Best way to learn how to really use Photoshop?
Discussion
RobDickinson said:
Pixel Pusher said:
If you're really serious about your PS skills, chuck the mouse in the bin and get a graphics tablet & stylus, Wacom Intuos preferably. Think about it. What do you write with? What do you draw with? It aint a mouse.
Honestly I bought one, tried it, just cant get on with it, back to my Razer deathadder.Last time we discussed this it was on this thread below.
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...
Look at the date.
Pixel Pusher said:
Wow 21/22nd Feb 2011! Needless to say things took a slight detour about then.Yes I bought a small one, I can probably force myself to use it (once I find it, in a box somewhere) but I wasnt really getting on with it
And now have a 27" and 22" monitor...
ExPat2B said:
Photoshop...
I am on a bit of a journey these day with Photoshop.. here are some of the things that made a huge difference to me.
First is interface hardware. You need a decent keyboard, and a quality gaming mouse with switchable DPI fast refresh and a quality mouse mat. This makes pixel level control of the mouse and smooth movements possible and easy. It will also add macro support which you can assign to photoshop actions to speed up your workflow. For example, I have one button on the keyboard assigned to a series of photoshop actions that builds out the highlights and shadows tonecurves, builds a saturation map etc. I recommend Razer Deathadder mouse, Sphex mousemat, and Blackwidow keyboard.
Next is the physical hardware - You will want as a minimum a 4 core AMD or i5 intel CPU, a mid tier GPU ( AMD 7770 or NVDIA 650 )
Photoshop is a memory hog, you need 8gb minimum RAM and 16GB highly recommended.
Photoshop should be installed on an SSD. All files that are being processed and lightroom catalog should be sitting on a solid state harddrive. This is 100 times faster than a regular harddrive and makes a huge difference to loading and saving. Photoshop should be configured to use the SSD as its scratch drive.
You need 2 LCD screens. One for the image, and one for all the photoshop tool bars and histograms. They should be decent quality and white balanced and gamma adjusted.
After years of using photoshop on substandard hardware, I really can't tell you how much the above sped up my workflow. Everything happens instantly now.
The next big change is your personal workflow. The biggest speed improvement is hotkeys.
The minimum you should using is the below :
CTRL-J to make a new layer,
CTRL ALT SHIFT E to stamp a new layer from all visible layers
Hold down alt key and right click mouse then move mouse vertically and horizontally to adjust brush size and hardness
CTRL-D to deselect
D to switch to default colours ( useful when airbrushing masks )
B for brush
I for color picker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXHO8x8W3s
Next is the basic Photoshop concepts to master.
Layers, layer masks, channels, clip masks, thresholds and creating layer masks from them, selection, and refining the edge of selections.
Once you have masks and selection mastered, learn the blend modes and when to use them to sharpen blend and enhance images, the frequency separation technique is incredibly useful as it allows you to split the spacial information from the colour information which makes retouching and cloning an image much easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKiSUBWAObA
Channels is next, channel selection and creation is the heart of fast mask creation for highlights and shadows based on luminosity.
http://christopherodonnellphotography.com/exposure...
Next is the adjustments - in my opinion, the curves tool is the one to really master. All other adjustments are really just creating curves. You can do white balance highlights shadows and colours in curves, all with much more control than the other tools.
http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/03/18/photo...
Next is tools, learning the different tools and when to use them is key.
http://phillihp.com/2013/02/12/adobe-photoshop-cs6...
The cloning and dodge tools are worthy of particular attention, learn when to use the different types and when to sample layers and automate texture creation.
Colour theory is next. Understand RBG, CMYK, LAB and HSB and when to use them for sharpening and printing. Understand how to create a pallete for the image and adjust the image to it rather just relying on what came out of the camera. Doing this is important - its one way to put your stamp on the image and create a personal style that means your images are recognisable. Dan Winters is an expert on this.
http://www.danwintersphoto.com/
Lastly is automation. You should be able to create actions for all of the above tasks to speed up your workflow, and then assign them to hotkeys on the keyboard. For example, having an action that creates a luminosity channel for shadows, then creates a new layer with a mask based on that channel with a curves adjustments layer to allow you to instantly selectively brighten, darken, or change the saturation or colour temp of the shadows is incredibly useful, and once setup will save you hours.
Droplets are next. Once you have actions setup for one image in a shoot, you can apply those actions to all images in the shoot. You then can open up each image form the shoot and adjust to taste, however 50% of the work is already done. You can create droplets to save all TIFFs as JPEGS, to crop down to a size, to save and sharpen for web publish. All with much more control and quality than lightroom gives you.
http://kelbyone.com/course/rc_automatingcs6/
Pretty good advice except I would recommend the hardware for photoshop should be Mac not PC.I am on a bit of a journey these day with Photoshop.. here are some of the things that made a huge difference to me.
First is interface hardware. You need a decent keyboard, and a quality gaming mouse with switchable DPI fast refresh and a quality mouse mat. This makes pixel level control of the mouse and smooth movements possible and easy. It will also add macro support which you can assign to photoshop actions to speed up your workflow. For example, I have one button on the keyboard assigned to a series of photoshop actions that builds out the highlights and shadows tonecurves, builds a saturation map etc. I recommend Razer Deathadder mouse, Sphex mousemat, and Blackwidow keyboard.
Next is the physical hardware - You will want as a minimum a 4 core AMD or i5 intel CPU, a mid tier GPU ( AMD 7770 or NVDIA 650 )
Photoshop is a memory hog, you need 8gb minimum RAM and 16GB highly recommended.
Photoshop should be installed on an SSD. All files that are being processed and lightroom catalog should be sitting on a solid state harddrive. This is 100 times faster than a regular harddrive and makes a huge difference to loading and saving. Photoshop should be configured to use the SSD as its scratch drive.
You need 2 LCD screens. One for the image, and one for all the photoshop tool bars and histograms. They should be decent quality and white balanced and gamma adjusted.
After years of using photoshop on substandard hardware, I really can't tell you how much the above sped up my workflow. Everything happens instantly now.
The next big change is your personal workflow. The biggest speed improvement is hotkeys.
The minimum you should using is the below :
CTRL-J to make a new layer,
CTRL ALT SHIFT E to stamp a new layer from all visible layers
Hold down alt key and right click mouse then move mouse vertically and horizontally to adjust brush size and hardness
CTRL-D to deselect
D to switch to default colours ( useful when airbrushing masks )
B for brush
I for color picker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnXHO8x8W3s
Next is the basic Photoshop concepts to master.
Layers, layer masks, channels, clip masks, thresholds and creating layer masks from them, selection, and refining the edge of selections.
Once you have masks and selection mastered, learn the blend modes and when to use them to sharpen blend and enhance images, the frequency separation technique is incredibly useful as it allows you to split the spacial information from the colour information which makes retouching and cloning an image much easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKiSUBWAObA
Channels is next, channel selection and creation is the heart of fast mask creation for highlights and shadows based on luminosity.
http://christopherodonnellphotography.com/exposure...
Next is the adjustments - in my opinion, the curves tool is the one to really master. All other adjustments are really just creating curves. You can do white balance highlights shadows and colours in curves, all with much more control than the other tools.
http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/03/18/photo...
Next is tools, learning the different tools and when to use them is key.
http://phillihp.com/2013/02/12/adobe-photoshop-cs6...
The cloning and dodge tools are worthy of particular attention, learn when to use the different types and when to sample layers and automate texture creation.
Colour theory is next. Understand RBG, CMYK, LAB and HSB and when to use them for sharpening and printing. Understand how to create a pallete for the image and adjust the image to it rather just relying on what came out of the camera. Doing this is important - its one way to put your stamp on the image and create a personal style that means your images are recognisable. Dan Winters is an expert on this.
http://www.danwintersphoto.com/
Lastly is automation. You should be able to create actions for all of the above tasks to speed up your workflow, and then assign them to hotkeys on the keyboard. For example, having an action that creates a luminosity channel for shadows, then creates a new layer with a mask based on that channel with a curves adjustments layer to allow you to instantly selectively brighten, darken, or change the saturation or colour temp of the shadows is incredibly useful, and once setup will save you hours.
Droplets are next. Once you have actions setup for one image in a shoot, you can apply those actions to all images in the shoot. You then can open up each image form the shoot and adjust to taste, however 50% of the work is already done. You can create droplets to save all TIFFs as JPEGS, to crop down to a size, to save and sharpen for web publish. All with much more control and quality than lightroom gives you.
http://kelbyone.com/course/rc_automatingcs6/
If you have the budget then use two monitors, one for the work, the other for the menus, and calibrate them so the colours match the print.
And use a decent sized tablet rather than rely on the mouse.
You don't have to use SSD as the scratch drive for editing photographs, though I wouldn't recommend using an external USB drive if you are editing 1080p videos.
Photoshop has always been know as a memory intensive application, so make sure whichever brand of computer you go for has huge amounts of RAM at its disposal.
rich888 said:
Pretty good advice except I would recommend the hardware for photoshop should be Mac not PC.
What is your justification there?For the last decade photoshop has typically run better on windows than OSX, OSX has had improvements under the hood far slower ( 64bit, multi threading) and in actual use photoshop works in exactly the same way, totaly OS agnostic.
Apple macs (well iMacs) have pretty poor screens in comparison to what you can get for PC too, their LED backlighting kills the colourspace.
You cant easily upgrade your average iMac either, now you cant even add more memory to them. Dreadful consumer orientated things. I have 4 HDD's in my PC and 24gig or ram which I could easily upgrade to 32 or more, and a good AdobeRGB colourspace monitor.
I use photoshop on a PC and with a mouse. I know a lot of guys recommend tablets but despite trying several times I just can't get on with them.
IMO photoshop is difficult enough to learn without also having to learn how to work a new operating system and a new input method at the same time.
IMO photoshop is difficult enough to learn without also having to learn how to work a new operating system and a new input method at the same time.
rich888 said:
Pretty good advice except I would recommend the hardware for photoshop should be Mac not PC.
You don't have to use SSD as the scratch drive for editing photographs, though I wouldn't recommend using an external USB drive if you are editing 1080p videos.
.
I don't think Mac or PC makes any difference - just make sure the hardware meets the specs as already discussed in the thread. My main rig is a hexa core i7 PC, laptop is MacBook pro - both do a fine job.You don't have to use SSD as the scratch drive for editing photographs, though I wouldn't recommend using an external USB drive if you are editing 1080p videos.
.
....and scratch disk should be fast (more so than the app/boot disk) so with a 128gb ssd available for less than £50 it would seem crazy not to
Edited by StuH on Monday 24th November 11:55
RobDickinson said:
rich888 said:
Pretty good advice except I would recommend the hardware for photoshop should be Mac not PC.
What is your justification there?For the last decade photoshop has typically run better on windows than OSX, OSX has had improvements under the hood far slower ( 64bit, multi threading) and in actual use photoshop works in exactly the same way, totaly OS agnostic.
Apple macs (well iMacs) have pretty poor screens in comparison to what you can get for PC too, their LED backlighting kills the colourspace.
You cant easily upgrade your average iMac either, now you cant even add more memory to them. Dreadful consumer orientated things. I have 4 HDD's in my PC and 24gig or ram which I could easily upgrade to 32 or more, and a good AdobeRGB colourspace monitor.
As regards upgrading the RAM, I've checked on the Apple website and though I'm not sure about the 21.5" iMac, it is showing that the 27" iMac has four user-accessible memory slots offering a maximum of 32GB RAM, along with support for DVI, VGA and dual-link DVI monitors.
The more powerful Mac Pro can be upgraded to 64GB RAM if necessary, along with the ability to connect three monitors.
All of these Macs can of course be used with large external drives, whether this be SSD or HDD is up to you.
BTW, the OP was asking for the best way to learn Photoshop so I thought it best that he at least considers the hardware options available to him. Go into a PC store and try out a few of the Windows based computers, then visit an Apple store and try out the hardware they have on offer so that you get a feel for the product that you may well be using for many years to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k8dwi2JvR0
A nice Phlearn Video on colour theory, shows how to pick complementary colours and apply to an image, and demonstrates several other really useful concepts, the application of fill layers, colour selection, blending modes and layer masks.
A nice Phlearn Video on colour theory, shows how to pick complementary colours and apply to an image, and demonstrates several other really useful concepts, the application of fill layers, colour selection, blending modes and layer masks.
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