Photoshop is visual communication. Photoshop has many automation features and keyboard shortcuts that help you save time on repetitive tasks. Install filters and plugins, new brushes and textures, and other useful extras to Photoshop to continually boost its functionality.
Photoshop is a mainstay for designers, web developers, photographers, graphic artists, and many other creative professionals, as well as hobbyists. The software is used for editing, creating, and retouching images as well as adding special effects. Graphics can be created and then exported to other programs. With Photoshop, perform simple functions, such as erasing a blemish from a photo, or advanced photo editing and creation. The benefit of working digitally is it’s easy to practice your skills.
The Photoshop Tutorial was held for 3 days, and it was such a wonderful and interesting session for all the participants. The course helped participants to understand the basic and essential abode photoshop skills. This course guided them to understand other adobe programs and techniques that can improve their workflow. The course was facilitated by Mr. Tufail Shah, a Freelance Designer, and Marketer. This course-oriented participants about the fundamentals of Photoshop, Masking Techniques, covers shortcut keys and techniques, adobe programs such as Adobe Bridge and Lightroom work, and helped them to save the document itself before the crash. Mr. Shah made the session more interactive and interesting by engaging participants to make their project along with the basics of Photoshop skills.
Figure: The Photoshop Tutorial session being delivered by Mr. Tufail Shah, Freelance Designer & Manager
The session started with a general introduction of the speaker and all the participants were asked to introduce themselves one by one. They were asked to share why they wanted to learn Photoshop. The basics of Photoshop started explaining the shortcuts in Photoshop and different elements used for editing photos and videos.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is one of the most popular and well-known photos- and graphics-editing software applications around. Adobe Photoshop is a critical tool for designers, web developers, graphic artists, photographers, and creative professionals. It is widely used for image editing, retouching, creating image compositions, website mockups, and adding effects. Digital or scanned images can be edited for use online or in print.
Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge is essentially a software that organizes your files. It’s a fantastic way to scan and manage files across different programs. Adobe Bridge is fantastic for viewing photo thumbnails, metadata, and keywords. Mr. shah addressed some specific keywords.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
Lightroom has its own organizational features and it shines in its editing options. Lightroom was designed for photographers who want to organize and lightly manipulate their photo collection.
Some of the specific keywords
Ctrl+ A to select all
Ctrl + C to copy
Ctrl + O to open file
Ctrl + N to create a new file
Ctrl + A to select the whole image
Ctrl + T to make size equally
Ctrl + K to change color
The Layer Tool
A layer can be used for an image, text, brush strokes, background colors, patterns, and filters.
The Color & Swatches Tool
The Color and Swatches tool lets you use, modify, copy, and save custom colors for your content. While this may seem like a pretty self-explanatory element, it has powerful features that will keep your visual content vibrant and unify your color schemes.
Custom Fonts & The Text Tool
The Text tool lets you add custom fonts to your database, and it gives you access to advanced font settings that give your text some serious style.
Custom Brushes & The Brush Tool
Just as with fonts, you can add your own, royalty-free, custom brush tips. With the brush settings, you can change the size, shape, and transparency of your brush strokes to achieve several different visual effects. Brushes are a great way to add some visual accents to your content. Photoshop starts you off with a nice selection of brush tips that you can use to clean up your graphics and create some basic visual effects.
The Select Tool
When used correctly, this tool will let you select individual elements, entire graphics, and determines what is copied, cut, and pasted into your graphics.
The Move Tool
This is a fairly basic tool that allows you to move individual elements of your graphic. The Move tool works on individual layers and the graphic as a whole. It comes in handy when you’re trying to reposition images, text, and other design elements.
To scale, rotate, move, and flip things
The Free Transform tool lets you scale, rotate, move, and flip any element in your select layer or layers. Use the shortcut CTRL + T or Command + T (for Macs) to initiate Free Transform, and check out the options that pop up at the top of your screen. Hold the SHIFT key while transforming to maintain the proportions of your elements.
The Fill Tool
The Fill tool, formerly the Paint Bucket tool, fills any solid area with the color of your choice. It’s great for solid backgrounds or coloring large areas. It can also be used to apply patterns to your images. The Gradient tool within the Fill tool lets you create a nice, faded background effect of the color of your choice.
To apply patterns to your images
These patterns can be manually created if you have the time and patience, or you can find a variety of royalty-free patterns available for download through a basic Google search.
To use the Gradient tool
To apply a gradient, first select the layer you’d like to fill with a pattern. Then, from the top menu bar, choose Layer > New Fill Layer > Gradient. From there, a “New Layer” window will pop up and prompt you to name the new color fill layer. Don’t worry about choosing the color you want right then and there — simply name the layer and press “OK.”
To use Blending Options
First, select the layer you want to apply your blending options and effects to. Then, open up your blending options and choose the one you’d like to apply. With the variety of options available, you can achieve several great effects to finalize your graphics. Have fun with these and experiment on different layers, images, and texts.
Masking
Mr. Shah said photoshop is good at masking. Masking is used in different techniques with and without selection. There are two primary types of masks: clipping masks and layer masks. These two tools are closely related in concept but very different in application. A layer mask is something that you apply to a given layer to control the transparency of that layer. Where layer opacity controls the transparency of the entire layer at once, a mask gives you more precise controls over very specific areas. Clipping masks are very similar to layer masks only they use one layer to determine the transparency of another. In this scenario, you stack two layers on top of each other with the bottom being the determining factor of the transparency of the top.
Mr. Shah added at the end of the session that the use of shortcut keys is very effective to make things easier.