these two photos: our traveler and our sports car.

We ran out of time before we could remove an image from our photo, so we will tackle that next week. Ann also asked if we could learn how to add text to an image, and Dionne asked how we can clean up images of people for things like plastic surgery and skin blemishes.

Class 6:

Night Road
Motel Continental
Chairs
Sign
Diner
Diner Sign
Emma at the Diner
Fly
Sisters
Stairs
Dam

Related posts:

1. Fall 2008 – Thursday Class
2. Spring 2008 – Thursday Class
3. Spring 2009 – Tuesday Class

If you want to resize your photos using Picasa, there is an easy way to do it. The tool you will use is called “Export” and it is located at the bottom of the Picasa screen. Export will make a copy of your photos, and will give you the option of what size you want the new copies to be, and where you want to save them. Don’t worry, your original photos will stay right where they are.

To get started, we will need to choose the photos that we want to resize (or Export). We do this one of two ways. The first way is by Control-Clicking your photos (by holding down the “Ctrl” key on your keyboard while you click photos). Control-clicking will put a blue border around your photos that will be exported (remember, the original will stay there, but it will export a small copy). Here is what the blue border looks like when you have your photos selected:

Once you have them properly selected, they will appear in the Picasa Tray in the lower left corner of the Picasa window. The tray works just like a printer queue and holds files there until you are ready to perform an action or do something with them:

If you want to hold photos in the tray, simply click the Green Tack, and it will hold them there until you are ready to Export. When you have selected all of the images you want to Export, click the Export button at the lower center section of the Picasa window:

This pops up the Export dialog box and asks you where you want to save the small copies of your photos. It also gives you a convenient slider to choose how large you want your photos. The default is 800 (which means the longest edge of your photos will be 800 pixels long). 800 or 640 would be good sizes to choose if you are going to e-mail your photos. The more photos you plan on e-mailing at a time, the smaller you will want this setting to be:

Picasa saves the “Exported Photos” to a folder in your My Pictures folder by default, but I don’t think this is very helpful, or easy to find, so I recommend saving to the Desktop. Click “Browse” and another box will pop up asking you where you want to save these new photos:

Click Desktop at the top, then click OK. This takes you back to the Export window. Click OK and it will save your photos to their new location. When it is done, it will pop open an Explorer window showing the location of your new photos:

Related posts:

1. How to Batch Resize Photos in Photoshop
2. How to Tile Windows Vertically
3. Run a Batch File Invisibly