Photoshop Fundamentals in One Hour

1. Welcome!: Welcome to digital painting studio. My name is hardly Fowler, and I'm excited to share all of the techniques, tricks and best practices that I've learned during my career is a digital artist. Digital art has become the industry standard for all forms of illustration and concept art . While traditional art media will always hold a place in every artist heart, the enormous logistical, practical and efficiency advantages of the digital media make it essential for anyone who aspires to be a professional artist. To put it simply, once you go digital, you can make better art at a higher speed and never worry about making mistake. So if you're new to digital art, I congratulate you on pulling the trigger and deciding to take the first step. If you're a more experienced digital artist or even a professional, you still might benefit from a quick refresher on the basics Before you take on some of the unbelievably cool, advanced courses that we offer. Over the next few lectures, we will learn some of the fundamentals of the wonderful, incomparable Adobe Photo Shop. But before we do that, let's go over some basic equipment requirements. I'm working on my Mac But everything will do here translates perfectly to PC, so no worries there. I'm using a wake on into owes. Three. A pressure sensitive tablet is essential for most of what we'll learn on this site, although there's quite a variety of tablets available. This model has worked very well for me for years, so I strongly recommend this one. But they were free to use whatever you're comfortable with. I'm using Photoshopped CC. All of what we'll learn here, though, goes back to some pretty old versions of photo shop. So don't worry if you have a less up to date version. Interfaces will be visible during all demonstrations, so feel free to pause or rewind. If any software issues are unclear. Now that we have our equipment and software up and running, let's take a look at some basic Photoshopped fundamentals 2. Basic Photoshop Operations: Oh, hi, everyone, This is Hardy. In this lecture, we will explore some of the basic functions of Photoshopped. This is a level one beginner course. If you have never opened this program before, then you are in the right place. Let's start by taking a look at a standard Photoshopped document and learn the lay of the land. The white space in the middle is called the canvas. This is the area where the digital paint is applied. On the left, we can see the toolbar, and we'll go into a lot more detail about each individual tool in later lectures. The windows on the right are customizable, but I like having these particular ones visible. They are the layers window, the history window, the navigator window and finally, the color swatches window. Again, we'll go into detail about the functionality and later lectures. Next will start exploring some basic Photoshopped functions. So first so show you had to open up a new document just like the one I have here. I've got a campus set up here, and I'm just going to show you what I've done. Just go to file new to create a new document this one is set to do about 14 by 13 inches at 300 DP I So let's go ahead and hit OK for that. It's Ah, nearly square, Candace. It's really life. Dimensions, or 14 by 13 inches is a good rule of thumb. Do 300 DP I resolution And whatever real life dimensions you would like it to be as if it were going to print. So this would look good is a spot illustration for a book page any any application where it would need to be printed in that actual dimension. Just set those dimensions and then do 300 d p I. And you should be in good shape. When in doubt, guess Mawr resolution, because it's something that you can't add at the end of a project. So we always want to make sure that we start out a project with enough resolution, and this should be perfectly adequate for most needs. It will have. Of course, if you were doing an illustration that was gonna go on a billboard or some very large format poster illustration, obviously you would need to go higher, but this rule of thumb should hold up if if you keep it at the real world dimensions. And at 300 dp i you should be in good shape a little bit about tools. The tools that will use by far the majority of the time are the brush tool, which I've selected here, the little paintbrush icon. And, uh, you can make that larger or smaller with the bracket keys, a very handy keyboard shortcut, and I should mention that B is the keyboard shortcut to select this tool. So I will hit B and it brings up the brush, and I can make it smaller by hitting the left bracket and larger by hitting the right bracket. Brushes are controlled by opacity and flow, so right now we're at 100% opacity and 100% flow. That gives us a very bold, full, full opacity. And I've got black. Is the selected color here? Ah, fully selected black color. Now, if we dial back, those two have gone to 40% capacity and 40% flow. It will be less opaque and it won't be coming out of the brush is fast. So if you do multiple passes with the brush, you can start building up darker and darker tones. Uh, I'll dial it back further to do 20 and 20 and you can adjust those with the keyboard just by hitting the number keys. And it will change those by a factor of 10. So 10 you hit one 20 you hit 2 30 40 50 and so on. And with flow, it's the same thing. You just hold down the shift key, some holding down shift in hitting five, and now I've got 50% selected. So why don't we do 20 and 20 and but tapping multiple times, doing multiple brushstrokes that you can have a lot of control about? The way you build up tone? Uh, to adjust settings on these brushes, you can hit F five, and it brings up this brush editor menu. And as you can see, Photoshopped comes with tons of shapes to choose from just by default. Thes air. A lot of fun to play around with, especially if you're a beginner. But one thing most professionals agree on is that the brush shape and even the settings are not as important as they might seem to be. As long as you're techniques air solid, you conduce most effects with just about any brush. In fact, the default a round brush is what I do, the vast majority of my work with it. It does the job well. There are tons of settings that we can change here with these jitters and those air fun to play with. I'll touch on them a little bit. Here, Um, let's go back to brush tip shape here. Spacing. If you stretch that way out, it starts reducing the brush to its basic shape. So as you can see, this makes a series of dots. But when we make that spacing tighter, that's what makes it a more continuous line. And obviously, if you go all the way down to 1% it would be a very solid line. Most of the time, about 25% is adequate. In fact, your computer can start to slow down if you're spacing is too tight. But, uh, 25% will give you a nice, nice line quality, for the most part, might go a little tighter than that, actually, Here we go. Uh, another thing you can do is scattering. Move these shapes off of the midline kind of scatter them around that that could be a lot of fun, especially if you stretch out your spacing. You can Sprinkle these shapes all over your page if you like. And there tons of these just to touch on a few more dual brush is a little complicated. I rarely have much use for that, but transfer is fairly useful. Utkan move. The opacity jitter up and the flow jitter, and it randomize is how opaque each of these little dots that is sprayed out is. It can make a nice, random effect if you're trying to use this to create some realistic effect, like snow or rain, something like that. But for the most part, we're just going to stick with a basic brush that's just making a basic brushstroke line that that's basically all you need to know to get 99% of the kind of work that I do done. So that's just a little bit about the brush tool in its settings. Another tool that I use very often is the smudge tool, and I've got that said it are on my keyboard shortcut, but I think different Photoshopped defaults. Um, you may have to reset that when? If you want to use it, it are is that keyboard shortcut. But this basically just grabs the tone that's already there and kind of smudges it out, as the name suggests. And you can adjust the strength and pressure by hitting the numbers on the keyboard and factors of 10 just like with the brush tool. So I've got this set on 90%. As you can see, I'm just sort of pulling through this tone here, and it it makes a really painterly effect. I especially like how it looks with this particular brush shape that I've got here. I will make all these brush tip shapes that I use commonly available to you. This is one of the rare circumstances where I think the brush tip shape can have a meaningful effect. So that's what we used this much tool for. I will move on to our next topic will be the use of layers. You can see. I've got my layer control panel here on the right side. Right now, we've only got one layer the background layer. We go down to this new layer icon and hit that and create It creates a new layer layer one on top of that. And I've got my brush tool selected here, and I'm just going to make a very basic circle shape. Now, what we can do with this is make another layer underneath and just to demonstrate the power of layers, I'm going to make another mark underneath. If this was all on the same layer, all of these marks would be merged together and they could not be controlled independently of one another. But because of layers, since I'm selecting this this layer beneath we can move it around underneath this circle that I've drawn. So in that way we can keep these things edible and adjustable as much as we need. And of course, if if you get to a point where you like everything the way it is, you can merge those together either by going toe layer, flatten image or if you have them all selected here, you can go to layer, merge layers or command E is the keyboard shortcut for that that will bring us to our next topic, which is the history panel. This is extremely useful because one of the main advantages of digital art versus traditional art is that no mistake is undoable. Anything that you do that you don't particularly like, you can go back in time. Essentially. So let's say I didn't really like I didn't really like this mark I made under. All you have to do is go back to that instance whenever that operation is performed, it's recorded in the history panel and you just go back to it just like that. And if you want to erase back, essentially put something back the way it was in an earlier state. All you have to do is check this little box next to it. Let's say I check this one before this blue mark was made on the screen. So now that that's checked, I can select the history brush, which is command a lot. Or just why is a keyboard shortcut? And you can actually use this to sort of paint back in time so it looks like I'm just erasing. But what I'm actually doing is using the history brush to restore this earlier state. So it's a little tough to wrap your head around sometimes, but it's an incredibly powerful tool, especially if you decide that you want to try something kind of risky in your illustration or painting, all you have to do is check the box and then you can essentially try anything you want. Another similar action is hitting this little camera icon over in the history panel. What that does is create a snapshot. If you scroll all the way up, you can see you've got your beginning state and also the snapshot that we just took. If you check that in the history brush will erase back to that state. And essentially, you can try whatever risky or ah, far out move You wanna try and there's no risk at all because you can always just revert back to this stage altogether. Or you can use the history brush to selectively paint back the parts that you want to change. So that's a basic summary of the operations that will use this. This should cover just about 95% 99% of everything that we will cover on this website. So once you have these fundamentals mastered, you can come and run with the big dogs. So I hope this is helpful, and I think you're gonna have a lot of fun in the later demonstrations, another useful set of photo shop operations that I'd like to demonstrate our selections. Basically, this is just defining a certain part of your image that we can apply other photo shop operations to rather than just applying them universally to the entire page. So I'll demonstrating there's a number of ways to create selections. The one that I use most often is the lasso tool, and there are a few different versions of this. But I just use this normal lasso tool, and it just lets you make a shape. And it defines a selection. You can tell when something is selected, because thes marching ants type things happen around the outside edge. So with the lasso tool, we can make pretty much any shape we want. And if you just click again, it will make a new selection. But if you hold down shift, you'll see a little plus sign happen to the lasso tool, and we can add to it. We can make more selections or just different shapes on the other side of that. If you hold down the option key, you'll see a minus sign appear next to the lasso tool. And with that we can subtract away from our selection. So this could be useful because I'll make a new layer here. We can paint within these selections, and it won't affect anything else. It's like your lips block that by accident. It's sort of like you have an airbrush mass cut or something like that. Um, if you hit command H, it will hide those marching ants, which I always find kind of useful to get a little bit distracting. But that's the basic idea you paint within these selections. Uh, I'm going to show you another way. Uh, rather than the lasso tool. You can use the marquee tool. Basically, if you want to make geometric shapes rather than just free handing it with the lasso tool, you can make rectangles and I'll here just add in some other ones. You can switch to ellipses. Add in a circle with these circle and the square or rectangular marquis tools. If you hold down shift, it makes them a perfect circle or a perfect square. Now, obviously, if you already have a selection and you hold down shift, it'll just add to it. See the plus sign there, so that only works. If it's it's your first selection. But that's also very useful in Just to demonstrate, we will paint inside of that is Well, now I'm going to try to make this kind of a solid shape because the next thing I'd like to demonstrate is called command clicking. I'm gonna hit command D, and that is de select. So now nothing is selected. I just had undo their um, if you want to select all of the pixels that air on a certain layer, you put your cursor over the image of the layer, not the title here but the image and you hold down command. And as you can see it, Reese elects everything on that layer. I'll create a new layer just to demonstrate that this this works on any layer. So if I want to select the pixels on layer to command click layer to want to select the ones on layer one command click layer one and it's ah, very quick way Teoh. Navigate your layers and to pull up selections whenever you need them. So that should just about cover our basic photo shop operations. We now had to set up a basic document. We know how to use the brush tool and the smudge tool we know about layers and the history panel. And now we know how to make selections and paint within selections. So these fundamentals should help you navigate the later, more complex and certainly more fun lectured. So thanks for watching. And I look forward to seeing you in the later lectures. 3. Filters: Oh, hi, everyone, this is Hardy. In this lecture, we will be expanding on our discussion of basic photo shop operations by looking at some filters that can come in handy in our digital painting work. So I've loaded up a photograph. I've got it here on its own layer with just a black background. And I'm gonna make a copy of this layer by dragging it down to the new layer icon. And now we've got layer one copy, and I'm switching to the move tool, which is V and I'm just gonna pull it across so that we've got two identical photos right next to each other. The first filter that I'd like to look at. We're gonna apply to this photo on the right. So I am making sure that I've selected this layer on top. His first filter is just a simple blur called the Gaussian Blur. And that does about exactly what you'd expect it. It takes the pixels and makes them very blurry. Uh, this can come in handy if you just want to make some brush strokes, look a little bit more feathered and smooth. Or if you have something in the far distance that you don't want to be quite as crisp is some of your other stuff. It's also something we can do when we're doing layer masks, which will discuss in detail in later lectures. But as's faras filters go, this is about as simple as it gets. Just a very simple blur. And you can clearly see the difference from left and right. So I'm going to de ah de select this visible tool, this check box next to each layer and that will make this blurred image of the dog invisible. And I'm gonna make another copy of the original so that we can try another filter. So here we go. I've got another one, and I'm gonna take the move tool once again and just slide it over so that there are two identical images right next to one another. The next filter we're gonna use is called the paint daubs filter. And we get to this by going to filter and filter gallery. Uh, now there are tons of different ones you can pick from here, and they're actually all kind of cool. And they might make you think that you can take any photo and make it look like some kind of amazing art project, but, uh, a warning. These these air, not magical fixes to make everything look like a cool illustration. They're just tools that you can use along the way to kind of help help get certain effects a little bit better. So definitely don't use these as a crutch there, just a tool. But that being said paint jobs, which I have selected here, is actually ah, remarkably clever filter that it takes a photograph and makes all the pixels just a little bit chunky and almost looks like they were. They were painted on with brush drugs. Um, obviously again, you're not gonna fool anybody if you just run this filter on a photograph and tell them that you did this illustration. But when we apply photo textures to certain parts of our paintings, this filter can really help it. Give a much more uniform look with the rest of your painting. It gives a really nice look if if you're trying to use photo textures or you might even want to apply this to some of your own artwork just for a slightly different look, you can adjust the size of the brush strokes by sliding this bar here and just for a for the sake of contrast, I'm gonna pump it up a good bit. Uh, what's the 14? Looks good. And what you've got the settings the way you like it. I should also say sharpness is something you can adjust to. Um, I usually keep it all the way down. It tends to make it look less painterly, the higher the sharpness goes. So let's leave that down low. And ah, I've got it set on wide blurry brush type, but those those are the basic setting. And I think this looks just about right. So I'm gonna hit, Okay. And as you can see, the photos looked remarkably similar. But there's just a suddenly more painterly quality to the one on the right. I'll hit undo so that you can see before and then after, so we'll go back and forth a little. So it's a very subtle effect. But this could really come in handy and can can really elevate your work. So it's ah, handy trick to keep in your back pocket 4. Masks: Oh, how everyone? This is hardy in this section, we will take a look at photo shop layer mask. Now, I've got a basic document set up with two photos that I've taken one of a cracked concrete texture and one of just a normal brick wall. Now I've got each of these photos on their own layer. As you can see, we can kind of shuffle the deck here, depending on which one we want to be on top. But what we're gonna do is apply a layer mask to this cracked concrete texture. And the way we do that is by going down to this icon right here, this is the layer mask icon, and we click that you can see it creates a new little white rectangle next to the layer representation of the cracked wall photograph. So this is the actual mask, And what we can do with this is hide in, reveal certain parts of this photo depending on what is white and what is black in this. So with black, we are hiding things. So notice I'm selecting this part. Not this part. Once we have to be on the mask and we can paint inside of it. We paint with black. We hide parts of this layer. If we paint back with white, we reveal it again so you can see if we fill this entire maskin with black. Then the layer completely disappears. It's still there, but it's completely hidden because it's mask is totally filled in with black. But what we can then do is paint in slowly with white with a low flow brush, and you can see this is a great way to make some pretty realistic photo composites. It looks like that crack texture is part of this brick wall just because we used a layer mask and sort of combined these two photos. Now this has a ton of really great applications with creating digital art. But play around with some photographs just to see if you can create a quasi realistic effect using layer mask, and I think you'll find this very useful in future lectures 5. Photoshop Tools: Hi, everybody. This is Hardy. In this section, we will discuss the basic tools of Photoshopped and some keyboard shortcuts for how to call those up and generally what they're used for. So I'm kind of going to go in order of how frequently I use these tools. So a good place to start is the brush tool. Certainly the most important tool that I use. It's It's the actual act of painting in the program, so let's talk about that first. This is the brush tool icon. It's keyboard shortcut. Is the letter B pretty easy to remember and most of them are. Are there? They're fairly intuitive. A few of them are not. But we'll talk about that brush tools and easy one letter B. And this, of course, is just what we use to apply digital paint to canvas. This is what we used to to lay down tone, make lines, make colors, basically adding marks to the canvas. That's what the brush tool does. Now it's opposite, in a way, is the eraser tool that is E on keyboard shortcuts. Also an easy one to remember. And Justus, you'd imagine this removes tone that we had laid down with the brush tool or just it removes any pixels from the layer you're working on. So that's what the eraser tool does similarly to in real life, when an eraser does so. Ah, lot of these very intuitive. Next up, most frequently used tool is the lasso tool that's L on your keyboard shortcut, and we use this to make selections. Now you can define an area can be any shape you make on your stylist with your stylist on your tablet. And once we have a selection made, we can modify the pixels within their without affecting anything outside. So now that I've made this selection, I can paint inside of it. I can erase away inside of it, and it on Lee effects what's inside the selection. So there are some other selection tools to this is the marquee tool I M is the keyboard shortcut for that one, and similarly, you can make selections, but these air ah, geometric shapes so we can make rectangles or ellipses. I do get a good bit of you set of those. They could be very helpful when you're trying to render a technical shape something with perfect geometric qualities to it. This could come in very handy. But again, once we have those selections made, and you can, you can tell when the selection is made because of the little dotted line sometimes called the marching ants around the outside. So we've gone over brush, tool, eraser, tool, lasso, tool and marquee tool. Another very important one that I use is this smudge tool. I'm I'm still using the brush tool right now, but I just want to lay down some tones here. Just Teoh show what the smudge tool can do. So here we go. This much tool is right here. I've got it set is our is my keyboard shortcut That used to be the default. But some newer versions of photo shop do not have ours. The keyboard shortcut for this one. So you may have to adjust that in your preferences or just make it into any short cut that you would like. But for a lot of versions of photo shop and for what I use are is the keyboard shortcut, and what the smudge tool does is, you might imagine, is sort of move tones around on the canvas. It it stretches them around. You're not actually laying down any new tones. You're just sort of dragging in smearing what is already there. This is a great tool that makes him really painterly effects things that that don't look digital at all. So it's ah, great wayto get a nice painterly quality to your work. Uh, sometimes I forget that this next one is a tool. It all. But it's this hand tool. Now you can switch to this tool by hitting H, and you can use it to move around the canvas. But a much easier way to do it is if you have any other tools selected and I've gone back to the brush tool. All you have to do is hold down the space bar and it automatically turns into the hand tool . So if you need to quickly pan around your canvas, just hold down the space bar when you have any other tool selected and it will switch to that hand icon very handy thing to do. Another one of my favorites unique to photo shop is the clone stamp tool. This is the letter s is the keyboard shortcut here. Now what? This allows us to do is once you sample an area and we do that by holding on the altar key . This is telling us what part of the campus do we want to clone? So if you hold down all and make a selection, then the clone stamp tool will perfectly copy that area in another part of the canvas. So I've made a weird orange and green blob, and I can copy that is many times as I want all over the canvas. Very handy way to get Ah, lot of you can fill up a canvas very quickly with a pattern doing this. If you're painting trees in a forest, for example, this is a nice, quick way to at least get basic indications down there. So clone Stamp s on the keyboard very handy. Next one will discusses the Grady int tool. This is it's icon right here it is G on the keyboard, and what you might imagine is this just makes colored radiance across the canvas. You can adjust the opacity just like any most of the other tools they have controls for their intensity and how heavy handed they are. So anything can be customized to whatever you she needed to be. But the Grady int just makes smooth gradations of color appear. You can see you can switch this two different modes. This is the radio Grady in, which is all often nice for, ah, making soft skies or any any kind of soft shape you might want to make, Um, and there are a lot of others. There's one that sort of radiates outward from the center. Feel free to play around with ease as much as you want, but that's that's the basic idea of it. The next one will talk about is the color dodge and color burn tools and the sponge tool. Don't use these terribly often, but they are kind of nice. Uh, this is a photography term, Uh, comes from a dark room use of dodge and burn techniques. But all this really does is when you are burning your darkening and making the color more intense, and it's sort of difficult to see here. But there we go, Ah burned area of the screen, and conversely, the Dodge tool makes things brighter and less saturated. But these effects are very subtle on these, These colors I've chosen but That's a basic idea, sort of. Ah, photographers tool. There, the pen tool sort of switch switches Photoshopped to a vector type program. It lets us make perfectly victory rised geometric lines, lines that are defined by math and not necessarily by the movements of our brush strokes. So if you need to make something with very smooth curves like, say, a power line hanging from a telephone pole or hoses going in and out of some machine that you wanna have perfectly curved edges, you can use the pin tool to describe a nice, mathematically defined and perfectly smooth curve shape. Just like that. Another very handy tool is the magic wand tool, and I'm gonna delete this and start over just to show you what the Magic one tool can do to start. I'm just gonna make a few very random shapes around the canvas, and now we'll select the magic wand tool. It is W is your keyboard shortcut, and what this does is it makes allows us to make selections very quickly. If I click the Magic Wand tool here out in this white space, you'll see it's selected all of this white area, the marching answer going around these circles, but you can see they're also going around the outside edge as well. So that means we have this sort of negative space selected right now, and I'll show you that by filling it with this orange color so very quickly and easily. We got this whole area selected just by using the magic Wand tool. It detects the edges of where where something is, and it just makes a selection air so we could select these circles as well. And I'm just holding down shift to make more than one selection, and you can hold down Ault to subtract away selections. Just like that. Another tool that's very handy is the medicine dropper tool. So let's make one of these circles. I'll go back to the Magic Wand Tool will make some of these a blue color. Now say, I wanted to paint with this blue color. All I'd have to do is use the medicine dropper tool to select that color. And as you can see, this exact color appears. Is your foreground color in your color selector so very handy? Let's Ah, let's make make this circle. Give this Cem some great Asians of color. So if we use the medicine dropper tool, it will pick any one of these gradations within this circle so you can see the color kind of jumping around. Because this medicine dropper is picking up every sort of in between color between the orange and the blue, it can literally grab any color you can come up with on the canvas. Now. One good trick to know is that if you have the brush tool selected, all you have to do is hold down. The Alte in the brush tool will automatically switch to the medicine dropper tool, so that's a great way to just sort of paint on the fly and just pick up colors and lay them back down kind of willy nilly. It makes your process very, very free flowing and organic, so that's ah, great one to use. Those were the the tools that I use most often. Certainly there are quite a few others in a lot of these tools have variations, and there are a 1,000,000 different things that Photoshopped can do that frankly, I just don't have much use for so that's basically it for what? What tools? I use in my process, certainly feel free to explore on your own. But once you understand how these tools that I've discussed work, you'll be able to do just about everything that they will go through on this site. So I hope this is a helpful introduction, and I look forward to seeing you in later lectures. 6. Course Recap: congratulations on completing the Photoshopped Fundamentals course. We've gone over basic functions, layer masks, tools and filters. You should now have a solid grasp on the basic functions of this amazing program, and you're ready to start thinking about creating art before moving on to the art fundamentals course. I'd recommend tackling a few of these course challenges just to sharpen up these basic skills. Course challenge one. Create a new document. Okay, not much of a challenge here, but let's start with an easy one. Very simple stuff, of course. Challenge to play around. Use each tool to make some marks on the canvas, of course. Challenge three. Play with layers, created document with three layers. Move and edit the layers independently to get a feel for how layers work. Okay, thanks, everybody. I look forward to seeing you in the next course.