Adobe Photoshop is a graphics program that allows you to change and manipulate digitized images. You can use Adobe Photoshop to import scanned images, and can also use it to prepare images for use on the Web and in PowerPoint presentations.

1. Open up the Launcher and select Applications. Click on the Adobe Photoshop icon to open the program.

• If you are going to scan an image, go to File, and Import, and select "Nikon Scan 2" for slides and Apple Color OneScanner for flatbed scans.

 
• If you are downloading an image from the web using a Mac, place your cursor on the image and hold the mouse down. This will bring up a pull down menu. Select 'Save As', give the image a name with the extension .jpg, and save the image to your desktop or to a folder on the desktop. The file is then ready to be inserted into your webpage or PowerPoint presentatation. You may open the image in Photoshop if you want to make changes ( but it is not a good idea to make changes and resave an image once it's in a .jpeg format, as you can lose information each time you save).

 

 
 
 

When using a PC, place your cursor on the image and click and hold down the right hand button on your mouse. Then select the Download command from the list, and save the file to your desktop.

• If you are opening a file from the desktop or from a folder, go to File and then Open, and select the file you are to open.

 
• If you are opening a file on a Photo CD, go up to the File menu and select 'Open.' When the Open dialog box appears, make sure the pulldown tab at the top is set on 'Desktop.' Under the 'Desktop' menu, double-click on the CD icon. This will open up the CD. There are two folders on the CD. You want to double-click on the folder named 'Photos' to open it. In this folder, there are five groups of images in different pixel sizes: 1536 X 1024(high-resolution or 'hires'), 192 X 128 (thumbnail), 3072 X 2048, 384 X 256, and 768 X 512 (fullsize).

 

 
 
 

The hires images are extra large in size, and are intended for use in PowerPoint (their extra large size allows them to be printed out about approxiamately 8 X 10 inches, as digital images tend to "shrink" when printed, due to the higher pixel resolution of most printers).

The fullsize images are designed to fill most monitor screens.

The 384 X 256 image is a good size for use in web pages.

The thumbnail sizes are intended for use in pages where you want to limit the time it takes the page to loads (thumbnails contain less information, so the page loads more quickly). Often web page designers will put thumbnails on a page with links to larger versions of these images.

2. The image will appear in Photoshop. This particular image is positioned horizontally, when it
should be vertical. To reposition it, go to the Image menu at the top of your screen, select Rotate Image from the pulldown menu, and then select 90 degrees CW (clockwise). This will move your image in the correct position.

2. You will next need to crop the image to remove the dark space around the edges. Go to the toolbar in the upper left hand corner and select the cropping tool, which is the first tool in the left hand column. Click and hold down on this tool and find the last of the cropping tools in that rool. Then place the cursor in the upper right hand corner to draw a box around the image. Use the square "handles" of the cropping margin to fit the dotted box around the image. When you are ready to crop, double-click on the image, and it will automatically crop it.

3. Many images are too dark and need to have their color and levels adjusted. Go to "Image" at the top menu, and select "Adjust" and then "Auto Levels." Photoshop will automatically adjust the levels within the image. For most images, this is sufficient.

4. Sometimes it's necessary to make additional manipulations to the images. In these cases, use the "Levels" tool (Image/Adjust/Levels). You will see a line graph of the tones of the pixels in the image, with three triangles below that can be moved to adjust the appearance of the image. To lighten the image, move the central triangle a little bit towards the left, and move the right hand triangle a little bit to the left.

5. To adjust the color balance of the image, go to "Image", "Adjust," and "Color Balance." There are three ranges, between Cyan and Red, Magenta and Green, and Yellow and Blue. By moving the arrows below each range, you can increase or lessen the amounts of each color in the image. However, changing the color balance may also effect the levels in the image, so you may have to go back into the 'Levels' command after you've adjusted the color balance.

6. You can also change the image through the Hue/Saturation command. Go to "Image," "Adjust," and "Hue/Saturation." There are three ranges, one for Hue, one for Saturation, and one for Brightness/Contrast. By moving the triangle under Hue, you can change the color of the image. By moving the triangle under Saturation, you can increase or remove the amount of color in the image (to make a color image into a black and white image, move the Saturation arrow all the way to the left. This is particularly useful for black-and-white images that have a reddish or greenish cast to them). By moving the Brightness/Contrast triangle, you increase or decrease the brightness of ALL the pixels in the image.

7. If you want to go back to the way the image appeared before you made changes, go to the History palette (if it is not already on the screen, go to "View" and select "Show History." When you find the History palette, you may scroll up and down and find previous actions. You may select one of these actions by clicking on them to go back to what the image looked like before certain actions were completed. To undo an action you have just performed, you can go to the Edit menu and select Undo.

8. You can also change the image size and resolution. Go to Image, select Image Size, and you will get a dialog box showing the Image dimensions in pixels (pixels are the blocks of light that make up the image), the print size in inches (because printers have higher resolutions than computer screens, most images print out larger than they appear on a screen), and below that, the resolution in DPI (dots, or pixels, per inch). The images on the CD's are all scanned to 72 dpi, which is the resolution needed for JPEG or GIF images that are posted to the Web.
If you want to change the size of the image, you can change the height or width in the dialog box for the pixel dimensions. Make sure the "Constrained Proportions" box is checked, so that the width decreases in correspondence to the height. Keep in mind that whenever you reduce the size of the image, you lose information, so try not to reduce an image's original size by too much.

9. When you have the image the way you want it, go to File and select Save. Save the file first with the extension ".psd" (Photoshop format) onto the desktop or onto a Zip disk, so that you will have an original from which to work from in case you want to resize or alter the image in the future. Then save a copy as a JPEG file by selecting File and Save as, and then put the extension ".jpeg" at the end of the file name. Go to the pulldown menu at the bottom of the dialog box and make sure that "JPeg" is selected as a file type. After you've pressed the Save button, you will see a dialog box called "JPEG options" which will allow you to select the quality of the file on a scale of 1 to 10. A JPEG file with a quality rating of 10 is a lot larger than a file with a quality of 5, so in the interest of keeping your files smaller, select 5 as your quality rating.

When you are taking images off the Photo CD's, you must always use "Save As" to save the images, since the CD itself is not writeable and information cannot be saved on it.

10. Now your Jpeg image is ready to be posted onto WebSpinner or posted into your web page. Remember, Jpeg images may deteriorate and lose information each time you open them, so if you want to make changes in your image, you should always go back to the Photoshop (.psd) file, make the changes, and replace the existing Jpeg file.