The following is a collective of notes that I took today at BTT class: When you open a New document, you have to choose and decide what it is for (are you putting it on the internet, printing, etc), thus choosing what resolution and dimensions it will have. The Rectangular Marquee Tool helps you select things with rectangular shapes. Elliptical Marquee Tool is very similar to the rectangular one, only it selects things with a circle shape. If you want a perfect circle or square to select something, press Ctrl+D. Always work on a duplicate layer, unless you want your original picture/work to get ruined if you make a mistake (it's also more convienient to work with multiple layers). There are shortcuts for each tool, for example press Ctrl+M for the Marquee Tool. The Move Tool helps move things around. The Lasso Tool helps you select things. The Feather Tool helps soften the selected edges. The Magic Wand Tool has tolerance levels froms 0 to 255. The tolerance levels choose the closest pixels to your selected number (10, 20, 100, etc). However if you select 255 as the tolerance level, then your WHOLE document will change. Red eyes are caused when light from a flash goes into the person's eyes and then reflects right back (a red reflection is made thanks to the retina). Contiguous means touching, and it only chooses the colors that are within the chosen levels AND those that are touching. The Crop Tool helps you crop parts of a picture and you can choose the width, length, and resolution of what you cropped will become right there. When you blow stuff up (make it big), it becomes fuzzy because information is absent. The Text Tool (you can write vertical or horizontal) allows you to put words onto your document, A gradient is a blend of 2 colors, and you can choose where the gradient starts and it's direction. You can even make the gradient opaque or transparent. The Shape Tool allows you to input shapes. The Airbrush Tool has a soft edge, and it is similar to spraypainting. The background Eraser erases the background layer of a work. The Compressionist Brush can be used to do funky stuff. The Blur Tool blurs parts of your picture. The Sharpening Tool increases the edges and contrasts betweeb a picture. Be careful not to overdo the Sharperning Tool because then your picture will have extreme, whitish contrasts and it will not look professional at all. The Sponge Tool softens and blends the picture like a wet sponge. The Smudge Tool smudges parts of a picture. The Red Eye Tool adjusts the levels of the red in your eye, and the computer tries to replace the red with existing colors from the eye. The Burn Tool subtly darkens an image. The Dodge Tool subtly lightens an image. The Clone and Stamp Tool clones a selected area of your picture. Press the Alt key down, click on where you would like to clone (the stamp appears), and then click on where you would like the cloned area to appear. You can change your paintbrush so that the brush sizes vary to help you with this. The Eyedropper Tool goes in and selects color from your picture (this is called color sampling). The Hand Tool is used to move things around. The Pattern Tool is similar to the Clone and Stamp Tool, only it creates patterns.