Adobe® Photoshop® offers an abundance of tools for you to create visually exciting images. As you may recall from your previous training and experience, there are two types of images in Photoshop, raster and vector. It's important to choose the correct type for your project, so that your final visuals look clear, sharp, and professional.

Consider a common scenario. You're designing a website for a client. You've spent two days creating an eye-catching image for the home page, and the client is so thrilled, she wants you to enlarge it to use as the background of a trade show booth. Your 72 dpi, 600-pixel-wide website graphic must be blown up for print, with an image size of 300 dpi and a document size of 36 inches wide. If you've drawn it as a raster image, enlarging the image will make it so blurry, you probably won't recognize it. Be prepared to sit back down at the computer for another two days to recreate it at the higher resolution. However, if you've drawn it as a vector image, there's no problem. In just a few minutes, you can enlarge it and it will be just as sharp and crisp as the smaller version. This is a great benefit of vector images, and Adobe® Photoshop® provides a robust toolset for creating vector images, including paths, shapes, and type.

From your past training and experience, you know that Adobe® Photoshop® layers are a powerful way to organize and edit your image files. In this lesson, you will explore advanced techniques that utilize layers. Some of these techniques allow you to hide and show parts of a layer. Other options enable special effects to be applied to images, such as blending, drop shadows, glows, bevels, strokes, and gradient and pattern overlays. You can turn layers into Smart Objects to save time and streamline workflow. Snapshots of layer settings can be saved as layer comps, allowing you to save many versions of one design in a single Photoshop file. Knowing how to work with layers greatly expands your design capabilities.

Sometimes you might need to modify a large number of different images in exactly the same way. For instance, you might want to drop 60 images into a catalog, and each image must be reduced by the same amount, they need to be cropped to the same width and height, and they must have the same color border applied. Modifying each one by hand would be time consuming. Adobe® Photoshop® and Adobe® Bridge provide a quick and easy way to apply the same actions to multiple images to streamline your workflow.

Photoshop's video capabilities have expanded with the release of Creative Cloud, enabling you to use the power of Photoshop's image editing tools to touch up and edit video. With the increase in social media websites, the use of video is on the rise. Knowing how to create engaging video is becoming a crucial part of the designers' toolbox, and Adobe® Photoshop® makes it easy.

Everyone practices project management to some degree. For example, making dinner requires a plan, such as recipes. You must secure assets with a trip to the store, and it is a good idea to have a budget to make sure everything is affordable. Certainly the objective is to eat, but who is the dinner for? Meatloaf and green beans might be your family's favorite, but impressing your boss might require filet mignon and grilled asparagus. You will need to prepare each part of the dinner at the correct time, so everything ends up on the table together. What tasks can you delegate? If you are an especially good project manager, you might have the kids set the table and your spouse chop onions.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.