What variety of interactive, fee-based educational medium would you like Deke to explore next?

Adobe CS5 - Adobe Creative Suite 5 is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications made by Adobe Systems.
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I am a switcher myself and have been happily working with MACs for the last 4 years. I now spend more time doing productive work on Photoshop than maintanance work with Scandisk and the lot on a PC. It won't be hard to get to learn the new system and you'll get lots of online tutorials and help. Good luck.

Hani
http://www.photoshopuser.com/members/portfolios/view/image/228934

Lisa, If your just talking about learning the operating system etc, and migrating to a Mac version of your Adobe creative tools, Mac OS is a breeze. Being a photographer, I am sure your quite savy about the basics, like file structure and hierarchy. Its just about learning the interface which is really easy. In fact, if you contact Adobe, they will usually let you do a media exchange to a new platform (Windows to Mac OS). Also, Word, Excel and Powerpoint are available on the Mac.

The big question is do you use any really important PC centric software (AutoCad, Visio, Microsoft Project) that just doesnt come on the Mac and you have to be compatible for whatever reason. If you do, then you might want to consider setting up boot camp or parallels so you can continue to run Windows. If you want to be a purist, which I highly recommend then Welcome to the team!

Mac OS has really intuitive tools (iLife) for doing most anything you would ever need to do - Burning DVD's, making movies, creating and downloading music, cataloging your photos (iphoto for starters and Aperture for pros - or you can continue to use Bridge or Photoshop Lightroom if you currently are.)

If your a mainly looking to move your workflow to the Mac and do the basics like web browsing, email and basic productivity stuff (word and excel) then you will be up and running in no time!

Hope that helps.

Randy

Would it be correct to say that a single pixel on a flat image can only be adjusted for color (hue) and brightness (luminosity)? The same pixel on a layer could also be adjusted for opacity?

It is easiest to describe saturation as the intensity of the color. Of course, by looking at an image with many colors, you would have to evaluate the saturation of the image by evaluating the colors across several frequency spectrums. Each color basically represents a different frequency of light. So, depending on the image, you may want to correct for saturation across all of the colors or you may want to isolate certain colors.

Contrast can also be expressed more complexly but essentially, it is the difference of the lightness throughout the components in the image. The human eye notices contrast more so than purely luminance. So an image with dramatic shifts in lights and darks draw the eye. Imagine an image where all of the colors had essentially the same lightness values.. there would be no detail left because you would not have any transitions from black to kind of black to less black to dark grey to kind of grey etc. If the transitions between the lightness and darkness values is too dramatic an image becomes cartoony.

Assuming your dealing with photographs and want to reproduce accuracy, you would FIRST adjust saturation to the point that the colors all pop just enough without becoming blown out or unrealistic, then SECOND, increase or decrease your contrast in order to create a nice balance of the lights and darks - where the shadows just fade to black and the highlights just turn to white.

Hope that helps