Why won’t anyone teach me what I want to learn?
I enrolled in a PhotoShop class at the community college, level 2, because I didn’t want to have to sit through a bunch of questions about whether to save as a JPG or a TIF or how large to make a file…
Wound up having to listen to those questions anyway.
What I’d like to learn is how to sharpen eyes, lighten faces and otherwise enhance my pictures. Preferably with a discussion of why and when to do such things.
Instead we spent the first hour drawing and manipulating circles and squares, which was a little bit useful, because I learned a few things I didn’t know about navigating the program. Then we learned how to make a neat border around pictures, and how to make one person in color and everyone else blurred and in black and white, and how to put an image inside block text letters. In other words, tricks.
So glad it was a three-hour course.
Here’s what I did today, using nothing I learned at the class. 
I “burned” the background, which was overexposed. I rather like the unnatural halo effect, and concede that this also is a trick.
Kari Neumeyer 
What textbook (if any) are you guys using? I took a photoshop class last summer and the book was really useful.
Uhhh, actually, there’s no book, but i did manage to teach myself how to sharpen and whiten eyes, by googling it. And I do see that there is a writer of photoshop books who is quite well thought-of…was your book per chance, written by Scott Kelby?