Inspiration Lab - Photo Editing with Photoshop CC
Introduction to Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a photo/graphic editing program that is great for creating, editing and manipulating images. By using the basic Photoshop tools, you will learn to manipulate the tone of a photograph, enhance or modify colour, adjust the size of an image and do some fine-tuning (cropping, straightening, sharpening etc) and retouching.
The Inspiration Lab
The Inspiration Lab is a free space dedicated to digital creativity, collaboration, and storytelling. We are located on level 3 at the Central branch of the Vancouver Public Library.
The Inspiration Lab features recording studios, a high-performance computer lab with audio, video and image editing software, as well as self-publishing and graphic design software including Adobe Photoshop. We also have analog-to-digital conversion stations for various forms of older media.
All of our services are absolutely free with your library card!
Inspiration Lab Booking
The Inspiration Lab is open during regular Central library hours.
Reserve a recording studio or drop in to use a computer workstation. If this will be your first time booking or you need a refresher on the process, review our booking instructions.
Creation and Digitization Station booking:
- Drop-in (available station not guaranteed) or create bookings up to 2 weeks in advance
- Use for a maximum of 3 hours per day (speak to staff if more time is needed for your project)
- Printing is not available from Inspiration Lab computers, but files can be saved and reopened for printing from one of the general use public computers.
- Please bring a USB storage device to save your work. See our guide for recommended storage size for your project.
Saving Your Work While in the Inspiration Lab
Please bring a USB drive to back up your files created in Adobe Photoshop CC. Adobe Photoshop CC files can be fairly large depending on the saved format, image size and DPI. These can be adjusted while saving your work to compress where needed. Any 16 or 32 GB USB will easily accomodate many Photoshop files.
Vancouver programs
Interested in taking a course or two at a post secondary institution? Here's a non-exhaustive list of some Photoshop courses offered at Vancouver institutions:
Free Media Sources
Looking for images, sounds, or videos to use in your Inspiration Lab project? Search for works without copyright restrictions (sometimes called "public domain"), or with licenses that permit reuse and/or modification (you may have heard of "Creative Commons" licensing).
Sometimes, the individual files on a website will each have different use restrictions. If you intend to share or modify someone else's work, or if you plan to use your final project commercially (ie. for profit) be sure to check for restrictions. Sometimes you will find these restrictions at the individual item level; sometimes at the website level. When in doubt, contact the copyright holder directly to ask permission.
Copyright Law:
Free Media Sources:
- Archive.org Community Audio - Public domain music and spoken word.
- Creative Commons Search - Search media sites across the internet for content made available for free reuse.
- The Flickr Commons - The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives.
- FreeSound - Public domain sound effects.
- Free Music Archive - Creative Commons and Public Domain music.
- Pixabay: Free Images - Free, downloadable stock images (except for the first line of Shutterstock images on each search page).
- Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg offers over 53,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
- Unsplash - The internet’s source of freely-usable images. Powered by creators everywhere.
- Wikimedia Commons - Images, sound, and video available for free reuse.
