Photoshop Elements 4.0 for the Digital Photographer II

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
Photoshop Elements 4.0 is Adobe's newest release of its popular photo-editing software. This is an excellent package for photographers to enhance and edit digital images, and in this class, we'll move into the advanced features for photographers. In the first lesson, we'll dive into a workflow for digital editing. Photographers often wonder where to start when working with an image, and this lesson will give you a good idea of the options available and a sequence to follow.

Lesson 2
In this lesson, we'll look at the Photoshop Elements tools that will help you in perfecting portraits. Although you can use these tools for fine-tuning any type of image, portrait photographers often use them for detail work associated with pictures of people. Today, you'll find out how to smooth away wrinkles, remove red eye, and even turn gray hair brown! If only it were so easy in real life . . .

Lesson 3
Distortion?it's not a word that you might consider desirable in photography. But with the options in Photoshop Elements, you'll find distortion can do wonders! In today's lesson, you'll find out how to slim a waistline, trim loose edges, and accentuate the positive with distortion tools.

Lesson 4
Photoshop Elements gives you lots of options for editing images and in this lesson, we'll turn to the task of restoring old and damaged photographs. You'll see how to turn back the effects of time, as well as how to add hints of color to black-and-white images.

Lesson 5
Many computer programs offer you the option of including clip art in your documents, and with Photoshop Elements, you can make your own! Today you'll see how to extract small portions of a photograph without any surrounding border, and how to use it in other images and documents. You'll also find some great ways to merge text and imagery to create outstanding photographic impressions.

Lesson 6
Photoshop Elements offers countless effects, filters, and styles that you can use to show off your images. In today's lesson, you'll find out how to sharpen and blur photos as well as how to salvage an image with these miraculous fixes!

Lesson 7
The ability to create layers in photographs is one of the most powerful aspects of Photoshop Elements, and in this lesson and the next, you'll see how they work from beginning to end. With layers, you'll build a quickly modifiable business card and a collage as you learn how to use Adjustment and Fill Layers to your advantage.

Lesson 8
As we continue our discussion on layers in this lesson, you'll see how to add patterns, blend layers with colors and effects, and group them for great framing options. Using layers in Photoshop Elements is like supercharging a racecar?and you'll be in the driver's seat!

Lesson 9
In this lesson, we'll look at moving pictures. You'll see how to create an animated presentation from a sequence of images. And if that isn't enough, you'll also see how to create dazzling slide shows with special effects, text, and music to showcase your images.

Lesson 10
Now that you've seen how to create moving pictures, it's time to learn how to capture a frame from a video or movie clip, and that's what we'll do in this lesson. We'll also discuss how to enlarge any image and create colored borders of many sizes and shapes around your work.

Lesson 11
Panoramic images are a beautiful way to show off wide scenic shots. In today's lesson, you'll see how Photoshop Elements helps you blend these to provide seamless imagery. You can also use these features to manually blend collages into any shape you like! We'll also look at some quick options for resizing and watermarking groups of photos.

Lesson 12
In our last lesson, I'll fill you in on a few remaining Photoshop Elements tools, like the Cookie Cutter tool, the Shape tools, and how to use both for more variations of clip art. You'll also work with a RAW file and see the benefits of working with these large, uncompressed files. Last, but not least, you'll see how to use one more strategy to achieve perfect exposure in a finished print. You'll find yourself with lots of knowledge and hours of practice under your belt as you finish up this class on the advanced features of Photoshop Elements.