OddballGreg - Photoshop 101 (A Newbie's Guide To Professional Photoshop)

Do you realize how trippy it is photoshopping a picture of Photoshop taken while I was photoshopping a picture of Photoshop? (It's Photoception! Teehee)

Photoshop. It's a common subject of conversation in today's world, with models being edited in magazines, competitions being held for the best images, and this blog being made pretty much entirely by it. Suffice to say, I wasn't always very good at it, but I do have some handy tips to pass on if you're interested.

First and foremost, allow me to preface this article by saying that it was largely inspired by the great reception we had to the article I wrote the other week, "Drawing 101", which was basically like this, but with pencils rather than a mouse. (Teehee) Also, do keep in mind, that when I say "A newbie's guide", I'm actually talking about myself. I'm by no means the best out there, (That title belongs to people like Alexander Koshelkov), but I do have a good few handy tips that'll put you a few months ahead of the learning curve I've had to deal with as I started doing the graphics work for this blog. So without further ado, let us discuss the basics.

First and foremost, if you've just started with photoshop, and you don't own one of those ridiculous expensive touchscreens or drawing tablets, just quickly throw any ideas of drawing on your computer, out the window. Drawing with a mouse is like trying to make the Mona Lisa with water colours and a pencil instead of paint brush. It doesn't work that way. (Trust me, I tried.) While it's still a great idea to eventually get one such tablet for the ease of use with Photoshop, budget users of myself simply make do with what we have. (Which is to say; a gaming mouse and too much time.)

Now that you've relieved yourself of that vacuous notion, I'll point out that Photoshop is fairly intuitive from the get go. Things do tend to be where you expect them to be, once you know what you're actually looking for. (That's actually the hardest part, knowing what you actually want to do.)

Buttons. Buttons... Everywhere. I will point out that I am using Photoshop CS6. There's probably some things not here that Adobe CC has added since they discontinued support for CS6.

I'll point out, that your best friends will be items such as the "Lasso" and "Magnetic Lasso" tool, clipping/layer masks, the control, alt, shift and space keys, and those numerous cascading buttons along the the top left of the screen. Lets talk about the tools and features first.

The Tools

Cascading Buttons. Always fun. Also a mainstay of basically every program ever...

Firstly, like any program, Photoshop and basically every Adobe program, a very large quantity of your functionality comes from the cascading toolbar. Things like changing the size of your canvas to adding images in as new layers to even changing the layout of Photoshop itself are up in here. (And Filters. Filters are also important.) I highly recommend getting familiar with these and their functions by going through them and testing them out as they can make your life a great deal easier.

The "View" button gives you access to a great deal of handy, non-default functionality in Photoshop such as showing grids and making things align to them, which in my case is fantastic since the custom font I use for the blog headers requires me to align each letter by hand. The "Filter" button contains what is essentially a bunch of effects you can apply to your image, the most commonly used being the "Gaussian Blur" which allows you to make your image well, blur. Great for implying speed or hazy vision, or simply tying a new element into the greater picture when necessary. Then under the "Select" button, we have the "colour range" and "modify" options which are fantastic for selecting specific colours in a picture, or simply changing the your selection in a more intelligent way such as growing it by a few pixels or feathering it. There's plenty more functionality to be had in these buttons, so make sure to go through them well.

Next up, we have the selection tools, and layer/clipping masks. Now, I'm not going to explain every tool since if you have Photoshop open, you'll realize that a great deal of them are straightforward and even have tooltips if you're not sure what it's supposed to do. An eraser, erases, and brush paints, etc and so forth. I am, however, pointing out that some of these tools are actually far more important than others despite not being obviously such.

Most importantly, I point out the lasso tools for one simple reason. People that use Photoshop like to cut things out, and these are by far the most effective tools for doing so. When I first started, I would painstakingly erase everything from an image that I was placing into the other image, which was stupid in hindsight considering how easy the lasso tools make it. The magnetic lasso will automatically create a selections for objects along any obvious borders that you bring your mouse close to, such as mountains along a skyline. Far easier than doing it manually, so you can remove the skyline (or mountains) with far fewer clicks and far less effort. In the case of not as obvious borders or when you want specific selections, the polygonal lasso is fantastic for cutting out objects cleanly as opposed to the incomplete cut-out effect a eraser tends to leave by simply clicking along the border of what you want. Some people also use the pen tool for this, among many other things.

Of course, the other option is some clever use of Clipping and/or Layer masks. A Clipping mask is a layer which only shows where there are pixels on the layer below it. So for example, this blog's title has the faces of myself and JovialJman. By creating a layer of the inside of the letters, and then setting the pictures of our faces as clipping masks, they only show on those letters. Far easier than cutting out our faces for those exact shapes. A Layer Mask is roughly the same, but can be applied directly to a layer instead of made from another layer. It's essentially a white board that dictates where the layer shows. By blackening pieces of the board, you can determine where that layer shows, with one less layer. (I don't personally use Layer Masks all that often, but Aaron Nace is very fond of them. I'll tell you about him later.) These items specifically, will make your life while using Photoshop TONS easier than mine was when I first started out. ONTO SHORTCUTS!

Shortcuts

Another great thing to remember, is that Photoshop was designed for effective workflow by professional programmers. Apart from the latest version being constantly improved and updated,(Provided you're paying the $50 dollars a month to use it.), that means that it's made to be quick and easy to use once you're familiar with it. Most functions have hotkeys. My favorite is "Control + S" since that saves my work. You only need to lose 10 hours of work to a power failure once to use those two buttons more than the rest of your keyboard. (And to headdesk.)

In addition to that, pressing "Control + Shift + S" Opens the "Save As" window, so there's no need to press the "File" button. There's also things like pressing "Control + T" to transform the current selection, pressing "Control + Alt+ C" to resize your image canvas, or simply holding space while creating a selection to change the location of the selection. (Again, another handy tip from Aaron Nace.) Here is what they call a "Cheat Sheet" which has a whole bunch of the keyboard commands in a convenient PDF image that you can print. Great for improving workflow once you're familiar with what you're actually looking to do in Photoshop. These will be great for helping you to make good compositions, easily.

How To Make Good Compositions

So you know how to you use the tools and you're familiar with the functions, but how do you get a good looking composition, (image)? Well, firstly, that's something that comes with time and hard work. Like my Drawing 101 article, I will point out that what I know in Photoshop has taken a fair bit of work and dedication to learn to effectively do. But there are a few things I can mention that will help you in the right direction.

Firstly, like drawings, lighting and shading is the be all and all of your image... Usually. Like when drawing a cartoon, it might not always matter, but if you want realism, then you need to make sure that you understand where the light is supposed to be coming from in your image, and adjust your changes accordingly. In my composition called "War Bear" which can still be found right at the beginning of this blog's archives, or below if you're lazy, I created the room and lighting around the teddy bear entirely by hand. It was by no means an easy process, but understanding how light works in the world makes faking it all the more easier with a bit of work.

Ironically, Having just looked at it now, there are still tons of ways I could have improved this picture, and there are many easier ways to do the lighting than the manual hand work I actually did here.

Another thing to consider are the image adjustment's which are located just above the Layers window by default. (Shown below) These are great for tying the individual elements of your image together. While shadows and lighting  are important for making an object look like it belongs wherever you've put it, image wide colour or curves correction can really be the deciding factor in just how convincing your creation is. You'll note that the TCSA blog post header images all have either a blue or yellow hue adjustment (as of writing this post) which helps to make the background image seem relevant to the image, rather than just something caricatures were pasted over. They're also great for changing contrast and brightness or even removing the colour from the image or making it more vibrant. All of which can be effective in tying the new object into the original image, or for tying the composition together.

The final thing I need to mention in this case, is resolution. Resolution can make or break your composition. A lot of images around the web are miniature 600x300 (Also known as FREAKING TINY) or some other ridiculously unhelpful size. A good thing to note is that images scale down fine enough, but blowing them up more than a few hundred pixels tends to cause pixelation and completely ruins your image's believeability. Get a good camera, preferably in the 9 megapixel or more range, and take some decent photos if you want to make decent compositions. Which brings us to the next important lesson. PUBLIC DOMAIN!

Public Domain

First rule of the internet with Photoshop. If you want to do something with an image you didn't take, don't. Second rule of the internet with Photoshop, if you really need images but can't take them yourself, celebrate the inception of Creative Commons, and go find some public domain images. The worlds laws about using images tends to be about as strict as it is on theft. Ie, it doesn't belong to you, so if you use it, people are going to sue you quite badly if they didn't give your permission to do whatever you're doing.

Thankfully, Creative Commons has a large following of photographers who enjoy giving their works to the public domain to use, waiving their rights to the image in exchange for fame for their patronage. (A great deal in my opinion. If you do this, I truly thank you.) The website I most commonly visit for this purpose is Pixabay.com which has thousands of high resolution images which are released to the public domain when they are uploaded to Pixabay. Obviously, a great resource for the budget Photoshop artist.

To a lesser extent, you can explore DeviantArt.com for a a vast trove of resources like custom fonts and textures, but be wary of quagmire of potential attributions you might have to make if you decide to do that. There's fantastic things on there, but you could have a large issue on your hands if you mistake something for being free for use and incur the ire of another artist. (Reputations are important when your success is dependent on fame.) Speaking of fame, this brings us to the final piece of advice I can offer.

Tutorials and Phlearn

Remember I mentioned Aaron Nace? He's the presenter of the YouTube channel Phlearn, which does frequent, free tutorials on many aspects of Photoshop. Did I mention they're free? A couple of the things I've mentioned in this post are the result of watching Phlearn's tutorials. (Some is from other sources and my own effort. Nothing quite compares to the entertaining and interesting quality of the Phlearn videos though.)

Fun to watch, and greatly educational if you're really interested in developing your skills at Photoshop, these videos are invaluable in terms of saved time and effort. Many of the things that took me weeks of tinkering to figure out are basically just handed to you by Aaron in these video's, so I highly suggest you check them out.

In any case, that's about all I can think to offer for this Newbie guide to Professional Photoshop. I hope that it has proved informative and useful to you, or at least been entertaining to read. If it has, or you would like me to answer any questions about something specifically, then make sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear from guys. Also, if you have any friends looking to improve their Photoshop skills, consider sharing this post with them. I'm sure they will appreciate it. Of course, if you would like to read more interesting posts like this one, then do be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left so that you can get the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this lengthy article; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy Editing my friends.