Photoshop

[greg sims]

I'm just in the process of getting back in the photographic field. My first hurdle is to get back on track with photoshop. Many years have passed and to put it mildly, I'm way out of touch. Living is a very small community the opportunity to be taught photoshop one on one is impossible. I have seen a variety of tutorial sites on the web but I have no idea if the sites first of all are credible and secondly if I will receive full information as if I was a beginner. Any suggestions?

[jeremypayne]

I'm just in the process of getting back in the photographic field. My first hurdle is to get back on track with photoshop. Many years have passed and to put it mildly, I'm way out of touch. Living is a very small community the opportunity to be taught photoshop one on one is impossible. I have seen a variety of tutorial sites on the web but I have no idea if the sites first of all are credible and secondly if I will receive full information as if I was a beginner. Any suggestions?

Lightroom ... you don't need Photoshop ... Get Lightroom.

[Mark D Segal]

The best, and the best value in tutorials is right here on this website. Buy the Lightroom tutorial and the Camera to Print tutorial. After watching parts of them them, you can make up your mind whether Lightroom would suit ALL of your requirements or you still need Photoshop, and if you follow it all through, you will have the best image preparation instruction available.

[Ed Foster, Jr.]

Jeremy,
Lynda.com is a well recognized source for tutorials for all types of digital offerings and programs, and has quite a few on Photoshop that can help you get back up to speed in a hurry.  They charge $25.00 per month for a subscription, but if all you are interested in in PS, one month should do it for you.  Adobe.com also has some excellent tutorials for free. And, as others have mentioned, this site too is a wealth of information.

BTW - I have no affiliation with Lynda.com.

Happy Learning,
Ed

[BernardLanguillier]

Frankly, the only things you really need to understand in PS for photography to start are:

- Open from Bridge, very easy to do, just go to a folder and double click on an image
- Color space selection, "color profile" in edit menu: just select ProRGB and check all the boxes asking whether you want to be asked what to do in case of inconsistences between files,
- Info palette: just go to window menu and display the info palette in which you can display the RGB value of a pixel or group of pixels
- foreground/background color: at the bottom of the left tool bar, you see 2 little squares overlapped. The one on top shows the current foreground color, and is the only one you need to worry about to start. You can click on it to change the color that will be used to paint with the brush tools (see below)
- History: just go to window menu and display the history palette which provide multiple undo in case you do something wrong

- Layers: just go to window menu and display the layer palette in which you can select which palette is the active one, you can show/no show layers or change their order. Think of old plastic transparencies stacked on top of each other. By default a layer is transparent and contains nothing,
- Resize: this is part of one of those menu a bit towards the left and enables you to change the number of pixels in your images or to change the size of the canvas,
- Brushes and cloning tool: in the left tool bar, enables you to paint or copy a part of an image on top of another (hint, you need to alt click somewhere in an image to select the source of the cloning operation),
- gradient tool: also accessed from left tool bar, is very useful to generate progressive applications of adjusement layers though masks (see below),

- Masks: can be created by clicking on an icon at the bottom of the layers palette (second from left): they make it possible to control what part of a layer impacts the layers below it. You can click on the small mask icon in the layer after having created one, then you can use the brush tool (see below) to paint on the layer,
- Adjustement layers: special layers that provide the ability to do live modification to an image. It is pretty intuitive and is the only good way to do images modifications in PS,
- Sharpening: Filter menu, then you have a few options to sharpen your images, just try.

Easy. 

Cheers,
Bernard

[bill t.]

Bernard, that's excellent!  PS in a Nutshell.  I wanted to reply with something like that, but I was too lazy.

Personally I found that sloshing my way through lengthy text tutorials with step by step examples was just too painful.

Better to start working, then as you run into problems search the solution online.

Or open a PS book to a random page once in a while, and absorb just one little piece of knowledge.

Would add only that it's incredibly important to do as much editing as possible with adjustment layers, because they are completely reversible at any time.  If you make changes directly to the basic image data with things like Image->Adjustments->Levels, you are irreversibly messing with the underlying image data which degrades it forever, if only subtly.  You may get the result you want, but every time you make a direct change your image loses a little bit of quality.  So if you want to slosh through texts, spend your energy learning about adjustment layers.  They are your best Photoshop Friends.