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In today's installment of Photoshop CS5 Top 5, Deke demonstrates Photoshop's bristle brushes, which simulate traditional paint brushes—the kind your local art-supply store sells—and its new Mixer brush, which lets you give a photo a painterly look. Along the way, Deke passes along a tip for customizing Photoshop's interface—one of those little chores that can save so much time, but that so few of us do.

In this installment of Photoshop CS5 Top 5, Deke McClelland explores a feature he calls fun to use, funny to watch, and extremely powerful. Take a fifteen-minute tour of the Puppet Warp feature, then head over to check out all of our Adobe CS5 training to explore new courses and tutorials covering Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Flash, Premiere, and more.

Refining selections and creating masks are unglamorous but utterly essential Photoshop techniques—you've got to master both in order to perform tricky compositing tasks, such as extracting a person from an image and then adding a different background.

Whether you want to be subtle or brash, the greatly improved HDR features in Photoshop CS5 are worth a close look. They're the subject of today's Photoshop CS5 Top 5 movie. Watch as Deke McClelland walks you through Photoshop CS5's HDR toning and HDR Pro features.

In this first episode of Photoshop CS5 Top 5 on lynda.com, Deke McClelland introduces us to the common sense enhancements, tweaks, and fixes in latest version of Adobe Photoshop. Learn about the new Straighten button, the Content Aware Fill tool, and more.

Virtually every Photoshop project starts with Open (how often do you choose New?) and ends with Save. And unlike other apps, Photoshop treats all image formats as native. Open and Save are the alpha and omega of imaging.

Home to at least eight of the features Deke has mentioned so far in the Photoshop Top 40 Countdown, the Layers palette is command central—the place where most of the action in Photoshop happens. Were it not for this one palette, Photoshop as we know it would not exist.

The essential Image Size command lets you scale an image on screen or in print. Here's your chance to understand resampling and resolution, both of which affect the core quality of your digital photographs.

Photoshop lets you modify your view of an image using a variety of tools, commands, and options. But you don’t need a single one of them. Learn a few shortcuts and you’ll be working at maximum efficiency in no time.

PPhotoshop doesn’t sharpen focus, it sharpens detail. Using any of three remarkable filters, Unsharp Mask, Smart Sharpen, and High Pass. Apply them as smart filters, and you’re ready for any output scenario.

Photoshop doesn’t just support multiple color spaces, it supports infinite variations on the device-dependent ones. You can open an RGB photo, process it in Lab, and output it to CMYK, with certainty that the conversions will work.

The safety-net trio of Undo, History, and Revert protect the intrepid image editor from unexpected disasters. But they also let you toggle operations, compare before-and-after images, and move back and forth through time.

The ubiquitous eyedropper is simple in purpose and easy to use. But imagine a world without it, where you had to dial in every one of the 16.8 million+ colors manually. The eyedropper is Photoshop’s color ambassador.

The Levels command, and its cohort the histogram, let you adjust luminance levels on a channel-by-channel basis. The upshot is that you can increase contrast, correct for color cast, and make a bad image good.

The Color Settings command is your way of establishing reliable color management policies across the entire Creative Suite. While admittedly techy, it ensures that what you see is what everyone else sees as well.