With the release of Creative Suite 5, Adobe’s premiere photo-manipulation application Photoshop is more powerful than ever. As you complete the eight projects in this book, which were carefully designed to depict the types of assignments that you will encounter throughout your graphic-design career, you will learn to:

• Define appropriate resolution and compression settings for a variety of distribution purposes.
• Select specific photographic elements and separate them from their backgrounds with a variety of different tools and techniques.
• Composite raster images, vector objects, and text elements to create unified, finished documents.
• Use Photoshop’s powerful controls for correcting colors, adjusting lighting, and repairing other types of visual damage in your images.
• Create unique artistic effects using many of Photoshop’s filters, adjustments, brushes, and 3D tools.
• Use valuable time-savers such as libraries, styles, actions, and batch processing to streamline your workflow.
• Prepare images for web publication by adding animations and defining image slices.
• Save files with appropriate settings and formats for a variety of print and digital distribution methods.