Mark Larson told a Photoshop joke before a Summer Arts lecture last week. Yes, there is such a thing as a Photoshop joke. Here goes:

How many Photoshop experts does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

The answer: One, and the other 99 have their own expert ways to do it.

Larson, the course coordinator for the CSU Summer Arts digital photo seminar, might not be getting his own HBO comedy special anytime soon, but he's a very nice guy, and he welcomed me to his class Tuesday and introduced me to a few of his students. I focus on one of those students, Charlene Kassmayer, in Friday's issue of 7. (You can see a bigger image of her Barn Door photo on the jump.) Some of her fellow students shared some more tips for up-and-coming photographers:

• Sami Heglin, Humboldt State: When you're shopping for a new SLR camera, be very careful. "One thing I learned about my lens is that it's crap," she says. Once Heglin got down to the nitty-gritty of learning Photoshop techniques, she realized that the 18-55 mm kit lens that came with her Canon 40D camera (she bought the package at Costco) causes chromatic lens aberration. (Zooming in on one of her images on the screen, she showed me how a back-lighted object starts getting fuzzy around the edges.) Her advice: put out the extra bucks for a really good lens.
• Rew Popp, Humboldt State: With Photoshop, it's easy to make a portrait better in small but distinct ways, such as brightening the eyes and whitening the teeth. Popp is a fan of the "refine edge" option when blending layers, which allows you to adjust the smoothness and feather selections so that layer effects are seamless.
• Jeri Burzin, Visalia: Burzin is a longtime area artist (and a member of the Art Stand gallery), and while she's been photographing for a long time, the digital photography seminar inspired her in several ways. When it comes to composition, she was impressed with Nevada Wier's philosophy of depending on a wide-angle lens for "people pictures" instead of relying on a telephoto. With a wide-angle, the photographer is forced to get close and personal with the subject instead of hanging back. Capturing a compelling image can be as much about the relationship between photographer and subject as any sort of technical skill, and forcing yourself to get up-close produces a whole different kind of photo. When it comes to Photoshop technique, Burzin was introduced to the all-important Photoshop component known as layers, which allow you to make specific changes to a photo but makes it easy to go back to the original. Burzin says that when evaluating an image, the four most important tools to consider using are these: curves, color balance, hue/saturation and selective color.
• One last tip from Larson, the course coordinator: "Harm no pixels." There are easy ways in Photoshop to do amazingly creative (and drastic) things to your images. Just make sure that there's an easy way to get back to that all-important original.