Let's learn Photoshop in about 15 minutes My name is Phil Bonnar from video school online.com.
And in this tutorial I want to teach you the basics of Photoshop how to get started it would take many
hours to learn all of the cool things you can do with Photoshop and maybe even many years to perfect
those things.
But you can get it started right now.
So in this tutorial we're going to cover things like getting started opening starting a new project
adding layers adjusting the size of your different layers like photos adding text shapes.
Doing some basic adjustments and saving so that you can make your own basic graphics or photo edits.
So the first thing we need to do is open up Photoshop so I'm using Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud.
20:17 version.
The new creative cloud version sometimes has updates when they do their own updates.
There's new maybe new tweaks or tools or things that they improve.
But no matter what version you're using even if you're using a noncreative cloud version like CSI 6
or CSI 5 you should be able to do most of the things here.
I'm also on a Mac.
So some of the things that I do here will be a different keyboard shortcut on a PC but I'll try to explain
that while I go.
I'm also going to be including the keyboard shortcuts on the bottom of the screen so you can follow
along.
When you open up Photoshop for the first time you might get a window like this that pops up for creating
a new document or it might show projects that you've already opened up in the past.
If you don't see this window you can just go up to the file new button or command an on a Mac or control
end on a PC.
This gives you lots of different options for starting your project TARC starting your sort of graphic
and you can choose the basic size.
There are some basics presets that they have some templates under these different tabs or if you've
created different templates in the past or use different sizes in the past they'll show up here under
the recent on the right you can customize it though.
So say we want to create a perfectly square image then we would set the width and the height to wall
whatever we want but we'll just do 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels pixels is the dimensions that we use mostly
in terms of digital graphics.
You can change this to things like inches or centimeters or other types of measurement below you have
resolution 150 is a pretty solid standard for web graphics even for printing.
This is basically the quality of the resolution.
So I would just leave that 150 color mode.
We're going to leave the RSGB color 8 bit is fine.
Sometimes in different scenarios you're going to be asked to create a graphic in different settings
and this is where you set them and then you can change the title up here so I'm just going to call this
test and then choose create.
Once you do that you have this blank canvas pop up on your screen and you see here that we have this
tab at the top of Photoshop that says test.
This is our project that we're working on.
Let's just do a really quick run around for where things are in Photoshop.
You have your top menu up here.
This is where you can get to a lot of different settings and even some filters and an adjustment layers
and things like that on the left.
We have a different tool panel with all of our different tools.
We're going to be going over how to use some of these in just a minute.
Over on the right hand side we have more panels and you have different buttons and tabs and these are
things that we're going to be able to click and pop open and close them down by shutting them down.
We're going to be going over how to use some of these in this tutorial and by learning how to use some
of them you can basically understand how all of them work.
You can rearrange your workspace you can drag the edge of these things in and out these different panels
and windows you can drag these buttons up and down to rearrange them all stuff that you can do to customize
your workspace as you learn which tools and panels you use most.
So first things first we're going to practice Photoshop by adding a photo to this graphic say we're
creating something for Instagram or Facebook.
We want to add a photo to this graphic.
I'm going to go over to my finder or my documents and if you want you can download these files in this
little tutorial.
I've attached them and I'm going to just place the flowers graphic.
I have two photos that we're using.
One is this trail photo.
One is this flower is one you'll see that the flower is is a JPEG file.
This is a compressed photo file.
The trail is a raw image file and I want to show you how that opens up in Photoshop in just a minute
because it's different when you open up a raw image with flowers or with any graphic that you have it
doesn't have to necessarily just be photos.
We can literally just drag and drop it onto our Photoshop project.
You see that it appears initially you can adjust the size of this you see that it has these adjustments
on the edge the bounding box.
And we can resize it by clicking the corners dragging in and out.
You can see that as I do that it can get squished or stretched.
But if I hold shift down it locks the aspect ratio so that it doesn't get squished or squash and that's
smart.
When you are resizing photos so I can move this around and say I'm happy with where it is.
I press return on my keyboard and that places it.
If you didn't see those control transformation controls you might need to check this box up here.
And that will show or turn on or turn turn off those transformation trolls.
You'll also notice that when we added this photo there's this new flowers layer in our layer panel.
OK.
So this is our layer panel you can think of these as all the different layers we're going to add to
this project.
Text shapes you can add more images that kind of stuff that ends up in the layer panel.
The flowers are above the white background and you can turn on or off any of these layers.
By clicking this eyeball over here quickly let's just zoom out a little bit from our comp our project
or our workspace.
You can do that by typing in a percentage down here in the bottom left right now I'm at 100 percent
that's based off of my screen resolution.
Depending on your screen it might be higher or lower percentage but say up to 80 you can see that it
zooms out.
We also have a tool that allows us to do that over on the toolbar you can choose this magnifying glass
and if I choose that I have this plus mine magnifying glass that allows me to zoom in or I can click
the minus option up here because once you select a tool all those tool options will show up here in
the top bar of Photoshop.
So we have for this tool a plus or minus.
We can also with most tools press the option button to change the version of the tool.
So if I press the option button that's on a Mac for a PC that would be the all button.
You can see that the tool changes from what I had just selected minus two plus.
So if I go too far for example instead of going up here depressed Plus I can press the option key and
then click.
That's just a quick sort of efficiency tip for editing your photos and using Photoshop.
Once I do that I'm still in the plus or minus zoom tool.
I want to go back to this move tool which is the basic move tool that you're going to be using to kind
of move things around.
And I want to make this the full size of this composition so I'm just going to stretch it out holding
Shift and moving it around.
You'll notice that on my photoshop you see these purple lines.
Pop open pop up like that and that those are just guys that kind of helped me understand if this photo
is centered or not.
If you have this plus or this cross of the pink lines it means that it's directly centered.
If you don't see those pink lines popping up to help guide you go to your view menu beneath extras you
see this show option and make sure that smart guides is checked on and you can do that just by checking
that on and also making sure that Extras is checked on as well.
So that's how you move things that's how you reposition things and once you're done whenever you're
done sort of moving or rotating because you can also rotate photos by hovering over the edge and you
see the mouse turns into this sort of two sided arrow with a curve you can rotate things.
This is also a good time to understand how Photoshop works in terms of undoing things because while
you can go back in time in history with Photoshop it's not an easy tool to undo multiple changes that
you saw there that actually rotated this and then to undo that.
I'm going to press command Z and that undo that rotation.
But if I press commands again it actually just reverts back to it kind of redos and goes back to that
rotation that I had set to actually go back in time to a previous step we have a history panel and it's
this little one up here or if you go to window history and you'll see all of the different steps we've
done I've only done a few.
We created a new project.
We placed the smart object which was the photo.
We moved it and then we transformed it.
If I go back to New It goes all the way back to the beginning and I can go back to this free transform
after I've done all my moves and everything.
But you all kind of understand as you go along how undoing different things is sometimes impossible
in Photoshop as you go along.
So we learned about the zoom tool.
So let's quickly go over just some of the other tools.
I'm going to let you play around with these That's the best way to learn.
But some of the coolest ones are the selection tool or the quick selection tool and you can see if I
click and hold some of these tools have different options underneath.
So you click and hold and then you see all of the options pop out open.
So I'm going to like the quick selection tool and this is a great way to select just a part of an image
you see here that if I click it's not going to let me because it says that I need a layer selected.
And that's because over my layer panel I don't have any layer selected I first need to make sure that
I'm selecting the flowers layer and that's highlighted before I start making a selection.
Say I just want to like this flower up here.
Let me just zoom in to 100 percent so you can see I can just click over and you can see that it starts
to make a selection.
So let me just.
I'm just clicking and dragging holding the drag button down and so I made a selection of this flower
with this tool.
There is a cool refine option selecting the mask.
So if I click that you can see what is being selected.
You could make all kinds of adjustments here.
You can feather the edge you can use a smart radius for having Photoshop kind of detect the edge on
its own.
And if I click OK that selection is still made.
Now what can we do with that selection.
We can copy it for example so let me go back to my move tool and to copy.
I'm just going to press command see on a Mac that's Control-C on a PC and then command V and control
V.
You see that there's a new layer in the lower panel of that new copied version.
And if I move it you can see that I've created another bunch of flowers.
Pretty cool right.
If I put this underneath the flowers layer it disappears.
So that kind of again helps you understand the layer panel a little bit more to delete this layer.
I'm just going to select it and then just press the lead on my keyboard or this little trash can icon
down here in the bottom right it ask me if I wanted to delete the letter I'm going to say yes.
So that's one tool.
Let me just show you a couple of other tools some of these tools adjust the actual images some actually
create new layers so this dodge and burn tool this actually with my flowers letters selected.
If I click on it it's going to say that your smart object needs to be raster size before proceeding.
This gets a little bit tricky.
Just know that when you raster rise an object it actually means that when you're making edits to it
those edits are permanent.
OK so I'm going to click OK just to show you and when I have this dodge and burn tool my brush sizes
really big up here in the top left.
You can change the size of the brush and is for many tools they appear as brushes.
And so if I paint over this it's very subtle but you can see that it's actually brightening and that's
because my exposure is set at 54.
I'm going to undo that.
Let me set my exposure to 100 I'm also going to change the range to highlights.
And now if I paint on you can see that it's really affecting a different part of the image making a
lot brighter the shape tool and the text tool are two tools that I use a lot if I hold over the shape
tool.
You see all the different options we have elipse lines rounded rectangle.
Let's just use the rectangle tool.
When I select that I have my options appear to affect the shape the fill color is white so that's going
to be a white shape if I want to change that.
I can just select one of these colors or click this little color picker I can choose a specific color
up here.
I can click on my image anywhere to find a specific color then click OK.
You have your stroke option which is set off right now.
And if I just drag.
Now we have this new shape.
You see that also when I did that this shape appears in the layer panel above flowers.
We also have this properties panel that popped open and that has sort of the similar effects as up here
with a couple more if we want to round our corners we can do that by changing the corner roundness.
You can change the position the shape the color on here too to close any of these panels that pop open.
You can just click that button to close it or just click this little arrow button to close it as well.
Now I can go back to my move tool move this around say we want to add a title at the top of this we
can do that.
I'm going to just put this up in the center.
Now I'm going to take my text textual with the text tool selected you have your font choices you have
your font size similar to really any sort of text editor if you click the a character panel or the P
paragraph panel.
Actually that's not a P but kind of a backwards p.
You get all of your text options to create text though.
I can just I need to just click in my project and then start typing flowers and case.
So when you're happy with that to move it and to resize it I can go back to my move tool I can move
it around.
I can resize it again holding Shift down to lock its aspect ratio and there you have it.
Once I'm done moving it around again I have to press return on my keyboard to actually lock it in place.
Let's just go over one quick sort of adjustment option.
So if I select this flower and I want to make an overall adjustment maybe I want to make it black and
white.
There's lots of different ways that we can do that.
One way is by adding an adjustment layer.
If I click this little button down in the bottom right that brings up all kinds of different adjustment
layers.
And so if I click one of these let's say human saturation.
What happens is this little adjustment layer pops up above the flowers layer that I had selected and
then this property panel popped open and I can adjust the properties.
So if I want to drop the saturation make it black and white I can do that.
The one to boost the saturation I can do that as well.
So that affects everything beneath it.
So if I put this above the rectangle it's going to also affect the rectangle.
Got it and this is a smart way of adjusting your photos because there's other ways to adjust this photo.
Instead of adding those hue saturation layer adjustment which I turned off just by checking the eyeball
over there if I selected this layer went up to image and then adjustments and then added a hue saturation
adjustment and say we dropped it to black and white and clicked OK.
Well now that is locked and we can't do anything to that photo.
We can't really undo it.
While I can't undo it right now because I have one step backwards going back to that it being a colored
version.
But let me just show you really quickly what if I then selected both of these this text and the background
shape layer by selecting the rectangle in the layer panel then pressing pressing shift and selecting
flowers text so I can select two objects and moving it down pressing return to place it.
Now if I want to undo I can and do but say I say all but I want to undo the flowers adjustment the black
and white adjustment.
I can't do it unless I go up to the history panel and go back to this layer order right before the hue
saturation.
But then everything else I did after the hue saturation layer adjustment or image adjustment is it has
to be undo did too.
So I know it gets a little confusing but when you're making adjustments to images it's better to use
the layer adjustments and not just image adjustments.
One other quick thing I want to talk about is your opacity and blend modes.
So the opacity for every layer is basically if it's visible or invisible you can click and drop select
Alair and then click and drag or the left or right to really drop or increase it or you can select a
specific number and actually type it in.
So say we want this text to be 50 percent opacity or opaque along with opacity.
There is what's called a blend mode right now every layer is set to a normal blend mode.
If we dropped down this options right here you can change it to a different type of blend mode.
In each of these has a different type of effect to scroll through these really quickly actually what
you can do is press shift and then the plus or minus keys at the top of your keyboard that they should
be right to the left of the delete key and you can see all kinds of different effects and these are
just cool to know about.
In case you want to come up with a cool style you know this stuff is just something you'll play around
with but I end up using a lot of Blen modes when creating graphics myself.
So I've learned how to open a project we've learned how to place objects into that project resize them.
We've learned about the tool panel not all of the tools but you know how to use them.
Play around with them just click on them and start using them.
If you have questions you can always let me know.
We know that up here with each of these tools we get different properties settings.
We have the panels over here that also give us settings for the different tools or layers that we're
using.
We've learned a little bit more about the layer panel and how that works with adjustment layers What
next.
A couple more things that I want you to understand before letting you go play on your own.
What if I have a photo and I just want to make an edit to that photo without creating a different size
if I want the project to be the exact size of that photo.
What you can do simply is actually just drop the photo into or onto the Photoshop icon.
So if I do that into my application icon what happens is it opens up at the original size.
Now I can go in and you see that it's actually made as the background.
So that's something to know and it's locked.
So to unlock it you just have to click that little lock icon to the right side of the lower panel and
now we can move it around.
But that's how you open up a just a basic photo in Photoshop.
I talked about this being a jpeg compressed photo.
Here is a raw photo.
If I open this up in Photoshop again just by dropping it onto the Photoshop application icon what happens
is camera raw pops open.
Now not everyone will have camera raw but if you have Adobe Creative Cloud and you have camera RAW the
application installed all raw photos should open up like this and this is where you have all kinds of
additional options for making adjustments to this photo.
I'm not going to go through all of them but you have different tabs over here that allow you to do things
like split toning greyscale adding Binet's sharpening changing the exposure with the tone curve.
Over here in the basic panel I can do all kinds of things like increasing the overall exposure increasing
the exposure of just the highlights increasing the exposure of just the shadows that kind of stuff vibrance
clarity all sorts of tools.
I have a full Photoshop class if you're interested that we go step by step over this kind of stuff in
detail but I just want you to understand that if you're opening a Roth photo this is what happens.
And then how do you bring it actually into Photoshop.
Just click open image up here or down here and that will actually open it up in Photoshop as a regular
project.
You see now that I've opened up a few projects that I have them all open in Photoshop like this so this
these tabs show all the projects you're working on say we're done with a project and we want to save
it.
The easiest way to do it is well first you should save a Photoshop version of your project so you can
go back to this Photoshop version and make changes.
So just click Set file and then save.
That's going to open up the project.
I'm just going to call it flower project and you see that the extension is PTSD in this save menu.
You can change it.
You can quickly save a JPEG if you want.
You will have different options depending on what options your computer has.
But right now I'm just going to save it as a photoshop project.
So now if I close this down and then I go back to my finder later on tomorrow and I want to change this
I mean just double click the Photoshop project and it will open up this project and I can go ahead make
changes say I want to save it for online viewing if I want to put this online in a different file format.
I would recommend going to a file and exporting it then go from export to export as this opens up the
export as menu and you have all your different options.
Typically you're going to want to save it as a j peg if you're saving for online.
You can save it as a piano if you want.
It's a little bit higher quality.
You see you're good for your Jif your SPG files.
I'm setting at JPEG the quality I'm going to leave out 100 percent.
But here you also have an option for changing the image size say you saving it for a web site and they
want the size to be 500 by 500 pixels.
All right here in the image size of this expert panel I can set that to 500 pixels and it's automatically
going to change the width and the height to match this way.
I don't have to actually create in brand new Photoshop project at 500 by 500 pixels.
Redo all of this.
I can just sort of scaled down this project here in the export settings.
You don't want to increase the image size because that's going to decrease the actual quality of the
photo because you're expanding it you're blowing it up.
But if you shrink it totally fine.
So once you're happy with your settings just click export it's going ask you where you want to save
it.
Save it as flour project.
It's going to be a jpeg export.
Go back to our Feiner and now we have our flour project at 500 by five pixels.
Perfect for posting on line.
Wow I think I've gone over 15 minutes.
I try to get as much as possible into this little tutorial.
If you have any specific questions about what I taught in this tutorial please let me know.
I'll try to answer your questions.
But know that I have a full Adobe Photoshop CC course that if you're interested in it's very great it's
it's I think is a great class.
Anyways a lot of people think it's a great class you.
It's very project based.
So we're going to go over a ton more of these tools walk through things a little bit more slowly learn
all kinds of cool things you can do with the layer panel more image manipulation photo retouching all
kinds of stuff and you can always find that at video school.
Online.com alright cool while I hope this was very helpful.
Thank you so much for watching and I hope that I helped you out.
Have a great day and enjoy using Photoshop.