Tutorials That Will Help You To Get Started With Photoshop
When I turned photography into a profession, I understood that Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are a must.
While Lightroom had quite an intuitive panel and it was pretty easy to get started with it, Photoshop became a stumbling block. After continuous program downloading, installing and removing, I finally decided to start with the tutorials. It appeared much easier than I had expected before. If you are a beginning photographer, designer, developer or graphic artist, and this sounds like you, the following useful tools and tutorials will be a great help for you to get started with Adobe Photoshop.
If you have your own story about Ps in your life, you are welcomed to share it with us in comments below.
Please note! At some point of your work with Photoshop you will need premium PSD templates to build more beautiful products.
Photoshop Toolbox
Before starting with advanced Photoshop tools, we recommend that you spend some time to get to know more about instrument panel. It is not that hard because toolbox is split up into four specific categories:
- Selection, Crop & Slice Tools;
- Retouch & Paint Tools;
- Drawing & Type Tools (Vector Tools);
- Annotations & Measurement Tools.
Further comes general information about some of them:
- Selection Tools include marquee (for selecting objects), move (for moving selections, layers, and objects), lasso (for making irregular selections) and magic wand instruments (for selecting areas of similar colors).
- Crop Tool helps to redefine the active image area. Take a note that crop instrument has nothing to do with image resizing.
- Retouch Tools consist of healing (for repairing imperfections in the image), clone (for copying selected area and pasting it to the other required area), eraser (for erasing parts of an image), sharpen, blur and smudge instruments (smudging the image the way like fingerpaint was used).
- Painting Tools feature brush and pencil (for painting strokes in graphics) along with fill (for filling the entire layers, selections, and areas with a monochrome color) instrument.
Layer Tool
Layers are the most critical components of Photoshop. They may be a tricky thing, but if you understand their work principles, they will ease the overall process of photoshopping by unlocking software diversity. Remember to always name your layers, primarily if you are working on a project including a number of them, another way you will mix them up and waste time to figure out layers order.
For detailed information on adding, deleting, selecting and duplicating layers in Photoshop, check out the video tutorial.
Brush Tool And Custom Brushes
If you want to add some design accent to your content and accelerate the workflow, custom brush tips are right for you. Thanks to extended brush settings, you will be able to change the size, transparency, and shape of the brush stroke. Brushes can be found on the toolbar on the left hand. To open brush options and settings, all you have to do is just click on the appropriate icon.
The settings will let you change the brush flow, opacity, etc. along with its size. Do not be afraid of experimenting with settings, so it will bring various style and look to your project. It is also recommended adding a new layer while working with brushes, so you will not paint over any of the other elements of your graphic.
Actions
If you are a beginner, you may not know that some repetitive no-brainer tasks like final image resizing and presets applying can get automated with the help of built-in Photoshop action. This is a recording of the editing process. Playing actions to saving, loading, editing, deleting, etc. are done in actions palette. On the very bottom of it, you will see the iconic bar. The icons are very similar to recording device controls and represent the same functions.
To find detailed instructions on how to record and save the actions, check out the tutorial.
The above-mentioned tools and tutorials do not guarantee that you will become top ‘shopper right away, but we do hope that they will become a powerful kick on your way to Photoshop mastery. To become a first-rate expert in photoshopping be ready to spend some time for learning and practicing and of course stay patient.
Wish you all the best of luck!
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