Exporting an Image from Photoshop (CS3)

Once you have finished your Photoshop project, FILE | SAVE your file one more time as a .PSD (the Photoshop format that preserves the layers).  If SAVE is greyed out then your file is already saved.

Now you need to export a .JPG (JPEG, J-PEG, the compressed format that most photographs are saved in.  By saving as a JPG you flatten all the layers into one picture that is then compressed into a much smaller file.  Sometimes you will need to make the file even smaller - GoogleDocs chokes on anything bigger than 2.5 megabytes - but we'll handle that at the end.)

Now, FILE | SAVE AS your file

When the Save As dialog box comes up, navigate to your student folder.  

DO NOT CHANGE THE FILE EXTENSION.

Look for the Format drop down menu and change the FORMAT TO JPEG.

Notice how the file extension automatically changed to JPG when you changed the file format

Now hit the SAVE button

In the JPEG OPTIONS dialog box make sure the Quality is 12 and Maximum and hit the OK button.

Once you hit OK the filename.jpg will be in the folder you specified on your Student Drive.

And... boom, you're done.

Compressing a file into a SMALLER SIZE:
This is easy!  Simply change the Image Options on the JPEG Options dialog box from Maximum  to High.  Notice that the quality number went down to 8.  You can also change the number directly to get the exactly right sized file but it takes trial and error.  I usually just step down to high.