Welcome to Adobe Photoshop! This is one of the most popular and used software out there for editing and manipulating photographs.The above image is what will greet you when you open a new image in PS(Adobe Photoshop)

For this exercise because you won't be saving anything you can use any picture you already have access to on your computer. Or you may download one from the internet.

Step 1: The Tool Bar

The tool bar is where you will locate most of you actions. This includes but is by no means limited to the crop tool, direct selection tool, move tool, healing brush, and clone stamp. Most of those we won't be getting into in this lesson but it is good to know where they are located. For this lesson we will mainly be using the move and crop tool.

I have attached an image if what the crop tool looks like so that it will be easier for you to locate in the future. You can hover over each icon and it will give you that tools name. Please keep in mind that there are more tools embedded under many of the ones you see.

To crop your image after you click the crop tool you will drag corners where you want them and click enter to perform the crop.

If you make a mistake and want to undo it click CTRL - Z

Step 2: Adjustments

Throughout this lesson most of your edits will be done using the adjustments menu. If you hover over one of the icons it will tell you what the adjustment does/is. I have captured images of what you will see when you click on the:

Brightness

Color Balance

Levels

Curves

Exposure

We will delve into these more later for now familiarize yourself with there location and feel free to experiment with the sliders to see what they do.

Step 3: Before, Cropping, and After

This is your orientation and therefor it is okay for it to look strange have fun with this part.

Step 4: Brightness/ Contrast

This tool allows you to make basic adjustments to the images tonal range. If you drag the slider left your image will become darker if you drag it right it will become brighter.

Experiment and move to next step.

Step 5: Levels

This tool also allows you to adjust tonal range, as well as brightness and contrast, however you do it by examining the histogram of the image. This is something that you can investigate further later on.

Step 6: Curves

There are many ways to tune and adjust an image this tool can also do what the previous ones did as well as the black and white end points in tonal range. You want your image to to be well exposed and balanced and to do that you have to know where these tones begin and end.

Step 7: Color Balance

This is the master control for the images color profile. You can change the tinting of an image and make specific colors pop more from this adjustment option. The is the penultimate control for image color.