ESSENTIAL Beginner’s Photoshop Course For Photographers - Part 1

hi and welcome to this beginners Photoshop course this course has a hue of information in it in such a short space of time that I don't to remember everything and it usually takes a few months to get comfortable with Photoshop to understand its logic and how to use it in your workflow so don't feel like you need to learn everything in a day or even in a week or even in a couple of weeks if it takes a while to get the hang of it that's ok you know it took me a few months to really get used to it so don't be harsh on yourself and don't be self-critical you'll get there in the end but feel free to watch this video cause over and over again and practice on your own photos now let's begin the tutorial the first thing we want to do is set up our workspace and by that I mean we basically affect the layout so that it's optimal for photographers and in the top right hand corner you might have something here which says essentials or some other drop-down box but I have this thing here and you can see we have a list of options now if you don't see that instead you can click on window workspace and then you see we have essentials 3d graphic and web we want to select photography so make sure you do that and once you do you'll notice you have a layout similar to mine you might see that the histogram is actually above my adjustments panel and you can move your panels any way you want and when you see these blue lines that means you can let go of the panel and just place the panel where those blue lines are or you can even put them in this little bar here so now we have our adjustments here if you want to save space so I'm just going to put that back to where it was the next thing we're going to look at is bit depth and color space by bit depth we're basically just looking at how much information our photos have and there are two main options but to bring this up we first have to open up an image in Photoshop and to open up an image we can just go to file and we can go to open and then select our image or we can go to a folder where our images select image and just drag it into Photoshop and it'll open up like that now when we go to image and mode we can see at the bottom we have 8-bit 16-bit and 32-bit now the two primary editing 8-bit and 16-bit and don't worry if you feel like this is a little bit complicated I'm gonna keep it really simple this is what it means if it means your image has a little bit less information that's all 16-bit means your image has more information this means when you edit in 16 bits you're more likely to come up with a slightly cleaner image and by slightly I mean really small differences this is especially useful when you have banding in your sky and if you don't know what banding is let me show you I'm gonna open up this image I've already prepared and if we zoom into this image we can see we have all these lines where the colors are broken up in kind of a negative way and we could often see this in blue skies when we're editing photos the sky will become broken up like this and this is what we call banding and if I just undo this layer that I did before this is what it should be like you see we have this smooth transition between colors and this is banding now we notice that we're editing in 8 bits here so that's sometimes what happens when we edit in 8-bit to avoid that if we edit in 16-bit we usually come up with a much cleaner transition between tones now the truth is most of the time you can edit an 8-bit it really doesn't make a big difference for our type of photography however I edit in 16-bit because my computer has some pretty high specs so it can deal with the extra workload but if you've got a smaller computer or a slower computer there's nothing wrong with editing most of your images in 8-bit so all we need to do to change the bit-depth of our images click on it or click on 16 whichever we want but we can decide if we want to open up our images automatically in 8-bit or 6 bit and this applies to raw files so I'm going to show you how to set this up please find one of your RAW files from any image it doesn't really matter and drag it into Photoshop just like I showed you and come back to this video when you've done that so I'm gonna take my raw file let's just take this one that I've got here shot from my Nikon and you'll see when we drag our image into Photoshop or load our image into Photoshop and if it's a raw file will open Adobe Camera Raw and this is exactly the same as Lightroom just without the organizational module now we don't wanna do anything here all we want to do is go down to the bottom which is Adobe RGB 16-bit and you see the other numbers along here too we just want to click on that and here we can set our color space and our bit depth so this is what we were talking about earlier and if you want to work permanently in 16bits then I would choose 16 bits or you can choose 8 bits whatever's right for you the next thing I would suggest is that you change your color space to Adobe RGB this will just give you a richer range of colors to work with than if you edited in the normal default srgb mode which stands for standard RGB so I would change those two things and I wouldn't do anything else I just press ok now when you finish with that press open and your image will open and then you can just close it and that should save the settings that you've just used so now we've set up our workspace and we know how to open images I'm going to show you how to save images if we just go to file and save or save as that'll allow us to save our images anywhere we like but if you want to save for the web instead we should go to export and export as and because we chose the Adobe RGB color space that's not optimal for the web so when we choose export as and we choose JPEG it gives us this option to convert to s RGB which is optimal for the web so you can change the size of your image let's say I'm going to go for a thousand pixels wide and then once I'm happy I can just press export all and then we'll have an image ready for the web so all of that's pretty straightforward let's now talk about the tool bar on the left here we have all these different options and these are the different tools available to us in Photoshop now when we have an image like this we can't really edit it until we unlock this layer so if you see a lock on your background layer if you're in CC you just press it once if you're using cs6 you have to double click so I'm going to press it once and then we've unlocked the layer now we can edit this layer so let's look at these toolbars if you see a little arrow at the corner of your tool then that means you can right-click and you have multiple options so if you right-click on the rectangular marquee tool you'll see we have an elliptical marquee tool just below it and if we right click on our paintbrush you'll see we have a pencil tool so we have multiple options along the toolbar and let's start with the most useful so this in the top left hand corner is called the move tool if we click on our image we can drag it around and place it in all different areas and that's going to be very useful when it comes to stacking exposures in the art of photography course the next few tools are selection tools so they allow us to make a selection so for example if I choose the rectangular marquee tool I can do this along here and we've made a selection whenever you see these things we call them marching ants and this shows what's selected in our photo so if I right click on that selection and choose layer via copy we know I'm going to make this layer the big image here invisible and you see we've now made a copy of that area and we can move it about if we select the move tool so I'm just going to make the background layer visible again and there you go we can move this anywhere we want with the other tools we have here the lasso tool which gives us free rein to make any selection we like or we can select a polygonal lasso tool which allows us to make points like this straight points and connect them and now if you want to deselect your active selection we can just go to select and deselect or we can press command + D or ctrl + E on a PC and we deselect the selection there below this tool we have the magic wand tool and the magic wand tool basically makes a selection for us so if we just click on the image the magic wand has made a selection based on what we clicked on and an even better tool than that if you right click on the magic wand tool you'll come up with a quick selection tool and here we can make a selection by drawing along the object you want to select on our image and you'll see the quick select tool does a pretty good job of making the selection so we're just selecting this mountain along here and when we have a selection we can always add an adjustment and we're going to talk more about adjustment layers in the next video but let me just open up let's say a levels layer this is a contrast adjustment layer and you can see we can make adjustments to that selection it's only affecting the selection that we made now with all of the selections you have the ability to change some of the settings so you'll see above here we have some options and when we change the tool that we're working with those options change so let's say we've got the lasso tool for example if we set a feather feather basically means how soft we want our edges to be so let's say we go for a higher feather and by the way when we have options like this we don't have to click on the number a manually input the number we want we can just click on the word and this was called scrubby slider and we can move it left or right so let's say we want to really large feather of I don't know let's say 80 then if we make the selection it makes a selection here and if I right click just as we did before and do layer via copy and then I make the background layer invisible you can see we have some really soft edging now around that selection whereas before we had a square selection or a rectangle selection and that had solid edges so on all of the tools not just the selection tools we have the ability to refine the tool and give ourselves greater flexibility with how we use the tools I should say around about now that your tools might be in a different order to mine and if that is the case it's ok you can just look for the ones that look slightly similar and your tools might look a little bit different because when I have let's say the magic 1 tool selected that's the thing that we can see on the tool bar and if I right click and use the quick selection tool that's what I can see so yours might not look identical to this so you might need to take a moment or two just to locate the exact tool that I'm working with but don't worry you can always pause the video and then come back to it the next tool the crop tool I'm sure you already know how to use the crop tool all we need to do is select the tool click on the image and then we can bring in the crop tool and just decide how we want to crop the image appear we have delete cropped pixels and that means if we crop the image and press ok then whatever's outside of this image will be permanently deleted but if you don't want that because maybe you want to go back and make changes and you don't want to lose this information and keep this unchecked and using the crop tool is actually how we often straighten our images in Photoshop and I think it's very similar to the one in Lightroom all we do is choose this straighten function here and we choose somewhere on the horizon that we want is our straight edge now we don't actually have an arising here but I'm gonna make it a little bit crazy just to show you how Photoshop straightens or in this case doesn't straighten the image so there you go Photoshop is straightened itself according to the line that I just drew and if you want to keep the changes you can press the tick button or if you can cancel by pressing the cancel button or you can undo your changes by pressing this button here now I'm gonna continue down and just talk about some of the more important tools that we use as landscape cityscape photographers so here's another one which is the eyedropper tool and this lets us choose any color in our image and set it as our foreground color now this is our foreground color here and this is our background color here and we'll look more at that later but our foreground color here is blue now if I click on this mountain you'll see it changes to a slight pink because the mountains pink or if I click on the moon it'll turn white because the moon's white and this can be extremely useful when you want to pinpoint particular colors especially when we dodge and burn colors now the next three options are designed to help us clean our image so if we had some sensor dirt or some problems in the scene that we need to clean up then these will help us do that so on our image let's say we want to get rid of the moon we can choose this tool which is called the patch tool and all we do is draw around the area that we want to get rid of then we have this selection here and we can drag it right or left and replace it with a different part of the sky and Photoshop does its best to equalize the color so it looks like a natural transition but in this case it didn't do a great job because you can see some lines around the moon so I'm just gonna undo all of this so to undo something we go to edit step backward and we can do that a few times and this will undo our changes that we made and there's the moon next we have the Healing Brush tool so if we select that here we're going to clone an area and swap it with another area so I want to change the size of this brush this is kind of like a brush here and this little circle around it represents how large it is so I can go to this option here and increase the size of that brush to 267 now I need to clone an area let's say to the right and replace this area here with that cloned area to clone all I do is hold down alt on a PC or option on a Mac and then left-click on the area I want to clone it with and when I do that I can now take it over to the moon and just paint in that area and you see Photoshop is replace the moon with this area and it's trying its best again to adjust the brightness and colors so it looks like a natural blend but it doesn't look very natural here again because it's kind of a difficult thing to remove I'm gonna undo all this again and this time go down here to the clone stamp you might see the pattern stamp but we're gonna go to the clone stamp tool and the clone stamp literally replaces one area with another so again I'm gonna change the size of this brush let's say with 220 and it's not quite as useful for cleaning up images as the other tools because it doesn't try to automatically change the brightness of the area we're cloning watch what happens it just does a literal clone so I'm going to press alt or option on a Mac and left-click on the area I want to clone and then I'm gonna clone over the moon now this is actually done quite a good job because the sky is quite consistent in terms of brightness but if I clone let's say somewhere down here and then try to glow in the moon you see it clones at exactly the same brightness in color and everything so it looks quite unnatural I would say I use the clone stamp more than any other stamp and that's because we can use a non-destructive blank layer to do that and we're going to get into what non-destructive means in Photoshop in the next video but for now just keep in mind that the clone stamp gives us more flexibility and more options to work with when we're removing things in our image or when we're duplicating areas next let's go to the brush tool now the paint brush tool you might see the pencil tool the temperature is probably the most used tool in Photoshop for landscape photographers cityscape photographers in fact it's probably used with every single user of Photoshop it's probably the most used tool and that's because of something called masking and I'm gonna get more into masking in the next video because it's slightly more advanced but still a very basic concept but essentially a paintbrush tool is exactly that it's a brush and we can just paint on our image and whatever our foreground color is that's what we'll paint so if you want to change our foreground color we can just click on this white bit here where our foreground is and we can choose any color and if you want to change the range of colors we can just slide this up here and then select anywhere in this palette and press ok so here I am just painting in on the photo now I can change my brush size up here to a smaller brush size or a larger brush size and hardness so when we paint you see we have some soft edges just like the feathering when we made the selection earlier well hardness makes us have hard edges so if we go for a hardness of a hundred percent you see we have a harsh edge now in terms of our style of editing I almost exclusively use a hardness of north percent so we wanted to be a really smooth soft transition between areas just like this here now flow flow is where let's say we put it there 50 percent this is where we paint on an area like this you see it's quite subtle it's not as full as this area and then we pin it again we are strengthening the effect here but I'm just going to undo all of this if we change flow to a hundred percent and paint you see we have that thick paint along here just like that and for example when we bring that back down there around 50% again what happens is if we paint over what we've just done you see we're painting over it and we're thickening and strengthening the effect but if we go to something like opacity so let's bring our flow up to 100% and for landscape and cityscape photography I always use a 100 percent flow but let me show you what the difference between opacity and flow is well if I bring opacity down to 50% you'll see again we still have some of that background in there it's not like a thick block of color and if we paint over it without taking our left finger off the mouse so it's just one smooth movement it doesn't thicken it doesn't get stronger but if we go to flow and we change flow to let's say 50% watch what happens I'm keeping my left mouse button on and you see each time it's getting thicker and thicker all the time so the difference between flow and opacity is that opacity basically just lowers the visibility of the paintbrush so at 50% that's what we'll see and at a hundred percent we'll paint the full amount on our image but with flow at a hundred percent watch if we go over it nothing really happens we can go over a few times and it's still the full thickness of the paint but if we reduce flow down to 50% we can still see the background it's not completely red but if we go over the same area over and over again we eventually see nothing but the paint so again I always put flow at a hundred percent especially for luminosity masking this helps to avoid halos and edging now if you want to zoom into an area on your image we can use this magnifying tool and we can just click on the image and drag right which zooms in or drag left to zoom out alternatively we can zoom into a hundred percent like that or we can press fit screen just get it back to normal if you want shortcuts for that if you hold down ctrl + 1 or command + 1 you zoom in a hundred percent if you hold down ctrl + 0 or command + 0 on a Mac you fit screen and finally I'm just going to show you one more thing here we have the Paint Bucket tool you might see the gradient tool but this is the Paint Bucket tool here and essentially with a Paint Bucket tool let me just create a brand new layer and we create new layers with this little icon here and you'll see it's an empty layer it's a blank layer and now watch what happens if I use the paintbrush tool we painted all red the same color we were painting in before because that's our foreground color and this can come in useful for general photo editing once you're a bit more advanced in Photoshop so I'm going to delete this layer now to delete a layer we can right-click on the layer and choose delete layer or we can have the layer selected and just press the trashcan or we can drag the layer down to the trash can now let's have a look at our workspace a little bit more you'll see on my workspace I have these measurements along here and down aside as well now watch what happens when I click on this area and then drag right I pull out a ruler so I can see if I have any straight lines or crooked lines in my image and it's always better to use the Move tool when working with rulers because then you can just select the ruler and when you want to get rid of it you can just drag it off the image now if you don't see the rulers all you need to do is go to view and then rulers and if I click that you see my rulers disappear but if we press it again you'll make the rulers active and I like to keep these on here because I want to make sure my horizons straight or if I have any other buildings that I don't want to be crooked there I bring this along and just use it and measure the straightness of that object now I'm just going to open up another image in Photoshop and I can drag it again if I want let's say open up this image and bring it over Photoshop now I can drag it right on top of this image and that means this photo will open up on top of that one and on the right hand side you see we have two layers now now I'm going to delete that because I want to open that photo instead in a different window and we can do that by just dragging and dropping the image in this gap here above the photo into the right of the photos name and when we do that it opens up in a separate window so this is what we have along here these are our windows this is our nighttime image and this is our library image and to close the window we simply press this X icon now I want to talk to you a little bit about the logic of Photoshop and essentially Photoshop is made so that we can create what's known as a non-destructive workflow and that means we can make as many changes as we want and we can still go back at any point down the line and undo those changes so let's say we're editing a photo and we realize that we've made a mistake maybe ten steps before maybe we've added too much color to an area or we've sharpened an area too much well instead of undoing everything that we've done all we can do is just go down to a particular layer just make some little changes to that layer and that'll affect the whole image so it's called non-destructive because essentially we can make changes that don't ruin the entire image and we don't have to more or less start from scratch every time we want to make a change so when people talk about layers we have what's known here as a layers panel and this is where all of our layers live now don't you don't have to worry about this but I'm gonna create some adjustment layers and you'll see we're creating these layers here and this is our background layer this thing down here this is our bottom layer now layers are kind of like the layers of a cake whatever's at the bottom you usually don't see and whatever's on top you do so let's again open up that image like we did before and press ok and you can see that this library image is on top of our moonlit image and so because of that that's what we see that's the main image on our screen so whatever's on top affects the things below it now let me give you another example of that I'm going to open up let's say I'm going to click on this top layer and press hue/saturation the reason why I clicked on this layer is because I wanted this hue/saturation layer to be on the top if I click on let's say a curves layer and you don't need to worry about any of these layers now and then create a hue/saturation layer you'll see that has opened up just above the curves layer so whatever we've selected whatever layer that we're on that's whatever new layer we're creating will be above so I'm going to press the vibrance layer and just create a hue/saturation layer so this is at the top of the layer and when I bring down the saturation you see where desaturating this exposure but watch what happens if I drag this hue/saturation layer below the library layer so now it's below it you see it isn't desaturating the library layer anymore it's not affecting it it's only affecting the layers below now you see these eye icons these make layers visible or invisible so if I press this eye icon next to the library image watch what happens the library image becomes invisible and now if I press this eye icon on my hue/saturation layer you can see the effect the hue/saturation layer is having on the moonlit image so this eye toggles whether or not something is affecting the whole image whether or not it's visible and to get even more control over our workflow if you want to close any of these dialogs that pop up we can just press this arrow button and now when you've selected a layer you can go up to what's known as opacity and that's just the same as the brush opacity for example we're basically making this layer partially visible so when we press the eye button we're giving the layer 0 hastily and that's what happens when we have zero opacity the hue/saturation layer is invisible now and it's not affecting the image below but if we bring the opacity up let's say 20% 25% we've now reduced some of that saturation we have basically 25 or 26 percent in this case effect from this layer and now if we bring it up to 50% you see we're getting a stronger effect and again if we go up to 100% we now completely desaturate the layer because we're making this hue saturation layer completely visible this setup by photoshop having these layers here and being able to change the order of the layer the opacity of the layer the visibility of the layer gives us huge control of raw post-processing and combined with masks which we'll look at later we can essentially make a huge workflow a massive photography workflow and go back to any point in that workflow and make fine changes and that's why or one of the reasons why Photoshop is more superior to Lightroom Lightroom is non-destructive if we move a slider along we can of course go back at any time and move that slider back but in Photoshop when we combine it with the selection tools and masking we give ourselves so much more control over our photos so that's it for part 1 in this beginners tutorial there's a lot to take and especially if you're brand new to photoshop so please feel free to watch this a couple of times and experiment with your images in Photoshop and in the next video we're going to take things a little bit further and a bit more advanced but it's still very easy to understand don't feel apprehensive feel relaxed and I promise it'll come to you with a little bit of practice

Channel: Jimmy McIntyre

Views: 7,042

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, photography tutorial, beginners photoshop, photoshop secrets, beginners guide, how to use photoshop, what are layers, what is masking

Id: ePghLMHy1fc

Length: 28min 44sec (1724 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020