The lesson started by working with a photo and splitting it into its RGB channels. The composite below shows the original photo and each of the RGB channels.

Next, I used two of the channels and applied different Adjustment layer effects to those channels as shown below:

Since the snow scene with the house lacked bright colors, I also split the RGB channels for another photo. The differences in the channels are far more apparent for this image.

To get a better feel for how different effects might work with the color channels, and to see how I might use the channel splitting technique when working with photos, I did a few more experiments on the maple tree photo where different effects were applied to different channels.

I'm not sure what I learned from these experiments, except I do think the last one showed some possibilities for some photos. The rest, I believe, would be for 'artistic' (?) fun rather than to resurrect a poor photo.

The last part of the lesson was on node editing text and using an alpha channel selection. This was fun and creates an interesting text image, especially when some additional effects and filters are applied!

Another experiment was to save an image as a .tif file with its transparency option. Having done that we could then try using it in another application. I tried this with an Excel spreadsheet, and it worked - I think. In any event, the text was saved as a .tif file and then inserted into the spread sheet. I'm not sure if this is the result we were seeking, however.

It is clear that this week's lesson just introduces us to the 'tip of the iceberg' and provides so many more possibilities to explore in PSP. Thank you!