Description
Learning Adobe Photoshop can be challenging. Photoshop has so many features, tools, and use cases that it can be difficult to know where to start.
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If you don't have the latest version of Photoshop, you can try it for 7 days through this affiliate link directly from the Adobe website (Creator of Photoshop): https://bit.ly/Photoshop-Free-trial
In this training, we will look at the most essentials when starting to use Photoshop. We will look at creating two files.
A text file using shapes and Text Tool and second, we will be manipulating an image, changing brightness, color, and minor retouching. Through that process, we will cover many of the tools and actions that you will commonly find in Photoshop.
Transcript:
How to Use Photoshop - 2020 Beginner's Guide
Hey everyone. In today's video, I'm going to show you exactly how to use Photoshop if you're just starting out in Photoshop. So if you're brand new, this is the right video for you. And we'll work on a couple of different projects. I'll show you kind of how to start from scratch, but I want to show you how to create something like this, which is a text-based graphic.
And then I want to show you how to work with someone's image here and change things like color. And maybe turn it to black and white, maybe make it brighter, darker. I'll show you some of those here. So you'll have a good idea on how to use Photoshop between two different files. And I make these type of tutorials every single day on this channel.
So if you take some value from this, please give this a like and subscribe for much more. Let's jump right in. So first things first, if you don't have Photoshop, you could actually get it from a company called Adobe and they have a seven-day free trial. So I'll put a link to that free trial in the description below this video.
So you could follow along if you don't have Photoshop already. And then after that, if you decide to keep it, I believe it's about $20 a month. I have this thing called a creative cloud, all apps. Where I have all these other applications and I'll make similar videos on the other ones as well, just like this one.
And if you want to practice, there's this website called pixels.com and you could just look for model photos here, and that's what I've downloaded to show you exactly what to change. So a couple of things you could do with Photoshop, you could create graphics like this. Now I this for YouTube templates, for Instagram, for example, and you could also use it to touch up images and really alter images, make them better, remove blemishes, a whole bunch of things you could do with Photoshop.
So people use it for a lot of different things. So fixing photo is probably the number one. And then using it for creative effects. And graphic design like this is probably the second most fundamental thing. And a lot of people use it to paint with. And really you could see on the side here, there's some things that is going to walk you through.
If you need more information. Alright, let's jump in. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to close these two projects here so we could start from scratch. So when you first opened Photoshop, you're going to see something like this minus all the recent stuff that I have here from using Photoshop. And you want to press create new.
And when you create new, you're going to have a bunch of options to choose from. Now, I'll just show you the most common ones. This size 1920 by 1080 is a video size. That's what you see on your TV for example. This size 1080 by 1080 is what you would see on Instagram or up here. There's bunch of other options.
So if you go on their photo, Just a seven inch by five inch photo right here you could choose from. If you go under web, you could see common web sizes. Again 1920 by 1080. So, those are the different sizes you could choose depending on what you're doing. Now oftentimes I would just do a custom one.
So I'll just go over here right here. It says custom and I'll type in my dimensions because I would know what I'm going to use these for. So for example, if I was making something for YouTube, I will look up. What's the dimension of a YouTube thumbnail, for example, on Google. And I would get these width and height numbers.
So in this case, 1920 by 1080 pixels, I just type those in. Resolution, I usually leave around 300. This is good for just about anything, but you could even do it for print. I usually like my background as transparent, but you could leave it as white. This won't matter all that much and everything else could be the same, RGB color is fine.
And then you could go ahead and name your project here. And once you're ready, you're going to create, and it's going to create this. Again, if you left your background as a different color, it might be white. These little dots basically are a transparent background, but either way, we're not going to worry about it right now.
We'll just go ahead and start creating. First, let me show you quickly just what you're looking at here on the canvas. I'll just show you three very important things that you need to know. First is this tool bar right here and all the tools you have are over here on the left. If you press this little arrow, it's going to extended.
I usually like to look at it this way. Now, if your Photoshop doesn't look like mine, for some reason, if you come to windows, you could go to workspace and make sure you're on essentials or reset essentials workspace. And you'll get exactly this kind of look out of your canvas as well. So we'll come back to tools in a second.
You also have your top menu. So a lot of things are going to be inside these menus that we'll worry about also later. And what I use very often is this layers panel. Now layers are basically a way you could organize a project as you add more things to this blank page here. So I'll talk about layers in a little bit.
Where we actually add a couple more there. So let's go through tools here. Instead of going through all of them though, let me kind of just show you a couple of essentials and then I'll show you as we start creating a project. So you have a move tool. That's the shortcut V. So every time you select a tool here, if you hold down, it's going to show you the shortcut on your keyboard. So I'm on V and then I could actually use that to move things around. I don't have anything to move around now, but that's going to come in very, very handy. And you also have this one here, H and if you press H or you click this right here, you're going to be able to move around when your image is a little bit bigger.
Again, V for this arrow tool for the move tool. And H for the hand tool are going to come in really handy when you're going to move around your image or what you've created right here in the center. So let's go ahead and create what I showed you in the very beginning. And that'll start with creating a shape.
So in order to create a shape, you have a shape tool right here. Go ahead and press that. And you see all these different shapes that you could create. Rectangle is fine. So I'm going to choose rectangle here. Again, also the keyboard shortcut is U. And then every time you select the tool, the side, this bar on top will change.
So right now I'm on the shape tool and it changed. So I could change the color of the rectangle I'm going to make. So I could click this and choose a different color. Let's say, I just want to choose black in this case. I could just do that. There's a bunch of other options. Then if you click this, you'll have a whole bunch of options here you could choose from.
I'll just choose black from this recently used, or you could go through this menu. We won't worry about the rest, but stroke is basically a line around that shape and we'll just leave everything as is just to going here. And if I just come here in the corner of my image and I find just draw and I let go in the other corner, it's going to create that shape for us.
And now look on this side, on the right side here, this layers panel that we haven't talked about yet, it just changed that one layer I had that got created when I started this project. And it replaced it with the rectangle. So now I want to add text on top of this rectangle. I want to say how to use Photoshop, but I need to add another layer.
So I could add text to that layer. This is how you would keep your project organized with that layer structure. So just think of it as stacking Legos on top of each other. So let me go ahead and add a new layer here on top of the rectangle. To add a new layer, on the very bottom of this layers panel, there's this plus icon.
And if you press it, it creates another layer right here. You could also double click on this text and change the name and press enter. This way, you'll keep it more organized. So now you see how this layer is selected in gray. I want to come to layer one because now I want to add something here, which is text.
So let's come back to our tools again. And instead of rectangle this time, we want the T tool, for the type tool. So again, I could press T or select this, and then if I come and I press right here, if I click right here, it's going to start letting me type. And it's just putting some placeholder text. And as always, I could change the setting on top.
So the font size. The style of the fonts right here, all these fonts are available. The font color here. Let's say I wanted to do yellow font. I could just go and select yellow over here. So I just selected the color here and then the intensity of the yellow and I'll press okay. And let's type how to use, enter Photoshop for beginners.
So just like that, I just type my text. And when I'm done, you just have to make sure you press this check mark when you're creating text files, a lot of things that are going to require this check mark, press that. And now let's use our V tool, our move tool here. When I select this V tool, I could place this anywhere I want.
So I'll bring a right in the middle of this page and snapped it to these guides. If your guides are turned on, you can put a right in the center and now you have that text tool. You could always come over here now that you have that layer selected, double click to highlight, and then you could go on top and change the text size.
So I'll make it much bigger, maybe 60 points. And it got kind of crushed on top of each other like this. So if I press this option here, the Character on paragraph panel is going to open a panel for me, where I could change some things like spacing between characters and things like that for texts. I'm not going to go into this, but those are basically your text layouts.
And I created a lot of texts using Photoshop, but we'll get to what people mostly using Photoshop for right after this, which is touching up any images and changing the color and contrast and exposure of images. Now, if I wanted to change the color of individual texts in here, I could double click the T and just select how to use for example, I'm just dragging and selecting it. And I have my color panel right here. So if I select this and make this white and press okay, it just changes a part of it to white, the rest, to the yellow that I used to create them. You could obviously do this for different colors and different words, and I'm going to press check mark again on top.
So that's how you create text and background and shapes using Photoshop. So if you wanted to add another shape layer, you just come through this layers panel, you just add another layer. And as long as this layer is selected, you could come on this side again, and then you could add another shape, for example.
So this time let's do custom shape. And when you choose custom shape, there's bunch of different shapes to choose from as you can see up here. So if I wanted to put a boat right there, I'll just make sure it's a different color than my background. Like if I was to do a green boat, I could come and just drag.
See, I'm just dragging and letting go. And I should have a green. Now instead of creating it new project, what if we have an image from our phone that we've taken or any other way right here. I have one on my desktop. What if I want to bring this image to Photoshop? How do I do that? Well, one of the easiest way is just to right click or control, click on a Mac and open with Photoshop.
If you do that, it's going to go ahead and open it in Photoshop as a different file right here. So this is my first file. Now this is my second one file. And if I open more files, they're just going to add up right here. So over here is how you would jump between couple of different project files, if they're open this way. You could also come back to wherever your image is from.
You could actually drag and drop it on top of wherever it is that you have your project open and drop it. And it's going to put a right on your project that way too. And you could press check mark. I usually like to open it from scratch, but if I was to bring it in an existing project as how you would do that.
And when you open a image like this, a lot of times it's going to have a lock option right here. So I usually just click this to unlock it. So I could do everything to this layer that I would like. The lock option is going to give me a little bit of limitation. And I usually just make sure I unlock it.
Sometimes you have to double click to unlock it, but same results. So now let me show you a couple of different things to do here. One of them is just changing the image, color, brightness, and things like that. So to do that again, I'll make sure this layer is selected here. Also layers have this eyeball here.
If you want to make them visible and invisible, you can just turn them on and off, but let's go over here with this layer selected to image, adjustment. And you'll see bunch of different adjustments here. Brightness, contrast, level, curves, and exposure all have to do with, to some degree, the brightness of the image.
Vibrant, saturation and color, these have to do with the color of the image. So these two different sets come in very handy. Underneath the adjustment, there's also auto. So these just handle things automatically if you don't want to do them manually, but let me show you my favorite one, adjustments, brightness, and contrast, click that.
And right here is just two bars here. If you take this one up, it's going to make your image brighter. And if you take it down, it's going to make it darker. So if you're somewhere with dark image, just brighten it up, just like that. And the contrast look at the contrast. It basically makes the blacks darker or lighter.
That's the contrast of the image. If I was to simply explain it and when you're all done, you could go ahead and press okay. At any time in Photoshop, you could press command Z or control Z if you're on a PC and it takes you one step backwards, just like that, I took it one step backwards. That's also in the edit menu, redo brightness.
I could bring it all back. And if I was to undo it again, undue brightness, command Z, or control Z on a PC. So that's going to come in really handy to go backwards when you make a mistake, or if you want to see something before you changed it, then under image, let's look at color. So again, come under our adjustment.
And one of my favorite options is vibrance. If I click vibrance, I could change how colorful something is without really hurting the way a skin tone looks. So the skin you want that quality of it, that color of it. So I could make it more vibrant and you could see it just does a good job of bringing some of the colors out this way.
Saturation is just going to put a lot of color to an image. So when it comes to someone's face, it's not really the best option. At least not as much as vibrance, but it could come in handy with things like landscapes or products. That's a really good way is saturation, press okay. So that's vibrance and saturation.
And another handy thing is if you come under image adjustment, you could do black and white. So if you just press that, it just turns it into black and white for you automatically with some options here, if you want it to try that. And you have this whole filters menu, if you come to the filter dropdown, you're going to have a whole bunch of options, like blurring things, sharpening things, blurring, basically here, I'll show you blur and just make things more blurry here.
And it's going to come in handy again if you play with layers and maybe you had texted on top of this, that's what you would want the background out of focus. But another handy tool is sharpen. A lot of times, if something is already a little blurry, like an image, you could go ahead and sharpen it.
Again, this image doesn't require that, but that also comes very handy. You also have now under the tool section, the blur tool here. So if you go to the blur tool, you could blur different elements here to soften some of the skin tones here. I have a whole different video on touching skin tone on this channel.
So I'm not going to go much more in-depth in how to do that. What blurring is just a quick option to do that. And that's on the menu here. And one of the most common ways to get around Photoshop is command or control on a PC and plus. That will kind of bring you into the image a little bit more so you could have self finer details here.
So now that I've come in this, let me show you this really useful tool here called a clone stamp tool. If you select it, hold down option or Alt on a PC and select somewhere. And it's gonna take a sample and now you could replace any imperfection that you want on the skin if you want to. In this case, I wouldn't replace these kinds of imperfections, but just like that, that spot right here on her forehead is gone.
So the same thing I could go over here, press option. Hold it. And then you see, it's just replacing that part of her skin with the part I sampled. And that's a great way to quickly retouch skin here. One spot at a time. If you want it to fix it, you see the spots that have blurred. They look a little unnatural.
So that's why I would do a high-end retouching. And that's a whole different tutorial. And to come out of the zoomed-in image, I could press command minus to come out. And you obviously have a whole bunch of other tools here, the burn tool, you have a brush tool here where he could basically paint on things.
I'm not going to have time to go over all of these things. So I'll try to add more resources to the description of this video, if you wanted to learn more about Photoshop, and let's say we're done touching up our image or creating our text file, we could basically now save it, go to file. Save as. And just name your project here.
And you wanted the format to be Photoshop, Photoshop file save as dot PSD on Mac and PC. So I would save the project file first, so I could always come back to it. Then I would go to file, export and export as, and it's going to give me the export window and just to quickly kind of explain this window, it's going to let you change things from their format.
So I usually do JPEG. Or PNG, those are my two favorite ways to send something to someone or to put it on social media or to send it to a client. And then you have your image size. So that's the same size. I either we did the project or in the case of this image, it was already in this size. So that's what it's going to do when I export, but if I wanted to make it smaller, I could go ahead and type in whatever number I want here to make it smaller.
And it's going to give you your file size here. So 4.4 megabytes, that's well within the size of an emailable image and very high resolution, as you could see, we zoomed into it and he looked very good. And that's how you would export it, just like that. And that's your crash course on Photoshop. I know we covered a whole bunch of stuff, but really to learn Photoshop inside and out is probably more like a 10 hour tutorial.
So I'll leave as many resources as I can as I come across it in the description below this video. Test it out for yourself. Practice with different models from Pixels. Create your own text files and have fun with Photoshop. And I'll catch you on the next video. Thanks so much for watching.