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"Adobe recently released its upgraded Photoshop CS6, and now it's more powerful than ever. But does that mean it's even harder to use? Definitely not. In fact, here's a series of seven videos that show you the basics of how to edit, enhance and save images for social media and blogs that will take you just a few minutes to watch and learn.\nOver its 22-year history, Photoshop has accumulated a multitude of features; so many that it might seem intimidating to those who are not familiar with it. Don't let that discourage you. You'll be surprised how easy it is to harness Photoshop CS6's awesome power \u2014 you'll think you're working miracles. The best part is, you'll be learning how to use capabilities that can't be found on any other software on this planet.\nFollow along as we take you on a tour of many of its new features, showing you what we think is the best way to bring images into Photoshop, edit, enhance and modify them to your liking. So get yourself the free 30-day trial of Photoshop CS6, download these two test pics (picture 1 and picture 2) and follow along. Still have more questions after watching all seven videos? Tell us in the comments.\n1. Set Preferences\nIn this first video, we'll show you how we like to set up some of the basic features of Photoshop to make it easier to use. Tip: Watching these videos full screen will help you better see the details we'll point out.\n\n\n2. Camera Raw Interface\nNext, we use Photoshop's powerful Camera Raw interface to modify all sorts of parameters in an image. You'll see how easy it is to adjust a photo to your liking, using a series of simple sliders. After that, you can send it over to the main Photoshop application for even more fun.\n\n\n3. Content-Aware Fill\nHere you'll see how to expand an image into places where there was no image before. It's done with content-aware fill, which was first available in the previous version of Photoshop. Here, we use the rectangular marquee tool (the second tool from the top of the toolbar on the left that looks like a square drawn by dotted lines) to select an area, and in that area there will be new parts of the image that Photoshop created itself. It's almost miraculous.\n\n\n4. Content-Aware Move\nNext, I'll show you how to take this \"content-aware\" concept a step further, with a new feature just introduced in Photoshop CS6 called content-aware move.\n\n\n5. Spot Healing Tool\nHere's another way to enhance your images in Photoshop CS6: the spot healing tool. This was also introduced in a previous version, but it's even more useful now. With it, you can magically remove distracting elements of a picture. And it's just as easy as selecting a tool and drawing over parts of the image you don't want, just like using an eraser.\n\n\n6. Iris Blur\nWhy would you want your photos to look even more blurry, you ask? With carefully placed blur, you can make people think you have an expensive Digital SLR, when all you're using to take your pictures is a smartphone. Photoshop CS6 offers sophisticated controls that do what Instagram's tilt-shift tools do, but with a lot more precision. With this quick and easy Iris Blur tool, you can manipulate focus in as many areas as you'd like.\n\n\n7. Cropping and Saving for the Web\nNow that you've finished modifying that picture, it's time to crop it to just the right size and save it. Photoshop CS6 adds a new cropping tool that does a whole lot more than its predecessor, which hasn't changed much in 22 years, according to Adobe. Check it out, and learn easy ways to save images at exactly the right size you need for use on social networks or on your blog.\n\n\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, kryczka"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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