This week's lab will be devoted to learning the basics of how to work with graphics on the web. There are an enormous number of tricks, techniques, skills and concepts that are required to truly claim "expertise" in graphic design for the web. We will just scratch the surface this week. The main topic in this lab will be the use of Adobe Photoshop, an application designed for the processing of digital images. The goal is for you to become sufficiently proficient with Photoshop to prepare and include scanned digital images in a web page.
Even concentrating on Photoshop alone, we will only be able to cover a small subset of the features one might use. For those who want to learn more on their own, try the Ultimage Photoshop page (don't you like humility in a web page creator). Among other things, it has a list of links to web-based Photoshop tutorials.
Again, the lab is divided into two parts. Part I is a tutorial which we hope you will all finish during the lab period. You will, however, probably have to hurry a bit to accomplish this. This week's secheduled labs promise to be a "three ring circus". While your focus will be on the completion of the image editing tasks described below, we will also be having you briefly work individually with one of the TA's to learn how to use the image scanner available in the lab. As a result, this week's Part II starts with a few guided exercises we would have included in Part I if we weren't afraid you would run out of time. In addition, Part II asks you to complete some more independent work intended to give you further experience with Photoshop.
To prepare for lab it would be useful to skim the entire description of Part I. In particular, you should carefully read the material up to the section entitled "Modifying an Image's Size"
To simplify printing, a version of the complete instructions for this lab as a single page is also available.
If you have questions about the instructions for either part of this lab, you are encouraged to ask them through the discussion area for this lab in the course discussion forum. You may be lucky and find that your question has already been asked and answered.