Photoshop Tutorial For Beginners - Top 10 Things Beginners Need to Know

hey guys this is anthony morganti i am mr photographer.com if you've never used photoshop but you're thinking of using it this video is for you because in this video i'm going to go over the top 10 things beginners need to know to use photoshop okay this video is not meant to make you a photoshop expert i'm just going to overview 10 things that you really need to know when you're using photoshop some of these things should prompt you to look up more information on that specific thing now we're going to start out with the most obvious and easiest thing how do you open up images into photoshop well go up to file open and then navigate to wherever the images are on your system and you could open up more than one image at a time so i'm going to click on this first jpeg grain elevator i'm going to hold the shift key and click on that last one so i have four jpegs selected and i'm going to click open and you'll see that all four of those images will open up in photoshop and they'll be in their own tab and any adjustments you do to one image will be independent and unique to that image so you could work on all of them independently all right so you have these images open up in photoshop you really should get familiar familiar with the photoshop workspace the workspace in photoshop is really dynamic and customizable there are a number of default workspaces you could use though to get to those you could go over on the far right hand side and click on this little drop down right there and you can see because i'm a photographer i use the photography workspace but there's a number of default workspaces there there's one called essentials and when you first open photoshop this is the workspace that will be active it's what adobe considers to be essential for most users of photoshop go to the drop down there's a 3d workspace there's a motion workspace there's a painting workspace and you saw my photography workspace and there's a graphics and web workspace as well now actually these workspaces you could use as starting points i mentioned that photoshop is really customizable so i could go to that drop down and pick my photography workspace and i prefer my adjustments tab to be the first tab so i could just drag it right over there down here i prefer that these panels not be so far apart so i push them closer together and that's really the modification i do but you could do a lot more you may see may have seen many photographers like their layers tab to not be docked and they have it floating around so you could do that you could move things around you could go and add things and remove things from any of the default workspaces go up to window and you can see there's a number of different items here for example that adjustments tab let's say i don't want it just click on that remove the check mark and it's gone go back to window add the check mark and it reappears so you go to window and let's say you add a lot of type or text to an image i could go to character and add character so any fonts will be available here right docked right there all the time so i'm customizing the workspace again you could do any of these things once you have a customized workspace if you want you could save it go to that same drop down we used earlier go to new workspace give it a name you'll probably want to check all three check boxes so you're saving all that info in your workspace as well and click save and when you do that your custom workspace will show up in this drop down now if you did like me and you moved things around and added things and you decided that you just don't like it and you want to go back to the default in my case photography workspace click on that drop down go to reset photography and it resets it back to the default now again i'll do my minor adjustments i'll move adjustments tab to the left and i'll push that up and i'm all set now that's part of the workspace this stuff over here on the right but over on the left we have the tool well this is where all of adobe photoshop's tools reside and if you just hover over the tool or a tool you'll get a tool tip and a keyboard shortcut for that tool in the tool tip it'll give you an idea of what that tool actually does and we could hover over each of the tools and see the tool tip also i want you to take note that some of the tools have a tiny little triangle in the lower right hand corner that is indicating that there's actually more than one tool available in that spot i call these tool cubbies so in this case here this selection tool it's a quick selection tool has that little triangle if i click with the left mouse button and hold in the left mouse button i'll see that there's three tools in that little area magic wand tool that quick selection tool and the object selection tool so you could click and use any of those tools so there's actually a lot more tools here than it first appears now whenever you click on a tool you'll notice this area along the top will change that is called the context sensitive option bar those are different options and attributes for each of the tools so you could see let's say if i click the brush tool there's a number of different options for the brush i could click here i could affect the size of the brush with that slider the hardness of the brush i could pick a specific brush i could adjust or change what mode i'm brushing in the opacity and flow of the brush and so on many times i found that photographers were watching a youtuber demonstrate demonstrating how to do something in photoshop and they weren't able to duplicate what that youtuber was doing and most often that is because their settings for the specific tool they're using differs from the youtubers so these settings are very important so you should be very aware of them so that is in general the workspace of photoshop now once you have images in photoshop and you're familiar with the workspace you're probably looking around and you're saying well it doesn't really work like lightroom or on one photo or luminar or any one of a dozen applications that are non-destructive raw editors photoshop is different photoshop doesn't have on its surface like highlights shadows whites blacks contrast they're there but they're not like in this workspace as you would see it there's a companion application that comes with photoshop called camera raw many times you'll hear us photographers call it adobe camera raw camera raw really is the develop module of lightroom and it's integrated into photoshop and to get to it you would go up to filter then down to camera raw filter and when you do that you'll see an independent window opens up that's the camera raw window and you'll see that it looks somewhat like lightroom over on the right hand side it has the basic tab with all the controls that are in the basic tab of lightroom has curve that's the tone curve it's identical to the curve or tone curve in lightroom detail tab and it has sharpening and noise reduction and one thing i want to make note see these little triangles here by default those will be closed those are called expose triangles and you'll see sharpening if i click on that little triangle and roll it open you'll see radius detail masking all those sliders that are in lightroom are here so you could just wherever you see those little triangles click on them and you'll find more controls and so on so we have all those different tabs that are in lightroom here in camera raw also you have the tools as well you have the spot healing brush or spot removal tool you have the adjustment brush tool you have the graduated filter the radial filter the red eye removal tool also you have presets any presets you installed in lightroom will automatically show up in adobe camera raw adobe camera raw and lightroom use the same process engine so anything you edit in one will be recognized in the other and all this is here in camera raw and again you get two camera raw through that filter menu at the top of photoshop if you open a raw file directly up in photoshop now i open for jpegs but let's say i open a raw file we'll go up to file open and i have a sony raw file in that same folder of jpegs if i open that the raw file will open up directly into camera raw so you could come in here and do non-destructive editing to the file so you come in and just edit it to your little heart's content as you see fit now it's non-destructive what you could do is you could click done and when you do that what it will do is it will save a sidecar file in the same folder as the raw file and that sidecar file can be read by photoshop and by a lightroom and by really any adobe application that you might need an image in it could read that sidecar file and those edits will be carried over into the other application as well so it's non-destructive it never writes to the raw file but if you'd like to open the image up into photoshop and do some edits in photoshop as well instead of clicking done you would click open and then it will take your edited images those edits we just did in camera raw apply them to or have them at least show on the image when we're in photoshop so that's how you could get those lightroom type edits using photoshop that is with camera raw now one thing that photoshop really excels at one of many things is to it's its ability to remove imperfections there's a number of different tools in photoshop that allow you to do this we're gonna go over three of them very quickly first of all if we over look over at the tool well you'll see that there's these band-aids here and there's this little patch tool those are the three i'm talking about now on your photoshop those might be together in their own little cubby so be aware of that but i'm going to click on that that first one the spot healing brush with the spot healing brush you have a brush and you can see that the tool controls are along the top here and we could change different attributes i'm just going to stay with those default attributes you could quickly change the size of a brush any brush this doesn't just apply to the spot healing brush with the bracket keys the right bracket key makes it larger left bracket key smaller and then all you would do is if you have something you want to remove just click on it and paint on it and you'll remove it so you can come in here get a smaller brush and come in you could just click once if you prefer let's say on a blackhead or something like that or if you need to paint to remove like a strand of hair you could do that as well so you could just keep keep clicking you can see how quick and easy that is you could go very very quickly now the tool below that is instead of the spot healing brush it's just called the healing brush in a way it looks identical but it operates slightly differently with this tool you have to tell it where to sample from so if i just clicked on the tool and tried to use it i'll get an error it's telling me that i must define the source point to do that hold the alt or option key alt if you have a pc option if you have a mac and the cursor turns into a little bullseye click once so that means we're going to sample right there so i could come in and then paint and you can see how that plus sign shows that means i'm sampling those pixels over there and applying them over here so that sometimes comes in and works a little better than the spot healing brush now the last tool to help you remove imperfections is the patch tool let's go over to this image of the grain elevator the patch tool works great on things that are a little bit larger for example if i zoom in by hitting command plus on my mac it's control plus on a pc to zoom it zoom out you'd hit control or command minus to fit the image to screen hit command or control zero but i'm going to zoom in again i'm hitting command plus a couple times i want to move the image up hold the space bar in the cursor turns into a little hand tool and i can drag it up i want to get rid of this garbage right here so i'm going to get the patch tool and with the patch tool you just draw a circle around the area you want to remove so i'm going to just draw a circle around that piece of garbage now i have a selection that's called and you can see those are called marching ants little kind of blinking lines what i'll do then is i'll just click on this and pull it around to different areas and you can see how it's kind of reflecting whatever is under the cursor in that area i painted what i want to do is try to match up something that kind of fits and looks kind of natural something like that and just let go of the left mouse button when i'm satisfied and there it is now to get rid of those marching adds or that selection hit command or control d and that gets rid of it you can see that that garbage is gone i'll fit this to screen hit command or control zero so those are three tools that help you remove imperfections now another thing a beginner needs to be aware of with photoshop are adjustment layers we use them all the time and in my default photography workspace they're right here under adjustments and like most things in photoshop if you just hover over them you'll get a tooltip telling you what it is create a new brightness contrast adjustment layer create a new levels adjustment layer create create a new curves adjustment layer for example then i'll click on vibrance create a new vibrance adjustment layer you can see we have vibrance and saturation and i could increase saturation decrease saturation in this case i want to decrease saturation a little bit and you'll notice it's an adjustment layer so it's a new layer in the layer stack so we have the background layer and we have the adjustment layer and you could turn them off by clicking on this little eyeball if i click on that it removes that adjustment now it was kind of a subtle adjustment i did let's make it a little more obvious i'll make it black and white so turn that adjustment off turn it back on off on so you get an idea of these layers that are over here that brings us to number six things you must know when you're first starting out using photoshop photoshop in applications like it this includes and affinity photo they utilize layers and you can see we already added an adjustment layer but there's all different types of layers you could use most often you're just putting one image on top of another image and that is a layer for example i have this image here of this woman she's standing in front of a white background i'm going to get the move tool the keyboard shortcut for the move tool is v v is in victory it's right there and what i'll do is i'll just click on the woman and drag her up to the kitchen um tab so this is the image of the kitchen and i'm just going to let go of the left mouse button you can see that she was added to the kitchen now she's way too big right it's covering up the entire layer below it so layers in the in themselves they're not very useful you're just putting one layer on top of the other but it's the way you make those layers interact with one another where the power of photoshop really comes through now one way you could do that is by making a selection like i don't want that white background i just want the lady right so i can make a selection of just her now first of all when i moved it the resolution of the image of the woman was much greater than the resolution of the image of the kitchen so what i want to do now is resize this so to do that i'm just going to hit command or control t on my keyboard all right now it doesn't look like i did anything that's because the actual resize handles are off the screen so i'm going to make this much smaller by hitting command minus a few times now you see those handles so what i'll do is now i'll just grab these handles and resize this uh image so that it better uh fits let's say like that all right so we just have the image like that and then we're going to click this check mark to commit to that transformation and i'm going to hit command 0 to fit it to screen so still though it really doesn't do anything we just have a layer on top of layers so you know that layers are integral in photoshop well the next thing you need to know are selections we need to select the lady so to do that we're going to get one of the many selection tools in photoshop if we go over on the left there's a lot of them we have a rectangular marquee tool we could just like select our hand draw a like a rectangle around it um if i click and long press with the left mouse button we have an elliptical marquee tool we could do that as well do selections that way we have lasso tools where we could try to just freehand draw around an image then in that same cubby we have a polygonal lasso tool magnetic lasso tool again lots of different tools to do selections most often though you're going to use the tools in this cubby the magic wand tool the quick selection tool or the object selection tool now all these tools all those three tools they have their uses where they're most effective and that's part of the learning process of photoshop you learn how to use these tools and when they're most effective and when you would use one over the other now in this case i have probably the easiest situation there is she's standing in front of a white background just clicking on any of these tools in that cubby or hitting the w key for the keyboard shortcut for any of those three tools at the top in the context of context sensitive option bar will give you a shortcut it's called select subject because she's so isolated from the background i could just click on select subject and i have her selected so selections are very important and when you in this video you should look up and try to find videos on different ways of making selections and maybe go in better detail of all these different selection tools i do have two video series on photoshop one is beginning photoshop and the other one is more advanced like intermediate photoshop and i have links to those series in the description below this video and that's where we talk about things like this now we have this simple selection of the woman and this brings us to the next thing that you need to know when you're using photoshop and that is masking the selection doesn't do you much good we need to mask away the areas that aren't selected so to do that we go down over here in the lower right hand side and there's a little mask icon right here just click on it and it masked away the areas we didn't select and now the woman is showing off her new kitchen and that i didn't realize until i was just making this video that's probably the most chauvinistic thing i've ever done on this channel and i apologize profusely because i just realized it now so anyway let's say she was the carpenter and she made that kitchen for a client so that makes it maybe a little better but anyway so there is a way you could do selections and masking to um and layers so that you have the image the way you want it all right another thing you need to know when you're first starting out using photoshop is text you could add text to an image to do that you get the type tool the type tool uses the keyboard shortcut t it's over here in the tool right here and along the top we could see the attributes you could pick the font see there's tons of fonts you could pick whether you want to use or the attribute for that specific font this will vary vary from font to font sometimes you'll have italics you'll have bold and stuff like that in this case for this specific font it only has regular the size of the font and then do you want a sharp crisp smooth you could try different things there do you want it to the left centered or to the right and so on so um we could just like type like click anywhere on the screen and you'll get this lorem ipsum marker lorem ipsum doesn't mean a thing that's just like a placeholder and you could type in like my new kitchen all right we'll click the check mark to commit to that and then we could get the move tool again hit the v key and then we can move it to where we want it and then we could let's say resize it if we want go to the layers and you can see that's a third layer now that is our text layer double click on the t and we'll get the uh we'll get the selection of all those letters and we could come in to the size and we could change the size message to 30 point make it a little smaller we could change the color click on this little swatch let's say we want to uh let's go to let's say fff zero zero zero which is yellow so we'll make it yellow then we'll click the check mark to commit to those changes get the move tool and we can move it somewhere where it's better seen maybe right there so type tool and type text adding text to an image that's something that you should learn if you want to be a user of photoshop all right now we have our image we're done with it and we need to save it there's a couple different ways you could save an image both have their advantages in disadvantage the first is the typical save save as for example if i go up to file and then down to save as you'll see this box pops up and we have a lot of different formats we could save it as that's the advantage of using this method you could save it as a photoshop image and if you do save it as a photoshop image you could preserve the layers so you could come back in and re-edit these layers if you want to if you do it that way um you could do a large document format bnp and so on all these different you also could preserve the layers with a tiff file as well that will allow you to preserve layers or you can just i'll put it as a jpeg if you want the disadvantage of doing it this way is you cannot resize the image many times we don't need to save it as its full resolution so i'll cancel all that maybe you just want to share this on instagram and instagram recommends that the long edge be 1080 pixels long so in that instance you would go up to file and down to export and then over to export as with this option you have the ability to resize the image so i could make the long edge 1080 pixels long so that's a great advantage the disadvantage is you don't have as many formats available to save it as you only have png jpeg gif and svg now in this case we'll do the jpeg then you could you know go through the other things here i'll just leave it at the default click export where do you want to export it and i'm going to call it my new kitchen okay and we'll click it and save all right so i have an image of my new kitchen and this is the carpenter that created the kitchen for me all right so i could share that on instagram as easy as that and it was an image i made by combining two different images using layers and layer masks and i added some text to it so people understand that it is my new kitchen so those are the 10 things that every beginner needs to know right off the bat about photoshop and some of those things you really need to investigate further specifically adjustment layers learn how to use those all the different adjustment layers there's a number of different ones also layers in general you know how you could move one layer on top of another layer and then how you would do selections and masking for those layers again i have a lot of this covered in those two video series that i'll have linked in the description below this video thank you everyone who watches my videos i really do appreciate it talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 38,709

Keywords: Photoshop Tutorial For Beginne, photoshop tutorial, photoshop tutorial for beginners, adobe photoshop tutorial, adobe photoshop basics, photoshop basics, photoshop basics tutorial, photoshop basics tutorial for beginners, adobe photoshop tutorial for beginners, photoshop, photoshop cc tutorial, photoshop tutorial beginner, photoshop tutorials for beginners, photoshop tutorials, how to use photoshop, photoshop cc beginner, new, morganti, anthony morganti, tutorial, adobe photoshop

Id: A8Iad9ZW5r8

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020