Now the fun stuff.

We are going to introduce you to basic image editing in Photoshop by posing a problem: If you had to convince the city of Charlottesville that planting trees along a street would improve its appearance, and if you had to use Photoshop to do this, what would you do?

Well, you might start by taking photographs of the street; you might also take photos of trees you wanted to use on the street, or else find these in a magazine or book. Try Flickr or just use this picture released under a Creative Commons license by Alan Sharp:

Next, you would make a digital copy of these photos by scanning them. Using Photoshop, you could cut-and-paste a few big leafy trees into the streetscape containing none to illustrate what this street would be like if trees were planted. To do this, you would decide which trees to paste, and then you would select them: you would outline everything you wanted to copy--trunk, branches, leaves, even shadows if you so desired.

Here is a street tree picture by Mark Pritchard under a Creative Commons license:

After your tree was adequately selected, you would make a copy of it and paste it into the second image. Finally, you would use a variety of tools to edit and manipulate the tree in order to "blend" it into the new scene.

So there are three basic steps to this process:

• select a tree
• copy it and paste it
• edit and manipulate it