This is an example community service postcard I was to add to with the words “Monday is Beach Clean Up Day.” The purpose of the lesson was to learn how to use the text tool, specifically typing, moving text and coloring it.

Step One – I simply used the “Horizontal Type Tool” (further investigation found me a “Vertical Type Tool.” Just imagine!), and printed the specified words in my preferred font (Ariel).

Step Two – I moved the text  with the arrowed “Move” tool to under the main text.

Step Three – Used the “Swatches” panel to select the light magenta color which afterwords resulted in the final image:

Using Adobe Photoshop CS3, my first lesson involved this image:

My goal, as dictated by the PDF, was to keep the top left coin highlighted, while darkening the other two coins and the background currency.

First step – Zoom and Elliptical Marquee: I was taught to zoom in on the coin to make it easier to select it using the “Elliptical Marquee Tool”. I found the almost 500% zoom in to much, and opted to keep the image in the 100 to 200% range. I at first used the tool in free mode. While this would have made it easier over a greater range, I found the freedom too much, and found myself dragging too broad or small all the time. I next learned of the “alt-shift” combo that would restrict the tool to operate center-out from where selected. Clicking in the center of the coin (a tough feat that took me three tries), I was finally able to situate the area where wanted.

Second step – Inversing: With the coin selected, I used the “select” option then went to “Inverse” to turn the barriers not to restrict to inside the coin but around the rest of the image to restrict manipulation to everything outside of the coin.  I would be darkening everything but the coin, not highlighting just the one object, my previous notion.

Third step – “Curves”: After all my selections were finished, I enter “Select” at the top, “Adjustments”, then “Curves”. This opened a dragging menu to darken the rest of the image to my specifications. Once I dragged the output down the 250, the resultant image was this: