Tutorial on Photoshop for Beginners

Anyone who’s browsed the internet enough has heard of Photoshop. It has the largest use on the internet. From movie poster to simple photo enhancements, you can make them all in Photoshop. What people don’t know is how easily one can achieve the most magnificent effects.

Comfort
Make Photoshop more to your liking. Customize the keyboard according to your preferences. If you use a lot of color correction and light enhancement tools, set them to your preferences. You could set this in Edit>Keyboard Shortcuts. This will make you work faster.

Organize
Photoshop has a lot of windows and these windows can be moved around. Clean up your workspace and work with only the windows you want. You can even save your workspace. This can be done in Window>Workspace>Save Workspace. Apart from this, there are a lot of default workspaces available.

Naming
Photoshop is a layer-based software. Naming these layers and the groups they’re in, makes working faster.

Gradients
USE gradients everywhere! But use them sensibly. Gradients give the feeling of depth, specular and light & shade. Making your text, logo, illustration etc., look and feel more realistic and even glossy.

Brushes
Custom brushes and brush packs are available in scores on the web for free. These come in very handy to just decorate photos or enhance your illustrations. Also, there are about a 100 options for brushes themselves in the “brushes window” available in Window>brushes (F5). Just toying around with this window will create some really cool effects. Scattering and fading brush strokes in themselves make cool textures that can be used in backgrounds.

Blur
The blur, more precisely the “Gaussian blur”, can be an extremely helpful tool. Blur is used to create foreground focus, they’re used to make things mystical and you can do some crazy stuff by blurring out text and distorting it.

Layer blending and blending options
Blending options allow you to stylize a layer uniformly. It allows you to provide the same effect to all the elements of a single layer. You can provide a drop shadow, outer glow etc., to a particular layer. Find the dialogue box in Layer>Layer Styles>Blending Options.
Layer blending allows you to burn, screen, overlay, dodge, add, subtract and multiply image data. This controls how elements in a layer are affected by a painting or an editing tool.

By using these simple tricks you can decrease the time you spend on a file, you can create and design smarter and even invent your own methods of “photoshopping” images. These are some simple things that can redefine how you work with Photoshop. Simply toying around with these options will give you infinite ideas to do much more creative work. These are tricks all Photoshop gurus will vouch for.

echo $variable;

The post Tutorial on Photoshop for Beginners appeared first on Photoshop Online.