Beginners Guide to Adobe Photoshop: The Essentials

1. Introduction: Are you a complete Photoshop beginner? Do you want to learn how to edit images and create graphics from scratch? Then this Adobe Photoshop course is for you. My name is Kate. I'm an Adobe instructor working at the UK's leading Adobe Training Center in London. I'm a graphics designer and a shoe designer who's worked with Jimmy Choo and Sophia Webster. We will start this photoshop beginners course with all the essentials you need to know. Things like how to crop and adjust images and all the useful shortcuts that are important for us to use. We will get familiar with a couple of retouching tools and learn how to remove spots and blemishes from images and clean up our image. We will also look at a few other tools to remove objects from images and making it look seamless. We will also be selecting parts of images and do things like remove or change the backgrounds. We will also be manipulating all the colors of an image. We will also be looking at Photoshop from a more graphics approach and do things like create a web banner, create a sale ad, and use all our existing Photoshop, and researching skills to create graphics for social media. There are some really cool filters that we will be playing with and we will also use some really fun type options. We will be using an existing free template and learn how to change the contents of that template to our preference. Finally, we will learn how to save our files into print ready or web ready documents. There are lots of files and exercises that we can download that are available with this course. I will be guiding you recover shortcuts throughout the whole time. My goal is for you to feel confident in using Adobe Photoshop, and for you to go on and create your own amazing Photoshop graphics. Let's get started. 2. Let's Get Started: Hey guys, and welcome to Adobe Photoshop CC beginners workshop essentials. I cannot wait to show you all the tips and tricks that I have learned over the years of using Adobe Photoshop. The course will be divided in three main sections. The first section is all the essentials and the main introduction; things like what the panels are, what the tools are, the important shortcuts are, and so much more. Then the second section will be editing images. We will be changing the saturation, the contrast, the colors of images, we will be selecting parts of images and removing spots and blemishes and so much more. Then the third and final part is the more graphic section. We will be looking at Photoshop from a graphics approach and we will be creating graphics for social media and things like a banner ad, a sale ad, and we'll be working with shapes and shadows and so much more. But for now, let's start with all the essentials that we need to know. 3. Document Setup: Hey guys, and welcome to Adobe Photoshop CC Beginners Workshop Essentials course. First things first, let's talk about how to download all the files that are attached to this course. You'll see a series of downloadable zip files, each folder will be a separate zip file. This one is cropping and adjusting, and if you double-click on it, it will expand into a folder and you can access the files inside. What I will start with first is the main introduction, the essentials; how to work with the interface, where the tools are, what the panels are, the important shortcuts. Because the interface can look quite overwhelming at first, so we're going to fix that in the first five minutes. We're going to go to Photoshop. You'll be greeted by the welcome page with lots of information everywhere, things like your recently opened document, Home, Learn, which are built-in tutorials. This might look a bit different on yours, if you're using a different version of Photoshop. But it's all the same information, just in slightly different places. Now, we're going to go straight away to creating a new document. We're going to learn how to set up a new document from scratch. Later on, we're going to open existing documents, but for now Create new, please. You will see this confusing new document setup window and yours might look different too. Every version of Photoshop might have a slightly different looking version, but it will always have the same information. Let's look at the top first. It will say, Print, Art, Web, Mobile, so this is called the intent. This means, what is the purpose of your document? Will it be for printing, for web, for mobile? For today, we can just like to web. Now below for each of these, you will see existing presets, so things like Web Common, Web Large. If I select print, it will be Letter or A4, which is your typical printing paper, or you will have A3. Another thing that's exciting is if you scroll down, you will see some existing free templates which are really cool, and you can use any of these. Click on See Preview. You can edit the content for free, if you have an Adobe license, and use it for your own materials and that's pretty cool. But for now, let's select A4. Now, on the right-hand side, this is where you customize the preset details. So if you want to change the page size or make it landscape, you can click on this icon and it will make your page landscape. Now, if you could please take Artboards, which will be explained later on, I'll do a whole section on artboards. But an artboard is essentially a page or a canvas, and this is what we work on. Now, you can leave everything as is, and you can just go ahead and click on Create, nice and easy. That is how you create a new document. 4. Interface: The interface might look overwhelming at first but we will change that within the first five minutes hopefully. First of all, let's make sure that we all have the same exact Photoshop. We do this by changing something called the workspace. Now, the workspace is the preference of how you view your Photoshop. You decide which panels you want to see and which tools. To do this, we need to go to Window, Workspace, and you'll see a bunch of different workspaces. You have Photography for instance, which is for photography. If you select Painting, it will be all the painting related panels. You'll have your brushes and your swatches, which is where you save color. But for the purpose of this course, we will select Essentials. Now, you can move panels around. If you click on a panel and then you click on another one and another one, you can literally start playing with your panels, you can also close panels. Now, your interface is starting to look messy. The best way to fix this is to go to Window, Workspace, and Reset Essentials. This will put everything back into its place, just like Mary Poppins, which is great for people with OCD like me, who like everything to be tidy. You can always go back to Window, Workspace, and reset your essentials. Let's give you a little tour. At the top you have the menu bar, and this will look slightly different on a PC, I'm currently using a Mac, so it looks a certain way. The same information is there. File is where you place your documents, where you open documents, where you save documents and print them. Edit is where you copy, and paste, and undo and redo. Now, I tend to just use shortcuts for this, so I don't tend to use this very often. I'm just going to skip to the ones that are useful to you right now. View is where you can change how you view your Photoshop, so you can zoom in and out and stuff like that. I'll give you shortcuts for that as well. Now, Window is pretty important. Window is where all the panels live. Remember these are panels and if you're ever looking for one, it will be under Window, and this is for all Adobe software. Say you were looking for Swatches, if you click on it, it will highlight swatches. A little bit more about these panels. Over here, you have the Properties panel, and this is where it gives you properties or more information about your page or a shape that's selected. Now, currently we just have our page, so it's giving us information about that. Now, below, you have a very important panel and that's the Layers panel. In here, you will see Artboard 1. Now, this is Artboard 1. It's like a blank canvas or a blank page. You can hide this artboard by clicking on the eye, this will hide it, you can show it. Hide, show. This is where you place all your layers in, which will be clarified later. Just so you know, this section over here is a replication of the Properties panel. Later on you'll have the same options in the Properties panel as you will have in this area. Now, this part is super important, and it's the Toolbar. You can view it in a single column or you can click on little arrows and view it into two columns, this is totally up to you. Now, the tools are so important because every time you need to do something in Adobe Photoshop, you need to go to the particular tool for that. The most important tool is the Move tool, this one, because if you ever need to move something, you need to go to the Move tool. I would like you to remember to always revert back to the Move tool as a default. Now, if you hover over this icon, you will see the name, and in brackets, the shortcuts. So V is a shortcut, the very important tool. This means that if you press V on your keyboards, it will automatically take you to the Move tool. Now, you might not see this little preview, this little video, depending on which version of the software you're using or if you're using a Mac. But that doesn't matter, you'll still have the name and the shortcut, which is the most important. Now, these tools also have a little triangle next to them. That means that if you right-click on them, you'll have more options for that specific tool. More on that later. Then over here, you have the foreground color and background, and if you double-click on this, you can choose the color that you would like to work with. Then if you click on OK, that color will be applied even though we currently have nothing on our document. Right now we don't see the color on our document. Now, for a few very important shortcuts. In terms of shortcuts, just remember that if you're using a Mac, shortcuts will start with Command. If you're using a PC, they will start with Control. For zooming in, you can go the long way round by going to View, zoom in, zoom out. Or you can go to Cmd+ or Ctrl+, which is the shortcuts. Cmd- to zoom out, Cmd+ to zoom in, Cmd- to zoom out. Then fit to screen is Cmd0. Now, you can also use something called the grab hand tool, which allows you to grab your page around. You can do this by holding down the Space bar and clicking and dragging, this is pretty useful. I use this a lot. Now, if at any point you make a mistake and you regret it, you can always go to Edit, Undo or Command or Control Z. Now, currently we haven't done anything, so we don't actually need to undo anything but just so you know for the future. This is it for the little tour of the Interface. I hope that was useful to you and that it looks a little bit less overwhelming. We will be using everything, so it will become second nature to you. 5. Cropping Images: There are a lot of ways that you could get started in Photoshop. One way is the way we've just done right now is we created a new artboard, and if we were to continue here, we would have to place an image in this document, and maybe place multiple images and build our document this way. But what we can also do is open a new document. If we were to close this by clicking on the tab and for PCs the X will be on the right-hand side we will go back to the Welcome page, and this time, instead of create new, we would click on "Open", and we would select the image we want to open directly in Photoshop. If we go back to our ZIP files and choose "Cropping and Adjusting", and if we could select the first image, number 1 rotate, and click on "Open". Great. What this has done is just opened this image in Photoshop. No artboards, just plain old open. Now, there are a lot of ways to use Photoshop. You can edit images or in this case, you can rotate them. You can create graphics and advertisements, and promotions for social media. That would be more of a graphical approach, and we'll do a little bit of everything here so you get a nice introduction to what Photoshop can do. What we'll do now is we're going to crop and rotate this image. We want our image and our artboard to end around the parameters of this image so we don't see all the whitespace. So to do this, we're going to have to go to the crop tool over here or the shortcut C, and this way we can crop our image just by clicking and dragging. We can just start clicking and dragging and cropping it. Now, to rotate it, so Universal Adobe icon. If you hover over the top right corner of your image, you'll see the rounded double arrow, so this is the icon for rotation. If you click and drag, you'll see a grid, which means that you can nicely align your image to the grid, and try and get it straight, and now we can further crop it. Click and drag and crop your image so you have no whitespace. Now, when you're done, you can either click on the little v here, but I don't bother with that, I just press Enter or Return, and that is my image cropped. What we'll do now is we're going to open a second image, and we're going to do something similar, crop and rotate. If you go to "File", "Open", or Control O, and select "3 Seaside" in that folder, we can do the same thing. Make sure you're on the crop tool, and you're going to have to try and make the top line of the sea straight by clicking and dragging and aligning it, and then you press Return, and that's that. Now, if you wanted to crop the hair out, you can click and drag, and then press Return, and that is your image cropped. Now, that's it for cropping and adjusting. 6. Image Adjustments: What we'll do now is some further image editing rather than graphics. We're going to learn how to change colors of a shoe, of a bag, of really any object. If you do have any remaining tabs open, make sure you close them, and you don't have to save them unless you're really kin, and click on "X". Remember for PCs, the X is on this side. Now let's minimize Photoshop for a minute. We'll be working with two image adjustments now, and you'll see a Zip File. I would like you to double-click on the "Zip File", and look at the folder. We'll be changing the colors and making image adjustments of these guys over here. We're going to start with the shoe. Now to open an image in Photoshop, you can either right click and go "Open With" or we can just head back to Photoshop and we can click on "File". I would like us to open this as a Smart Object. A Smart Object essentially is an image that you place in Photoshop, and what it does is, it doesn't destroy the original pixels, and it helps you preview. If you select the Smart Objects option, it will not destroy your original image, so would like us to select "Open a Smart Object". If we could go to our folder, and select two image adjustments and select the lovely shoe over here and open. Now in the layers panel over here, you'll see this tiny little icon. We'll say Smart Object, thumbnail if you hover over it. This means that if we make changes to this image right now, the images, the changes won't be permanent, and you can still preview with or without them. This will make more sense when we actually get to changing it. For image adjustments, you always need to make sure that your image is selected. Then you need to go to "Image Adjustments". Over here, you have a whole bunch of adjustments. You have things like brightness and contrast. So you can change the brightness. If it's not really the correct amount of brightness, you can change the contrast. I'll just click on "Cancel" because I don't need this right now. You can change things like the exposure, which means the exposure to light. The more exposure, the more light hits it. Now the main one we're going to be working with here is hue saturation. It's actually my favorite. It's a very quick way to just change colors. I would like you to select "Hue/Saturation". Now, you'll see Master. Now in Master, you get to choose which colors you would like to change. I would like to change red because the majority of this shoe is red. If we select red, and now for the fun part, if you move the sliders here of the hue round, you will see the color of your shoe change. Isn't that crazy? Now it's turquoise, it's blue, so that's super awesome. You can also change the amount of saturation you want. If you increase the saturation and will be quite pop color, if you decrease the saturation, it will be a more duller, more pastelly, and washed look. You can still change a hue and reduce the saturation to get that effect. Really incredible. Now another thing you can do is you can change the lightness, so you can make it a little bit more white or a little bit more dark. You could have a dark yellow shoe or a dark purple shoe, and make it even darker. If you make it completely dark, you have a black shoe, and if you reduce a saturation entirely and make it completely white, you have a white shoe, which obviously you can see better if you have something else than a white background. It's pretty incredible. Black shoe, white shoe, saturated shoe, that's pretty cool. Now when you click on "Okay", you will see this appear in your layers, it will be called a Smart Filter, and it will be hue/saturation. You'll see the little eye over here. If you click on the "Eye" so that you no longer see the eye, this will remove the visibility of your filter, and you can preview it how it used to look like. Before, after, before, after. This is only possible with the Smart Object option. We're going to do this again, but for another image. If we could go to "File, Open as Smart Object" and select our lovely little hat or winter hat. Click on "Open" and make sure it's a Smart Object. Then we can go to "Image Adjustments". Now, I often use the shortcuts for hue/saturation, which is command U similar. Then same thing applies here. You can go ahead and select "Yellow" and you can change the hue again. Well, that hurts my eyes. You might want to reduce the saturation a little bit. That's a little bit better. Even more. You can also change the lightness, and make it darker and lighter. Then when you click on "Okay", you can see the Smart Filter and hide it or show it. Now there's another image in that folder, so feel free to use that, and play around with what we've just learned. Now if you could go and "Open as a Smart Object", one of the previous images we've worked with, so in cropping and adjusting and select "Rotate" and "Open" and don't worry about it being rotated, it doesn't matter. I would like to show you some other image adjustments that can be applied. You might want to zoom in a little bit maybe. Let's have a look at some other image adjustments that we can do. If we go to "Image Adjustments" and change the brightness, for instance, you will see it's a bit more bright or darker, or you can add a contrast. There are so many changes you can mix in image. If you click on "Okay", you can preview it again before and after. Its a minor adjustment. If you go to "Image Adjustments" and you go to "Levels" and you play round with this, this means that you're making all the black pixels or black points darker. If you move this to the left, you're making all the light pixels lighter. This doesn't upgrade obviously, so you can just press "Cancel". You can also change the vibrance which are similar to saturation. You make it a bit more faded. That's quite a nice effect. You can click on "Cancel" again. Let's look at black and white. This is how you make an image black and white, which is cool. But not only that, you can actually decide the type of black and white image you want. If you want all the red colors to be white, you will make them white. If you want them to be darker, you make them darker. You can actually play with these and customize your black and white image. If you're happy with this, you can click on "Okay". Zoom out and that's your image. You also have the typical adjustments, like you do in Instagram. You have shadows and highlights, and can change that as well. If you remove the previous filters by clicking on the "Eyes", it might be a little bit easier to look, so Image Adjustments, Shadows and Highlights, and you can change the amount. See this bit, so you can make this lighter. It's all about aesthetic as well, and the style you're working with. So much you can change your image. That's it, you can go ahead and close this. We are done with image adjustments. Next, we'll be looking at the famous selection tools. 7. Selection Tools: We are going to learn about selection tools, which is important. Selection tools allow us to select parts of the images and change things like the colors or remove backgrounds and stuff like that. You should have a ZIP file called three selections and masks. I want you to double-click on it so it expands into a folder and you can access the files inside. We will be working with these images and we are going to remove the backgrounds of these images and learn how to select parts of images. I want to us head back to Adobe Photoshop and click on ''File'', open as smart object. I want us to get in the habit of opening images as smart objects. If we could open this lovely building over here and click on ''Open''. You have a full range of selection tools and they are all available on the left-hand side on this toolbar. If you hover over an icon, again, it tells you what it is. I will start with the basic selection tools and I'll really explain the most important selection tools so you do not really waste time with the ones you will need as much. Let's start with the Rectangular Marquee tool. If you click and drag on your page, you will see this dotted selection area. Right now, this is selected. Now we are not talking about moving or making changes to anything. We are just talking about selection right now. That's how you select it. I will give you a really important shortcut. It is important to learn how to de-select things. The shortcut for that is Command or Control D, or select, deselect. You also have some other selection tools which are in different shapes. If you select the Elliptical Marquee tool, you can select in the shape of an ellipse. You have a bunch of other selection tools as well. But in the recent years, Photoshop came up with a really cool tool called the Object Selection tool is probably the newest selection tool. It makes all the other ones obsolete or less useful. This is a key one you want to remember. You tend to start with the Object Selection tool. Then what happens is you use the other tools to adjust your existing selection. I want us to go to the Object Selection tool or the shortcut is W. I want us to click and drag across our building. It's taking its time and let go beautiful look at that nice job. How great is that? That's done, we have selected what we needed to select. I do believe in repetitions, which is why we are going to open yet another image and do the same thing. Let's go to file, open a smart object, and select another image. Let's select this hand with the little travel cup and click on ''Open''. We are still on the Object Selection tool. If you hover over it, you will see a little video. You might not see it on yours but look at this cool video. I would like us to click and drag around this hand and the cup. It didn't do the best job. Sometimes when it does that, what I do is I try and reselect it again, I just click and drag and see if it comes up with a better solution. This happens often and the key here is to use another selection tool to edit the selection. To do that, we are going to need the Quick Selection tool. The Quick Selection tool has these guys at the top. You can either create a new selection, add to selection or subtract from selection. In this case, we are going to add to selection. If we could click on add selection. Now the Quick Selection tool is a brush. You might or might not see a little circle here. I'm going to give you a little shortcut for increasing this circle, this brush. That is the square brackets. The right square bracket would be for making it bigger. The left square brackets for making it smaller. I would like us to zoom in a little bit more. So we can see a little bit better. We are just going to go and click and drag and just add to the selection, how nice. It does quite a nice job. Maybe zoom in a little bit more. Make sure you go back to the Quick Selection tool. What I am going to do is I am going to make my brush smaller, left square bracket. I am going to add and click and drag and subtly add all of this bit to the selection. Sometimes you can just click and it does a good job. Might want to add some fingernails. Here there's a tiny little piece, but my brush is too big so the left square bracket. I'm happy with this. We can always adjust this later, but I'm happy with it, so I'm going to leave it. This is how you use the Object Selection tool. Pretty easy actually. Photoshop has made it quite convenient for us. 8. Masking: Now we're going to learn the next thing, and this is called masking. Masking basically, masks hides parts of an image. So in this case, we're going to mask the background. Now because our object is already selected, masking will be pretty easy right now. If you hover over here in the layers panel, you go down here, you will see this icon that looks like a camera, and that's the layer mask icon. If you click on that, it will clear the backgrounds or mask the background and beautiful. How easy was that? Let's do the same for our other image. So we click on it and we just click on the layer mask icon, and voila, not bad. Let's go back to our little building over here. This is how you mask it. I'm going to show you how to add a background fill, so just a color. Now bear in mind that you can place an image here and use that as a background as well no problem. But for now we're going to add a fill or a background. The icon right next to the layer mask icon, the one that looks kind of like yin and yang, if you click on that, you can add a new fill. If you select Solid Color, it will give you a color, hopefully not as awful as this one. I love pink by the way, so you're going to see a lot of pink here. I'm just going to choose a pink color. Obviously choose whatever color you would like, and I'm going to click on "Okay". The thing is, I cannot see my building right now because the color fill layer is above the layer of my image. What I'm going to do is click and drag it below the layer of the building, and voila, now you can see it and you have that background and that building. You can always change your mind and change your color by double-clicking on this and pick another color. You can even preview it which is pretty cool. That's done. Now as usual, I believe in repetition, so let's do the same for the other one over here. We're just going to go and select the new fill icon, select a Solid Color, and choose another color. Let's go pink again, and click on "OK" and same thing, move the layer down, and voila, super cool. Now we're going to repeat this whole process from scratch. So we're going to repeat the selection tool, the layer mask for removing the backgrounds and then the fill for color. So I would like us to go to File, Open as Smart Object and select the other hand over here and click on "Open". There we go. The same process will be repeated. So if we could go to the Object Selection Tool, and if we could click and drag around our hand, and it does an okay job. But here as well, we're going to need to adjust this by going to the Quick Selection Tool. Feel free to zoom in as usual. Commands are Control Plus or Zoom In. Let's get pretty close. There are some parts that we're going to have to remove and there are some parts that we're going to have to add. Let's start with subtract. So if you can select subtract over here and make sure your brush is a little bit smaller than what you need to select. Here I might need to make my brush smaller using the left square bracket, and even smaller, and the same goes here, click and drag or just click, that works too sometimes, and the same over here. That was nice. Did it on one go. I think that's it. I'm just going to add the little finger so it doesn't get chopped off. I'm going to go to the plus, and I'm going to click and start adding bits of the finger. I missed up spots. You can spend a nice chunk of time editing this in detail, but I'm going to leave it there, I'm quite happy with this. Now as a default, please go back to the Move Tool once you're done. Now I'm going to repeat the process of adding a layer mask. So we click on this little icon over here, and it will hide the background. If you're not happy with this obviously, you can always undo and edit this again, redo it from the top. The next part is clicking on this little icon again and adding a solid color and choosing any color you want. You know the drill for me, it's always pink and clicking on "OK". Again, we're going to have to move this layer below the other one. Now you've got a hand with a pink background. Well done. So far we've only used images that had a plain background. So now we're going to do this, we're going to try using the Object Selection Tool but with an image that has a background that's quite full of different objects. So we're going to go to File, Open as Smart Object again, and we're going to select this boot over here. As you can see, it does have a few things going on in the background, which is fine. So if you can click on "Open". You know the drill, we go back the Objects Selection Tool just to show you that Objects Selection Tool really works wonders even on an image like this. We're going to click and drag across our shoe and not too bad. Either way, we're going to have to go back to the Quick Selection Tool and adjust a few bits and bobs. Just going to zoom in and out. I'm just going to make sure I'm on minus, and I'm going to click here and start drawing. Sometimes you need to adjust your brush, sometimes you have to go back to the plus and edit it, minus and change this little bits. Now, obviously the more time you spend on this, the more detailed it will be. But for this purpose, we're just going to do the best we can. So it's all about adjusting the brush with the square brackets and then going back to plus or minus to edit the little detailed bits. I'm going to go to minus and remove this little bit over here, etc. Then you can fit to screens, Commands or Control 0 and voila. Of course, I can do a better job with this, but I'm happy with this for the purpose of this course for now. So we move onto the next part, which is the layer mask icon. So you can click on the Layer Mask icon and then we can go to the Solid Color New fill icon, choose a solid color, pink again and "OK". Then I'm going to click on that layer and move it below our lovely shoe. Now you have a funky boot with a pink background. Let's select our shoe layer and go to the Move Tool. I want to show you a few things now. I want to show you how to resize an object and then how to duplicate it. So make sure you're on the Move Tool, make sure your boot is selected, and then you can go to free transform, Command or Control T, or edit Free Transform, and you can just click and drag and make our little shoe even more little and when you're done, click on "Enter" or "Return". That's cool. Let me show you something else that's cool. For duplicating something, you can always go Edit, Copy, Edit Paste, but in Adobe, there's something much quicker and that's duplication and shortcut for that is Alt option and Drag. So hold down the Alt key and you'll see a black and white cursor, then you can click and drag, and you'll see another shoe and another one. That is pretty cool. Let's do the same on our building which is this tab. So make sure you select the building layer and then Command or Control T, and then you can click and drag and resize it. Now pay attention to free transform. In older versions of Photoshop, before 2019 I believe, you would have to hold down the Shift key to keep the proportions, but now it's changed so that you no longer have to hold down the Shift key to keep their proportions. So please do whatever is applicable to your version of Photoshop. So anyway, when you're happy, press "Return" or "Enter" and then we're going to duplicate this, Alt and Drag, and then Alt option and Drag. That doesn't look good, does it? We can put it in the middle and that's fine, and voila. What we've done here is selecting, removing backgrounds, adding a color, and resizing and duplicating. So we hit a few birds with one stone here. I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you soon. 9. Layer Mask exercise: If you have any files open, feel free to close them by clicking on the little x, or if you're really keen on the beautiful masterpiece you've created, you can save it by going to File, Save As. Save on your computer, and you can save it as a JPEG if you want, or a Photoshop file, which will be a working file, so you can still edit it later, this is up to you, and when you're done, you can click on Save. I'm just going to close these documents, my beautiful documents. Now, we're going to do a layer mask exercise again. This shouldn't take too long, but just to show you that you can use the layer mask and add a background as well. I would like us to double-click on 4. Layer Mask zip file. We can access the files inside, and you'll see a Photoshop file. On a PC, this will have a PS in blue, the Photoshop icon, but I'm using a Mac, so I just have a preview, a thumbnail. Anyway, I would like us to go back to Photoshop, and then we're going to go to File, Open as Smart Object, the usual, and go back to 4. Layer Mask and select this image. We're going to make this image into this one, which is pretty simple. We're just going to use the objects selection tool and remove the background, and then we're going to add this BG JPEG, this image, that's going to be our background. If we could select this image and open. I just want to show you that the object selection tool does work on multiple objects in one go, so if we were to go to the objects selection tool now, and click and drag around all our nail polishes, now sometimes it does a great job, and sometimes you need minor adjustments. We know the drill, we can go back to the quick selection tool, click on the minus, and we can just make our brush bigger with the right square brackets, plus, you can add the little pieces that might be chopped off. Make sure you zoom in so you can see a little bit better and you can click. Start adding some of these highlighted parts of the object really. Fit to screen. Once you're happy, you can click on the layer mask icon, get rid of this lovely background, so we can add an even lovelier background, and then go File, Place Embedded, and choose this lovely background image, BG JPEG, Place. Our background is a little bit too small compared to our image, but that's fine. Just click and drag and resize it accordingly and press Enter or Return. Then we just have to move the layer of the background below the layer of the objects, and voila, this is how you remove a background of an image and you add another background. Nice and simple. 10. Changing Backgrounds: We're going to practice the skills that we've just learned. We're going to remove the background of an image using the selection tools and the Layer Mask tools, and we're going to change and add multiple backgrounds which will be pretty cool. If we could go to file, Open as Smart Object and go back to three Selections and Masks, and select this lovely lady, and click on open. We need to make sure that our layer is selected, and then we can go to our same as objects selection tool and click and drag around the object or subject in this case, and we need to adjust these little bits by going to the Quick Selection Tool and by clicking on minus, because we need to get rid of those little bits. Now remember the shortcut to make the brush bigger is the right square bracket. You can just play around with this and this little bit, and now for in between the fingers that's zoom in a bit, and again we need to adjust a little brush, make it smaller, so the left square brackets, and the same here. He could just click, that should do a pretty good job. Took too much from there. I'm going to go to plus again and add a little fingernail and some more minor adjustments. Once we're happy with that, we can just click on the Layer Mask icon and voila, no background. Now let's go back to the Move tool. Always as a default, we always go back to the Move tool, and we're going to place a couple of backgrounds in here, and we're going to go File Place Embedded, and in that folder you should see a few background images. You can select this one. Click on place, and we might have to adjusted to make it a little bit bigger, click and drag. What a beautiful image. Trim it, and then when you're done you press Enter or Return. But now the background currently sits above the layer of the object. We need to click and drag and move the object down. Click and drag, and that is one backgrounds, and now we're going to find another one. We go find Place Embedded and choose another background. Again, resize it, and one more, this one. Now this one is a landscape image. You have the freedom to choose which sides you want to use, and then Enter or Return, and now you see the eyes. You can really swap the backgrounds you want by clicking on the eyes, and you can have multiple backgrounds in one picture. Now you can also add some minor effects to your image. Like you can change the edges if there are too harsh, and this you can do by going to effect. If you go to effects you have all options here, if you select Inner Glow, you can add a little Inner Glow to our image, we increase Opacity, and change the size of it or not. You can also select Outer Glow, and it will create a glow on the outside. This always depends on the background. If I click on Ok and I hide this backgrounds and look at another one, it will look different. If I look at this one, it will look different. It's too much in this one. A lot of variation that you can do to your image. I hope you go and play with other images and change the background and I'll see you soon. 11. Selecting & Colour Changing: Now that we've learned about image, adjustments, and hue/saturation, and we've also learned about selection tools, we're going to combine both to make some adjustments to our image. I'd like us to go to File, Open. Make sure you're in the Selections & Masks folder and select this image to eyes and lips change and click on "Open." Because surprise, surprise that's what we'll do now. We'll try to change the color of the eyes and the lips, and make sure you have the Layer selected. Now we're going to go to the Object Selection Tool because sometimes you need to individually select objects in order to change the color of them, and sometimes image adjustment doesn't really work without selecting objects first. Let me show you why. If I were to go to Image, Adjustments, and Hue/Saturation like we did before, and I were to change a hue, or I were to select the reds to change the red here and then change the hue. It doesn't really work because there's reds, although over the image, right here, right there. So let me just press "Cancel." In this case, you would have to individually select the objects and then change the hue/saturation. Again, make sure you're on the Object Selection Tool. Then you click and drag and create a little rectangular shape around the lips, and look it does a pretty good job. Now we're going to go to Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation, or the shortcut Command or Control U; hue, U. This time we can just go ahead and change the hue and look at that, does a really nice job. As usual, you can also change the saturation, making less saturated or more. When you're done, click "OK." Now are going to do the same with the pupil. Again, make sure you're on the Object Selection Tool. Select the pupil, click and drag and there we go. Sometimes you have to give it a few goes and then it does a good job, and again, we go to Image, Adjustments. Now look at what happens if I go to Hue/Saturation now like before. I'm just going to zoom in so you can see a little bit better. Okay, so if you look at the eye here, you'll see that there is a bit of yellow, there's a bit of gray, there's a bit of bluey gray, so it's not just a single color. If you were to change a hue and saturation of it, you wouldn't do such a good job. If I were to increase the saturation and now change color. It just doesn't look right, does it? So instead, you can just press "Cancel" and instead of Hue/Saturation, we can just go to Image, Adjustments and change the Color Balance. If you change a color balance, it does a much better job. Make it really blue or really cyan. We can make it kind of purpley, or green or more of a darker blue, yellow or green. So in this case, color balance would be better. When you're done, you press "OK" and Deselect Command or Control D. Those are the eye color and lip color changes we've made. I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you soon. 12. Introduction to Retouching Tools: Hey guys. I hope you enjoyed the introduction, and the interface, and all the shortcuts, and that stuff. Now, we're getting on with the second section which will be the editing images. We'll look at all the retouching tools which are really cool and really important when you're using Photoshop and I'm sure you will love them. Let's do this. 13. The Spot Healing Tool: Now we're going to look at Photoshop's famous retouching tools, and this is for removing spots and blemishes, and cleaning up stains and any type of thing that people use on their own profiles today in social media. Let's look at that. You'll see the zip file again, and I want you to double-click on it. It's expanded into a folder and you'll see the images inside. What we'll do is we're going to remove some blemishes and some logos and tattoos from these images using the spot healing brush tool. I would like you to go back to Photoshop, and again, go to File, Open as Smart Object, and select the retouching file, and select the lovely lady over here. Now, I'm going to show you my way of doing something. This way, it's to avoid making any mistakes. Whenever I make any retouching, I never do it directly on top of the layer, I don't damage the existing original layer. What I do instead is I create an additional blank layer where I put my adjustments in. To create a new layer, you click on the little plus, which is next to the bin or trash icon, and if you're using an older version, this will look like two little folded rectangles. Click on that, and you'll see Layer 1. This is how you create a blank layer. Now if you double-click on Layer 1 to rename it, you can name it Retouching. I tend to name all my layers to avoid confusion later on because once you start to build all your layers up, it can get a bit confusing. Now this is just a blank layer and there's nothing inside of it. Now we're going to go to the spot healing brush tool. This is a tool that looks like a plaster or a band aid, and it removes marks and blemishes. I think she looks perfect. By the way, she doesn't need any changes, acne is fine, it's all beautiful, but anyway I'm going to show you how to do it in case you wanted that too. Now the spot healing brush tool is a brush, so it has a circle. This means that we can adjust the size of the brush like we did before with the square brackets. Let's square bracket to make it smaller and right to make it bigger, just going to need to make the brush smaller. We might need to zoom in a little bit more so we can see better. Okey-dokeys. Now the trick to using the spot healing brush tool is to make the brush just a tiny bit bigger than the actual spot. When you're done, you click and voila. Make sure the retouching layer is highlighted. Let's try another spots, maybe make the brush a bit smaller and voila. You can just keep going and start removing some spots. How satisfying is this. Make sure you don't overdo it because it can look very photoshoppy very quickly, so just do minor bits. Feel free to use your own images to do this. Now we're going to zoom out and I would like to show you something or fit to screen, command Control zero. Now my retouching layer is over here. If I were to hide my background layer, I want to show you what my retouching layer looks like. It looks like makeup, as if I put up a bit of makeup on my picture. Now can you show your picture again by clicking on the eye? Now if you hide the retouching layer, you can compare it with before. So before, after, before, after, and this is only possible when you have a smart object and you do it in a new layer. Pretty cool. Let's look at another example. Let's go to File, Open as Smart Object again, and let's select this image. Even though the tattoo is very cute, often models in the fashion industry have tattoos and sometimes designers don't want to display them so they get hidden, it's just an example. Again, we need to make sure that we create an additional layer, and we call it retouching. Then we make sure we go to spot healing brush tool, and we make the brush a bit bigger using the square brackets. Just make it a tiny bit bigger than the spots, or in this case, the beautiful tattoo, and just click, and no more tattoo. How amazing is that? Let's look at another example. We go File, Open as Smart Object again, and we select this image Nike, click on "Open" and again we make sure that we add a new layer, call it retouching. In this case, we're going to learn how to remove a logo, and that's often the case where your, I don't know the model is wearing branded clothing and you need it to be blank sides, no brands, this is how you do this and remove logos. If you go to the spot healing brush tool and again, you use the square brackets to adjust it, make the brush just a bit bigger than the logo and click and beautiful, plain white tee. Again, with this one, let's make it bigger, and click. Make sure you do not touch the guy with the t-shirt, you keep it there. That is it for the spot healing brush tool. Now we're going to look at this later, we're going to be using this in actual social media graphics rather than just editing images. Everything we're learning now step by step, will be used in holistic exercises, so will all make sense. Don't worry, you will use everything you've learned and put it into practice. Go ahead and close this, and I will see you soon. 14. The Clone Stamp Tool: Okay, so now we're going to look at another retouching tool. We've covered the Spot Healing Brush Tool so far, but we're going to cover the Clone Stamp tool, which allows you to clone somethings. So we're going to clone a skiers and add them all over the image, which is pretty cool. Then we're going to use a Content Aware Move Tool, which is a tool that allows us to move content in the image, and it will automatically fill the background, pretty cool as well. Then we have the Content Aware Fill, which allows you to remove objects or subjects in this case, and it will automatically fill the background. So pretty nice. I want us to right-click on the "Clone Stamp Tool" and open with Photoshop. Now can you see that my background is currently gray? And that's because I've changed this in the preferences. Sometimes I like to do this depending on the image because it just looks nicer I think. To do this, you need to go to Photoshop preferences. Or for PCs it will be under Edit, Preferences. Either way, if you press the shortcut Control or Command K, you will be able to access it. If you could go to Interface and change standard screen modes to light gray instead of another gray. I just think it looks better, doesn't it? Then we click on "Okay". Just like before, we're going to need a retouching layer. We're going to need to go to the Plus, create a new layer, and call it retouching layer. There's a tool called a clone stamp tool. It literally looks like a stamp, like the one you post in the passports. We'd like you to select that, the shortcut is s. Okay, what's really important about this tool now is that we need to go to the top and look for the word sample and makes sure we select, Sample All Layers, otherwise, this won't get applied to the current layer that we've just created, retouching layer. Make sure Sample All Layer, is selected. Like before, we have a brush here, which means that we can increase or decrease the brush size using our lovely square brackets. Left for smaller, right for bigger. Just like before, I want us to make our brush just a little bit bigger than whatever we want to copy. Now what we need to do is sample or pick a piece of the image that we would like to copy. In this case will do the snowboarder. To do this, you need to hold on the Altar/Option key and you'll see the bulls-eye icon. When you see that, you click, and that will copy that. Then you can just move your mouse elsewhere and click again, and it will draw it. Let's do this with another skier. Alt/Option and click, and then click to place it, and then another one click to place it, and then this guy over here and just start filling your skiers, the scaling with lots of skiers. Click and there could do three in one go, hold down the Alt/Option key and click, and then click again to draw it. You always have to go back to the Alt/Option key to select, to sample your picture, and then you click again paint it. Just keep going until you are happy with this. Now, you'll see the retouching layer over here, and just like before, you can hide that layer and show, hide and show. Now if you wanted to save this, feel free to go to File, Save As, and save this on your computer as a Photoshop file or a JPEG, and then press save when you're done. I'm just going to close this, and don't save. 15. The Content Aware Move Tool: Okay. Now I'm going to minimize Photoshop and go back to the Retouching folder and we're going to move onto the next retouching tool, which is called the Content Aware Move Tool. What it allows you to do is to move objects, and it will automatically fill the background. That's pretty cool. If we can right-click and open with Photoshop, and we're still on the Clone Stamp tool from previously. What we need to do now is go to the Content-Aware Move Tool, which is here. We're going to need to select the edges of our hikers over here, more or less approximately. We're going to go click and drag, and start drawing around the edges and try and close the selection. Once you've selected the hikers, you click and drag. Maybe we'll move it here. Then when you're done, you press "Enter" or "Return". To Deselect, Command or Control D. We've just moved the hikers elsewhere. That is how you use the Content-Aware Move Tool. If you weren't happy with the selection, like here I've selected to much of the clouds, you can always adjust the selection and redo it again. You can always try it with different images. I suggest you play around with your own images and get creative. That was it for the Content-Aware Move tool. Feel free to save it or to just close this, and don't save if you want. 16. The Content Aware Fill Tool: If we could minimize Photoshop and go back to the retouching folder, and we're going to move on to the content-aware fill tool, which is also an exciting retouching tool. Let's do this. We right-click on this image, "Open With" Adobe Photoshop. Now, instead of going to the content-aware move tool, which we were just on, we're going to go to another selection tool called the Lasso Tool. We're going to select the edges, the perimeters around this woman, and then we're going to use the Content-Aware Fill. Let's start. We can literally go click and drag, start drawing around the lady. Once you are more or less happy with this, and if you aren't, you can always deselect, Control D or Command D, and then start over, no problem. But don't worry, we can actually adjust this later, so it doesn't have to be perfect right now. Then we go to Edit, Content-Aware Fill, and you'll see the green here. This is the sampling area. Here you'll see a preview. If you increase that, you can zoom in a little bit more and see a preview, and it's not that bad, is it? Now, we might need to adjust the sampling area with the brush. We need to adjust the sampling area. If we go to the Plus, we can adjust it. By doing this, you saw that actually the image got fixed a little bit, and it's looking actually better. You might want to zoom in a little bit more. It's looking good. I suggest you do some minor adjustments. Plus to add pieces and Minus to remove some pieces. This will change the image, it will adjust it. Now, if you want to edit your actual image, you need to go to the Lasso Tool. Now, at this point, you might notice your computer heating up or some fanning noise. This is because Photoshop is doing a lot of work right now. It's quite a detailed part of the software, this, so don't worry, it's all normal. Either way, when you select the Lasso Tool, you'll see a Plus next to the Lasso, which means that you can increase the selection area if needed, which is not actually what I need to do here so I'm going to undo. Command or Control Z. But you might need to do that. Now, to remove pieces. If you want to make the selection area smaller, you might have to go to ALT, and in Adobe language, ALT means minus, it means subtract. If you hold down the ALT key and then you click and drag, you will see it will make the selection area smaller. It is all about playing and adjusting until you're happy with this. Then you can click on, "Okay" when you're happy and this will apply it to deselect it, edit, select, deselect, or Command or Control D. It's not too bad, is it? There are always a few adjustments that we can do by changing the size of the selection area. But just like before, you can hide the layer, which shows the lovely lady, and then you can show the layer, which actually hides her. It's actually the opposite because the extra layer is actually a piece of background. This is pretty cool and I love this. I suggest you play with this and you get rid of a lot of things in a lot of backgrounds and have fun with this. You can go ahead and close this and I will see you soon. 17. Photoshop for Graphics: Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the Spot Healing Brush Tool and all the other retouching tools that are pretty fun to use. I think you are ready for creating graphics now, so using Photoshop for a more graphical approach and creating things like a web banner, a sale ads, and other graphics for social media. We will do a lot of practical exercises now that are super fun, and I can't wait for you to get started with them. Drink a coffee and make sure you're really well concentrated. Let's head to it. 18. Artboards Explained: Now before we move on to further adjustments of images, we're going to have a look at something called artboards, which I briefly mentioned earlier. Let's just click on "Create new", and create a new artboard. This can be a mobile one or a print, this is totally up to you. Could select "Web Large", which is used a lot. Make sure that artboard is ticked first, and then click on "Create". Again, if you want to zoom in or out, you can go to View, zoom in and out or commands or control minus. I want you to make sure that you're on the Move tool and you're going to see there's Artboard 1. Now you can close this artboard so the arrow faces to the right or you can expand it. You can hide it or show it. We might want to zoom in even more out. Now, you could also resize your artboard by clicking and dragging. I'm just going to undo that. Or you can change your artboard dimensions in the Properties panel. Now, if you wanted to add an additional artboard or various artboards because you would like to have either multiple pages to your file or you would like to storyboard your graphics so you can compare, you just wouldn't like a different artboard size, then it can go to the Move tool, right-click, and select the Artboard tool. Now, when you do this, make sure that Artboard 1 is selected and you should be able to see these pluses. If you don't see these pluses, you have the same option here, no problem. These pluses allow us to add an additional artboard. If you click on the plus over here, it will add an additional artboard over here in the same size, Web Large. Click on the plus at the bottom, it will add there. Click on the plus here, and it's quite a nice way to build our document up and have lots of artboards next to each other or you can have a few variations of the same design and compare and maybe change the width and the height. Maybe you would like it to be for an Instagram document. You would want to make it a square, which is 1,080, 1,080. Now, this is a square and it's ready for an Instagram post. If you click on the plus again, it will create the same size. I just wanted to touch up on some artboards because we will be using this later on in the course when we start creating more graphic key, more advertisement, and social media documents, rather than just photo editing, which is what we're doing. First, we need to build our skills up before we get there. The final thing I want to show you is also that you can add some guides that tell you when you've hit the center of an artboard. If you were to select an artboard, let's say Artboard 1, you go to the Move tool and you left-click and drag on those routers, these are routers. You can add a guide and it will snap to the center, which means it will stop at the center, and if not, just make sure you're lining it up to those white boxes, and then click and drag and snap to the center. It's a clever way of dividing your document and to know where the center is. You could do that for each individual artboards. You would just have to click on an artboard and then you can click and drag and add those guides. Click and drag. Always make sure you're on the Move tool. Also to clarify, that Artboard 1 over here is Artboard 1 over here. Artboard 2, if you click on it, Artboard 2 will be highlighted. If you click on Artboard 5, Artboard 5 will be highlighted. Now, if I select Artboard 1 and I add an image in this artboard, the image will come up in here under its layer. If I go to File and Place Embedded, this is how you place an image in an existing file. The image will go in here. So File, Place Embedded. We use embedded, because if we use embedded, it will place it as a smart object. Then you can choose any image you want, it doesn't really matter, and now we have our image. You can resize it, you can make it the whole size of the artboard, and when you're happy, you press Return or Enter. Now my image, this image, is in Artboard 1. I can close it, or hide it, or show it. If I were to add something else on top like File, Place Embedded again and choose another image, this one again, and resize it, and Enter, you will see that it is currently also in Artboard 1 and it's above the other image. If I move this, it will be below the other. You can also click on the little arrow and close the artboard. This is how you work. You look at the artboard and the layers that are inside them. Now, this is artboards explained and we're going to move on. See you soon. 19. Warmup Exercise: Now, we're going to do a warm-up exercise that covers a lot of things that we've covered previously. If we can double-click on the Warm-up Exercise, zip file so that it expands into a folder and we can access the files inside. This is what we'll be creating, and we'll cover the Spot Healing Brush Tool, image adjustments, rotation, and also how to place a logo in. Few things to cover, and this is the original image, this is the Logo, and this one is the Working File. The Working File ends was PSD format, so that's a Photoshop file. If you're using a Mac, you'll see a preview, a thumbnail of your exercise, but if you're using a PC, you will see PS, the Photoshop icon in blue. Either way, if he can double-click and open it up, and that is our document. I've pre-prepared our documents, so we'll have Artboard One here, which I've locked, it will have all the layers inside, and Artboard Two, which is this artboard and it's the one we'll be working with. We're going to recreate this on the right-hand side, so this time because we have an existing artboard, we need to place an image in this existing document rather than opening it in a new document, so what we do is we go to File, Place Embedded, go back to our folder, 5 Warm-up Exercise, and select the image and click on Place. We're going to have to rotate and resize this, so if you hover over the corner and you see the double bended arrow, you can left-click and drag, and if you hold down the Shift key, it will rotate it over a 90-degree angle. Now, let's do it the right way, there we go, clockwise, and now to make it bigger, we click and drag and resize our image, and then when we're done, we press Enter or Return. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to change the color, because obviously there's a difference in color adjustments, this is a little bit more red, and this is a little bit more green, so that's what we're going to change using image adjustments. If we go to Image, Adjustments, you have a whole lot of changes you can make, but we need to go to Hue/Saturation and slightly change the Hue/Saturation, so it's a little bit more warmer. That is about right, obviously, there's artistic freedom, you can change it, you can make it a more bluey color as well, and then you click on OK, now that's the image adjustment done. Now, I don't know if you can tell, but they're fewer, I don't know what these are. They're like leaves, or tomatoes, or plants. Let's call them flowers, so there are fewer flowers on this side than there are on this side, so we're going to have to use a Spot Healing Brush Tool to remove these. What we do is, just like before we create a new layer, click on the plus, and we go to the Spot Healing Brush Tool over here. Now what's important is that we make our brush just a little bit bigger than the spot, or in this case, the little leafy tomato. To make the brush bigger, we need to press the right square bracket, that's about right. Make sure you get the shadow in as well, can make it even bigger. Let's see. If it doesn't work, we can always undo it. When we're happy, we click, and not too bad. Now for this bit, we click and there we go, so this is how we can use the Spot Healing Brush Tool in graphics as well. Now for the final part, it's adding the logo, make sure you go back to the Move tool as a default, and then we go File, Place Embedded, choose the logo which is a PNG with a clear background, that I created it. Click on Place, and it's really tiny, so we need to make this bigger, pop it over here, and you press Return or Enter, and that is our image done. If you wanted to export Artboard two, which is the one you've just been working on, you just have to select Artboard two, and then File, Export, Artboards to Files, and this will give you a panel. If you make sure you tick Export Selected Artboards, it will select this artboard, and save just this one as a JPEG. Click on Run, and they said was successful. When you minimize, now, you will see the file over here, and that's the JPEG, and it's Artboard Tow, you can always rename it. That was it for our little warm-up exercise. Well done. 20. Shapes Explained: Now we're going to do something a little bit more graphicy. For creating more graphic elements, we do need to learn how to use shapes and text. That's what the introduction will be about right now. Shouldn't take too long. If we go to Photoshop again and you close any documents you were working on, we're just going to go and create a new blank slate, the clean page, and we go to Print or Web where you'd make a landscape. Click on "Art boards," and click on "Create." For creating shapes, you have the Shape tool over here. You've got the Rectangle tool, rounded rectangle, ellipse, and some other shapes. If you right-click, you have these options. If you select the Rectangle tool, for instance, you'll see at the top you'll see the fill and a stroke. The fill is the color inside the shape and the stroke is the border. If you wanted to change a color, you click on "Fill," and you can change the color in here. You can also change the color by clicking on "Color" over here. Then your color will change accordingly. Again, keep it in the think themes. Well, that's what I'll do. Then if you want to draw rectangle, you can click and drag. Again, to draw a square with equal width and height, you hold down the Shift key. Now, every time you draw a shape, it automatically gets created in its own layer. That's pretty useful. Now, if you wanted to draw circles or ellipses, you can go to the Ellipse tool. For an ellipse, you just click and drag and for a circle, you hold down the Shift key. Now, you also have some other tools. You have the polygon tool, so if you click and drag, you can create the polygon. If you click, you can also determine how many sides you want or if you want a star. If you didn't want a star, you can just untick that. Will no longer be a star. If you wanted the star, you tick on star, and you can change the number of sides as well. Now you have this weird star. You can change the indents to 50 percent, that creates a quite nice generic star, see? Now we have all these random shapes all over the place and it's starting to look messy. When you've created a shape, you always go straight to the Move tool, otherwise it will get messy. With the Move tool, you can just click on a shape. If you click on this one, for instance, it will be highlighted here in the layers. If I click on this one, Ellipse 2, it will be highlighted in layers. If I wanted to delete these, I can just select one and delete. Press the "Delete" button on your keyboard and start deleting. Is quite useful. Now, let's look at some other tools. You also have the line tool, you can click and drag, you'll create a line. You have the custom shape tool which I love. You'll see shape at the top. If you click on the arrow here, you should be able to see all these shapes or you should be able to see a bunch of folders. In these folders, you have a lot of shapes over here like submarine. That's funky. I have some leaf trees here that I downloaded. You have a lot of free brushes and shapes that you can download from the Adobe website, and there's a creator called Kyle Webster that created a lot of very cool ones that you can use. How nice is that. Now, if you wanted to change the color of a shape, say you wanted to change the color of this shape, you just have to select it. You can only change a color of a shape if you're on the Shape tool. If you are not on the Shape tool, the color option will not be there. If you are on the Shape tool, the fill and stroke option is there. You can either click here, and that will change. Or what you can also do is double-click here and click on this rainbow, it'll give you a wider range of options for colors. What you can also do with your shapes is you can make them transparent. If you select a shape, the rectangle, you'll see at the top it will see opacity. If you reduce the opacity, will make it transparent. Obviously you might only see it if it overlaps with something else. If you go to the Move tool, you move it, maybe move this shape above the others, it overlaps. You can see that it is indeed transparent. You also have fill which does a similar thing, actually, it's like a transparency but it's less filled. That's pretty cool for now. Let me show you something else that you can do with a shape. If you look at the Properties panel, you have the same option and I showed you before. You have the fill. This is the fill, the stroke. The Stroke is if you wanted a border, you could create a border. I personally don't really like them that much, but feel free to use them if you need for a border. If you look here, you have the width and the height. You can always change the measurements over here by typing it. Now, I'm just going to remove the stroke just because I personally don't like it. I just don't think it looks good. Below over here, you'll see these represent each corner of your shape. If you click and drag and make sure this is on, this is linked, so it makes all corners together. This represents the corners of your shapes. If you click and drag, you can round your shape. You can even make it look like a pill form, which is something that I use a lot actually for call-to-action buttons in social media graphics, web graphics. You say, click me over here, and it looks good. You don't have to use this of course, we'll be using it in an exercise later. 21. Shadow Effects: Okay, now another thing that you can do, which also we'll be using in, an exercise a bit later, is you can add a shadow to your shapes or you can add some effects as well just to enhance, to highlight it. Remember, we worked with layer mask. We worked with adjustment layer, which was for fill for the background. We worked with new layer. We worked indirectly with delete layer. So instead of clicking on that, I just press the "Delete" button and delete layer. Just going to undo. It does the same thing as pressing Delete button. But we're going to look at this one, fx, which stands for effects, like an effect that you can add on something. If you left-click on it, you'll see here a list, a drop-down list of effects that you can add. You can do things like Bevel and Emboss, which looks pretty cool actually, when you use it. You just need to modify. I can change the size, look at that. Standing out a bit better, doesn't it? You can also soften if it's less harsh, you can change the angle. You can change the color, the opacity. Like there's a lot you can play with here. If want to get rid of it, you just untick Bevel and Emboss. You have things like stroke so you can add a border. This is actually preferable, I think, to stroke before. The one I showed you before. In color, we can change the color. Always pink. You also have drop shadow. So you get rid of stroke. In drop shadow, if you actually click on the word rather than just a tick. This is something that I probably use the most. It's just so it enhances whatever I want people to click on. Just mix this button, stand out a little bit more and we'll be using this later and we click on "OK." Okay, next, say I would like to change this shape. I would like to elongate it and rotate it, you can absolutely do that. I just need to make sure I go to the Move tool and I click on this shape or make sure I select a layer over here. Now remember, to resize something, it's free transform or Command or Control T, which was here. I never use this. I just use a shortcut, Command, or Control T, then you can click and drag and it will re-size it, but keep the proportion. If you do not want to keep their proportions, you hold down the Shift key. Now, be aware of this because Adobe has changed this in the recent years. Before it used to be the opposite. Before to keep the proportion you used to have to hold down the Shift key. To distort it, it was without Shift. So look at which one is applicable to your version of Photoshop and use that. I'm going to shift and drag and I can distort it. For rotation, you hover over the corner and you click and you drag. 22. Text Explained: Now, for the final thing that is necessary, because I'm just giving you a little overview of some graphic elements that we'll be using in the next exercise. For the final thing, we add some text in, which isn't that complicated, especially, if you've used some other similar software before. You always have to go to the type tool T. Maybe make sure you highlight the top layer over here so that your new layer goes above that one. Now, make sure you click and drag and create a text frame. This random text is Lorem Ipsum, it's just some dummy text. You can just press "Delete" and it will get rid of it. Now can type in, Click me. Now, if you wanted to change a format or there is a possibility that you don't even see any text here, that it's some completely hidden, and that could be because I drew your font as really massive or really small. Either way, if you wanted to make sure that you select everything in your text frame, you can go to Select, All, or shortcut Command or Control A. This will select everything in this text frame. Make sure it's all selected, and then we can start adjusting the text. If we look at our properties panel again, we have some text formatting options over here. We have character formatting options and paragraph. In character, you can change the font. Raleway is the font I'm currently using, but you can choose some different fonts, whatever you want. I'll stick with Raleway because why not? Below you have bold, regular, light, so you can change the type and the thickness of your font. This is the font size, so you can highlight this. Here, it's the font size, it always indicates. You can highlight it and you can choose another option, or you can use one of my favorite tricks; you highlight this value box and you press the upward arrow on your keyboard to make it go bigger. Isn't that faster? Obviously, if you need a certain measurement, you can always type it in. To change a color, you can click on the color. Click on white. I just want to show you what this bit is here. It's called leading. If I were to press "Return" here, you might not see me anymore, the word me. Let's select everything. Select, All. Now it will be selected. Now, the reason you don't see me anymore is because the leading, this is the leading, the space between the lines over here, is way too big. If you change that to something smaller, you'll see it here. Now, obviously the space is too narrow, so we just need to make it bigger. This is the leading, so you can change the space between your lines, pretty useful, and it's the same in all Adobe software for text. Now, if you ever see three dots, three dots always means more options for that panel. If you click on it, you will see some more options over here. You've got these guys, which is vertical scale and horizontal scales. This is for distorting your text, which is fine, but it distorts the font, so bear in mind, and the vertical one. You also have this one which is tracking which is space between your letters, which is also cool. I don't tend to work with these that much unless I really want to play and distort my font. Below, you have paragraphs, so you can align to the left and align center, align right. If you want to do things like underline, you can do that here or small caps are all caps. That is pretty much it for text. You can go back to the selection tool, the Move tool, and move it. Now remember the drop shadow that I showed you earlier. Well, you have the same option. You can also add an effect to text, just make sure the text layer is ticked and then you can select stroke for instance. It adds a funky stroke and drop shadow, which adds a shadow to the text, like so. That's it for shapes and text. See you soon for an exercise where we get to practice this. 23. Summer Sale Ad: Now we're going to do an exercise where we get to practice shapes and image adjustments and text and fx for shadows. If you can double-click on 6. Summer Sale, and select the folder and what we'll be working with is these guys. These are just all the same templates, but you can choose which image you would like to recreate, that's totally up to you. The options will be there, and we have the Photoshop file PSD. Remember for a PC, it will have the PS icon in blue. We'll open this template and we'll recreate whichever one you would like. Then maybe after, you can be really creative and make your own one. If you can double-click on that and open the summer sale folder. First of all, this might look a little bit messy because we have a lot of folders, a lot of artboards open. We're just going to close each of these artboards by clicking on the arrow, so it faces to the right. We're going to recreate one of these on the right. First of all, we're going to zoom in a bit. Now if you wanted to recreate these images, they're available in that same folder. I'm going to recreate this one, and I need to make sure that I'm on the move tool, I'm on this artboard, Artboard 3. Now I can just go ahead and go to File, Place Embedded, go find that folder, and select this image which is not a black and white image. Just going to click Place. Now I need to resize this image. It looks similar to this image, to the original one. More or less, we're just doing it by eye, we don't have to do it exactly the same. Artistic freedom is always welcome here. Then press Return or Enter. Make sure you have Artboard 3 expanded. So the arrow faces downwards, so you can actually see the layer over here, and obviously this needs to be black and white. We need to go to Image, Adjustments, Black & White, and there we go. Now, all these are just some minor adjustments, this image is a little bit brighter. We can try and play with this. Make things a bit whiter like dragging the color stops a bit more to the right, and yeah I think that's about it, and I click on Okay. Now if I wanted to recreate this exactly on the right-hand side, what I can do is go to the move tool and add some guides by left clicking on the ruler, drag it down. I can add a guide every time there's something there that I want to add, like the text. What we'll start with first is the shapes, just going to add one more here. I know where my rectangle needs to be, and I'm going to go to the rectangle tool. Maybe we can start with the big one, the big rectangle. We're going to click and drag and draw a rectangle, and obviously it's not really the same color. Let me show you a way to get that color. If we go to Fill and if we click on the rainbow, if you hover over your page, you will have the eye dropper, looks like a pipette for eye drops. If you click on that fuchsia, you click on Okay, it will copy that color. Now we just need to go to the move tool, make sure rectangle is selected and we're going to rotate this image, the shape. We go to Edit, Free Transform or Command T, and we can click and drag and try and get it more or less the same. Again, doesn't have to be identical, then you press Return. Now clearly, it needs to be a little bit transparent, and it's either going to be a reduced opacity. Let's look what that looks like, and that looks good. It's a reduced opacity, which means it's transparent. Good. Now we're going to do this rectangle. We go to the rectangle tool and we do the best we can to make an approximately the same size. Again, it doesn't have to be exactly the same, and then we go back to the Fill, back to the rainbow, and back to the eye dropper tool, and Okay. Not bad. Now we need to add a little shadow to this rectangle. It's really hard to see, but let me zoom in. See there's a little shadow there which we're going to add. If we go to fx and go to Drop Shadow, and well, I need to reduce the spreads and maybe make it a little bit less opaque, so a bit more transparent and something like that. When you're done, you click on Okay. Now we're going to move to the text. Something like this can be done really fast as you can see. If we go to the Horizontal Type Tool, the type tool, and we click and drag and create our text frame. Now I want you to click and drag on the bounding box here that you can see just so that our text frame is the same size as our rectangle more or less. I want you to type in SUMMER SALE. Obviously, summer needs to be changed, actually they all need to be changed. First of all, to change the color of your text, you can highlight your whole text or you can go Select, All, make sure it's all selected. You can click on a color here, just so it's not transparent for now, or you can go, like before the Fill here and you'll see the color picker and you click on the eye dropper and Okay and at least we have the color right. The font that we're using is raleway. If you highlight your text and you make sure that it's raleway, and maybe you reduce the font size, maybe type, I don't know, 50, not bad. Maybe you can highlight summer and change whatever needs to be changed. Here, you can obviously make it your own font, you don't have to make it exactly the same, could be another font, you can also maybe reduce, change a few things, play around with it just to edit. Maybe you need more tracking, which is space between the letters, maybe I need to resize the font. That's up to you, I just want you to play with this and see what works. Then highlight sale and make sale much bigger. You highlight this font size, you highlight the value and you increase it, make it bigger. Problem with this is you always have to change the leading as well, make the lending bigger. If you need to change the vertical scale you can. There's always room, and then you have to go back to leading and change that. I know I've done a lot of steps right now, but I expect you to try and play around with this and see what you think looks better. Then when you're done and you're more or less happy, you go to the move tool, maybe I'll move this down, maybe make the cell a little bit bigger, and maybe increase the leading a little bit more. So yeah. Have fun with playing with that and changing it around. Now for the final part is Shop Now. We need to go to the type tool and click and drag and create a new box, and type in SHOP NOW, and my text's currently, I can't see it because probably it has the same color. Again, our famous Select, All option, always very useful. Then maybe we make the font size smaller so we can see it. We can change it to like 14, let's say, and maybe we need to make it white. You can just click on the white you see here, it will become white and you can increase the size and obviously I have a typo which is fine. Always change that, highlight it. Now the fonts for here is also raleway, I just need to make sure I remove all the vertical scale. I'm just going to make it 100, which means it's just original size. But feel free again to play with it and do whatever you want, and then go to the move tool when you're done and put it into place, and that is our summer sale file. Now if you want, feel free to recreate this one or this one, or use your own images and your own color and your own text and change the whole content and make it your own. See you soon. 24. Banner Ad Part 1: We'll be creating a banner ads that covers shapes, shadows, images, and much more. Now if you can double-click on the banner ad zip folder and you can access the files inside that folder. There we go. This is the example of what we'll be creating. It's an image, it's a circle with a stroke, text, a rounded rectangle, special effects shape and a shadow. We should have all the skills necessary now to do this. I would like us to select Banner Design WF, working file. Click on "Open". Before we move on, I do want to make a little note about the preferences of the colors of your interface. If you go to Photoshop preferences and for PCs it will be in Edit. Preferences will be at the bottom. Otherwise, the shortcut is Command or Control K for Kiddo, if you can't find it. I would like us to go to interface. Just so you know, you can change a color theme of your Photoshop, so you can make it darker or lighter. It's entirely up to you. I tend to use this one. But what you can also do is change the paste boards or where the artboards are, and make it lighter or darker. Now, for this, the purpose of today, this is the original one. I'm going to make this light gray. I find that a little bit fresher. We're going to be using this for the course now. Obviously, you can change and choose your own colors if you want. Choose the color theme that you prefer. For now, we'll keep it that way. Then we can click on okay and voila. There's two artboards. One is Design 1 and the other is your artboards. Now, we need to make sure that Design 1 is facing to the right, it's closed, and your artboard, the arrow is facing downwards, so it's expanded. We're going to recreate this graphic on the right-hand side. Of course, you can always use your own images and colors and content and text always, but I'm going to recreate this so you can follow me or make it your own. If we go to File, Place Embedded, and we need to find that folder again and select the image, which is this one. Click on "Place." Then we can resize it. Not too big. Put it in place and press "Enter" when you're happy. I always start with the bottom layer. Whatever is at the back, the furthest away from me, that's what I start with, the bottom layer. What I do next is this ellipse shape. If we could go to the shape tool and select the ellipse. Now, we can try and draw this shape, which we're going to have to move down. If I go to the Move tool again, I can move it down and adjust it. To change the color, you go back to the Shape tool. You change the fill. If you go again to the rainbow, you click on that color. Copy that color. But obviously, you are free to use your own colors. Now, if this is not exactly right, that's absolutely fine because I can still customize it but I have to go to the Move tool. Remember Free Transform, Command or Control T can then maybe hold the Shift key so I can distort it a bit more and maybe make it a little bit bigger. More or less again, we're always trying to do it approximately. Then we press "Return" or "Enter." Now, for that line, there are a few ways we could do this. We can create an additional circle or we could just add a stroke which is available in effects. Make sure ellipse is selected, and then you go to Effects, Stroke, and see, it's already looking okay. Select stroke and just reduce the size a little bit. I think it's about 18 pixels. Of course, if you click on the color over here, it needs to be white. Either click from here, utmost corner, or you can click from here, same thing, and then click "Okay." I just realized my image needs to be slightly moved to the left. I just need to select the image. Make sure I'm on the Move tool and just move the image a little bit more to the left. Now, that's done. 25. Banner Ad Part 2: Anyway, now we're going to do the texts, and we're going to go to the Type Tool, and we're going to create a text frame, click and drag approximately the same size and you can start typing your texts. Now, see I started typing but it's the same color so I can't see it. Again, I need to make sure that it's all selected. I go to Select. All and just make sure that the color for now is white. Can always change it later, so you click here. The reason I can't see my text is because the text layer was underneath the ellipse. So I just need to make sure that my text layer is at the top. Now I can start typing again. Initiative, creative, challenge. I bet I have a lot of typos in there. Again, select all and let's maybe make this already smaller. If we go to set the font size and make this smaller, and make sure maybe that the lettering is not really big, so we can see the remaining text, creative, challenge. Now the font needed for this exercise is called Roboto Slab. It's available if you go to finder on the Mac or File Explorer on a PC, you go back to that Seven Banner Ads folder. I've actually placed the fonts in here in a folder. If you double-click and double-click on that font, click on "Install Font". You should have access to this font now in all your software, like everything, even word, any software on your computer will have that font. Go back to the Type Tool and select everything. In character you just have to select Roboto Slab Bold. Now we're going to readjust every text piece by piece. We'll start with this one. First of all, it needs to be bigger. Second of all, I need to make sure it's not horizontally skilled and it's just normal. So normal would be 100 percent scale. Then you can make the font size bigger again. Now it's getting there. It just needs to be all caps. I need to scroll down and I'll see all caps over here. It's still not exactly right, isn't it? I think there needs to be a bigger tracking. Now remember, tracking is the space between letters. We can see here, there's quite a wide spaces between letters. I need to increase the tracking over here. Highlight this value box, press the upward arrow on my keyboard and there we go, it's starting to look a little better. I could also vertically scale it so it's a bit more distorted. Now I need to apply the same things to the rest of the text. You can always make the text frame a bit bigger or smaller, you can always change in and just start making the same edits we just did to the rest of the text. Once you're more or less happy with the changes you made for the text, you can also change the color of this piece by highlighting it, by going to color, and using the eyedropper tool for this. That's more or less. Obviously, I just realized that I had a typo in the initial one and it's initiative, but that's all good. Once you're done with that, you can always add start yours today as well. If there's not enough space, always make sure that you can extend your frame and then close it again later. Adjust the font size and something like that and go back to the Move tool. Changing. Now for the shape, the pill form shape, the call to action button over here. We need to go to the rectangle tool and click and drag and create a rectangle. Then we change the fill, go to the rainbow, select this color, and click on "Okay." Not bad for now. Now to round the corners, we go to the Properties panel, we go to the corner options here, and we click and drag and we make sure that the link icon is ticked and click and drag. Now it looks like a pill shape. Now if it's a little bit too large, too long, too wide, I can always go to the width tool and make sure this is unticked and just reduce pressing down the arrow on my keyboard and it will reduce the width. Then let's add a shadow, shall we? We go to Effects, Drop Shadow and we can change shadow, change size, change spread, distance, something like that, and click on "Okay." Then we go to the Type Tool and we're going to do the little text here. We can click and drag, sometimes that happens. What just happened is we converted the shape into a text frame. That happens, just edit, undo. Then we go to the Type Tool, and what you could do is create a text frame that's away from the shape and then bring it back in and just type Click Here and resize it accordingly, highlight it, and by going to the font size over here. I'm pressing the upward arrow on a keyboard. Once you're done with resizing, you go to the Move tool and you can move it. Then the final part is the arrow, which I've saved as a PNG file in that folder. We just have to go to File, Place Embedded, select the arrow Photoshop file, and it's here hiding somewhere. I can just put it there. If it's too small, you can use a Free Transform button, Command or Control T or edit Free Transform and resize it like this. Go to the Move tool and click "Away." If you zoom out, you will see that it looks gorgeous, and if you want, you can change all the contents and make it your own. Congratulations on completing this. You rock. 26. Filters / Blurs: Hey guys, okay, we're going to work with Photoshop filters this time, and it's more about editing images and adding some cool features to them. So if you can double-click on the eight filters zip file, and it will expand into a folder. They have a few images that we'll add or apply filters to. So let's go back to Photoshop. What we'll do is we're going to open each of those images individually as a Smart Object and then add the filters to them. So if we could go to "File", "Open a Smart Object", make sure we go back to that folder and select filters. What we'll start with first is Blur, Tilt and Shift. So click on open, and make sure it's a smart object. If it's not a smart object, you can always right-click and "Convert to Smart Object". That's always an option. So now we're gonna go to Filters, Blur Gallery, Tilt, and Shift. So you have a whole bunch of different types of blurs you have Fill Blur, Iris Blur. We're going to work with Tilt and Shift, we're going to do a few of them. I mean, there are so many, so we can't possibly do all of them right now, but just a few cool ones. So Tilt and Shift. So you can literally click and drag and tilt this so you can move it down, and tilt it and literally blur kind of everything else that's not in this section. By clicking and dragging over here, you'll see it will start to blur. I always see that mine be a little bit much, headache alerts. But you can reduce it and play with it. Now as usual, if you're happy, you can just press "Enter" or "Okay" at the top, and the effect will be applied. Now because it was a Smart Object, we always have the option with the eye here to hide it and show. Hide and Show. Which is quite nice when you're editing images. So okay, that's it for Blur, Tilt, and Shift. Let's close this tab. Don't save unless you're really keen. Again, "File", "Open a smart object" and we're going to move on to the next one. The next one is Iris Blur. Select this. Finding Nemo type fish Dory. Again, we go to "Filters", "Blur Gallery", but this time, "Iris Blur". The Iris Blur kind of blurs your images in this sort of shape. So what you need to do is click and drag and try more or less, and align the parameters of this shape, of this oval, so it kind of aligns with the fish. And now you click and drag, and you can blur the rest of the image. So sometimes you might want to extend your shape a little bit more like this, and then, maybe extend those guys. Click and drag away, and now I have to blur a bit more and you'll see that kind of everything blurs except inside these dots, these parameters. Then you click on "Okay", and you will see that it's kind of a nice blur. So it's good if you have an object that you want to highlight and blur the rest of the image. Again, you have before and after, before and after by clicking on the "Eye" for visibility. Okay, let's move on to the next one. So again we close a little tab and we go to "File". Now we're going to open a Photoshop file. So next image is a Photoshop file. So Instead of opening as Smart Object, we're just going to go "File", "Open" so that we can edit the layers. So can you see it's a Photoshop file. So "File", "Open" and click on "Open" and thanks to that, we have all the layers and backgrounds. So this image over here, make you're on the "Move Tool", this is a cutout. So it's already cut out for us, and what we're going to have to do is duplicate this cutout, this lady, and add a motion blur which will make it look like she's moving or like she's dancing. Let me repeat how to duplicate something. If you make sure you're on the move tool, hover over the layer and the lady, and hold down the Alt Option key, and you'll see a black and white cursor. This means duplication, and you can click and drag and duplicate the cut-out. Now if I wanted this to go behind the other layer, I can click on that layer and drop it below, and now I have two. Now I'm going to add a filter and the motion blur to this layer, to this one. So we're gonna go to "Filter", "Blur", "Motion Blur". Quite cool, you can play around with how crazy you want it to be like this is a bit crazy. You can make it a little bit more subtle, or a bit more, and that is up to you. The amount that you want. Once you're happy with the amount that you want you click on "Okay" and you can always move, it's a bit more there and there, could be more subtle like this. Whatever you think looks best. You can always go back and edit it. So if you wanted to edit the motion blur, you'll see "Motion Blur" here and you can actually double-click on it, and then edit it. That's that for motion blur. So feel free to do this with a picture of yourself dancing of really anything, your cat that's moving. Have fun with it. For now we can close this, and we'll move onto another filter which is pretty exciting. It's called Liquify. 27. Face Aware Liquify: I want us to go to "File", "Open as Smart Object", and select this bearded guy and click on "Open". We need to go to "Filter" and select, "Liquify" this time. It will open it up in a new panel, over here. Now, what we're looking at here is, Face-Aware Liquify and it's pretty cool. So it automatically detects a face and then you can make some adjustments. You have eyes, nose, mouth, face shape, and more. Now, the left hand side will be for left eyes and the right for right. If you want them to change equally, you just need to make sure that the link buttons are ticked and then you can change them. So play around with them. If you want to make your eyes bigger, you click and drag. You can change the eye height. Make them less high, make them less small, tiny eyes, or more. You can change the eye width. Eye tilt, that looks a bit weird, and eye distance. Less eye distance and more. All these variations, we can change. You can also change a nose. Longer nose, shorter nose, the nose width. Who needs a nose job? You can just edit it in Photoshop, and a larger nose. This is the creepiest bit. You can make him look sad or you can make him look happy and smile. Sad. Happy. You can also change the upper lips so it's higher, thicker upper lip, thicker lower lip. You an change it. You can change a mouth width so it's wider, and a higher mouth. When you're happy, you can just click on "Okay" and it will apply it. Then if you click on the famous eye, the visibility, you can preview it before, after, before, after. That's pretty cool. Obviously, we made him look a bit alienesque, but you can make it look more realistic as well, of course. As always, I believe in repetition. We're going to look at another image and do the same thing. Go to "File", "Open as Smart Object", and we'll find this image of a very, extremely beautiful girl who doesn't need any changes to be made but anyway, you can click on "Open" and same thing applies. So you go to "Filter", "Liquify". Again, you can even make one eye big and the other one very small. Looks cool. Change the eye height, or you can make these the same. Smaller eyes, or larger eyes. Looks a bit like an anime. The eye distance. Change the nose height and make the nose very thin. It's already a thin nose. I can make her smile, looks a bit creepy. Make her really sad. Increase the upper lip, increase the lower lip. Maybe give her a tiny mouth. I forgot to mention before, you can also change her forehead to give her a very big forehead or a tiny forehead. A tiny chin, or a really big chin. Change her jawline so it's tiny, or make it a wider jawline. Change her face width, give her a tiny face, like an elf or quite a larger face. Now she looks properly like an anime. If I click on "Okay", and I'm happy with this gorgeous creation, I can hide the eyes and compare it with before. Make it look like anime. Obviously, if you go back to Liquify and you want to make this a little bit more realistic and make some more minor changes, rather than the crazy ones I've made, obviously, feel free to do so. Make sure you highlight all these so they change incrementally. That's a little bit more realistic, isn't it? There we go and click on "Okay". That's a little bit more real. So after, before and after, before and after. I hope you enjoyed this and have a play with your own images. You can go ahead and close these tabs and I will see you soon. 28. Clipping Masks Explained: Hey guys, we're going to look at something called clipping mask now, which is a very cool Photoshop feature that allows you to place images inside of shapes and text. If you can double-click on the zip file and it will expand into a folder and you can access the images and files inside. We're not going to look at this just yet. First of all, we're going to create a plain old, blank canvas in photoshop. You can click on "Create new", and you can choose any type of document you want for this, it doesn't really matter, and then click on "Create" and we have a blank canvas. Again, if you want, you can always go to Photoshop preferences or edits, preferences for PCs, and choose and change interface. You can change the color of the background, and when you're happy, you click on "Okay," and there you go. What we'll need now for clipping masks is shapes. There are a couple of ways of creating clipping masks. One is the old-fashioned way with shapes, and this way is useful because most existing templates on Photoshop have this technique in mind, but there's also a new way of doing this, and that's the frame tool. I will show you both tools and then you get to pick which you prefer. Let's go to the shape tool and let's change the fill to whatever you want. I'm going to go with pink as usual, and you can click and drag and create a shape. So we have our shape and this will be our clipping, and we have the layer of our shape. Now we're going to place an image above this. So we go File, Place Embedded, and you can use any images that you want, or let's use a turtle. Click on "Place" and you can resize. What's important here is that your image is not smaller than your shape, it has to be bigger, and it has to be directly on top of it. The layer has to be the layer above the layer of the shape. Once you've done, you can press return as usual to place in, and I'm going to show you the famous clipping mask technique, and it's not too hard. What you need to do is make sure you're on the Move tool and hover in between the layers. Just hover, just move your mouse around. Now hold down the Alt or Option key and you just keep moving until you see the square and the black arrow. Once you see the square and black arrow, and only when you see it, you then click and your image will go in your shape. Let's do it again. I always believe in repetition and this time let's select an ellipse, keep it different, and we could make it into a circle, holding down the Shift key and change the fills with the color again. Now we go to File, Place Embedded and look in any of the Photoshop folders that I sent to you for a nice image. Yeah, sure. I'll choose the little hand here with the leaf and click and drag, place it above. Press "Return" or "Enter", and now hold down the Alt or Option key, hovering between the layers and then click. Let's do it one more time, but this time, we're going to do it with a custom shape tool. We can choose a whole load of shapes. So if we select the custom shape tool, we can select any type of shape you want. I'm going to go with one of these gorgeous trees. If you don't have these, search for any of the folders that you like and choose a shape that you like. Artistic freedom here, and then you can click and drag and draw whatever shape you chose. Again, maybe change the color so it's not white, so you can see it a bit better, and maybe zoom in a little bit more. Go to the Move tool. What a pretty tree, isn't it? Go File, Place Embedded, and choose any image you want, click on "Place" and resize this, and isn't that interesting? Pictures of trees inside a shape of a tree. Press "Enter" and hold down the Alt key and click and wow, that's awesome. Beautiful. Now if you wanted to move the image inside the shape around, you just need to make sure that you're on the Move tool and that you have the image selected. If you're not sure which one it is, make sure that it's the one was the arrow, because that means that this layer goes inside that one. This one is clipped to this, and also if you're not sure a trick I use is the eyes. So if I hide it, I know, okay, just hidden that image. Now it's showing, now it's hiding, so it's this image. You can move it around, and if you wanted to resize it, you can go Command or Control T, Free Transform or Edit, Free Transform, and you can resize your trees. When you're done, press "Enter". Now if you wanted to resize the pink tree shape, then you just would have to select the pink tree shape, the layer of that, the maple tree, and then you go to Edit, Free Transform, and then you can resize the shape of the tree rather than the image, as you can see. You can also move it around. It always depends on what you select. If you select the shape, it will change the shape. If you select the image, it will change the image. To select both, you just have to hold down the "Shift" key, click and shift both layers over here, and then you can move both. It's like when you select two folders, it's the same principle here. 29. The Frame Tool: Now, this is a clipping mask technique, but I did promise you to show you the newest technique, the latest one, which is similar to Adobe InDesign actually. It's called a Frame Tool, which is considerably new in the last couple of years. Let's have a look at how this works, and I let you be the boss of choosing which technique you prefer personally. Let's go to the Frame Tool over here. At the top, you can see you can choose between rectangle or circle. The downside of this one is that you have no custom shape and you have no text, which we'll look at later. If you go to this, you choose the rectangle and then you click and drag, you'll see a frame and you'll see it over here, and then what you can do is go "File" "Place Embedded" and choose any image you want, place it. It's the same thing, now you can move it around and you can "Edit" "Free Transform" it, resize it. It's the same principle as before, except I'm changing the actual landscape image because that's the one that's selected here in the thumbnail. If I want to change the shape, I have to select the "Frame Thumbnail" and that will change the shape or the frame rather than the actual image. Let's do it again and this time select the ellipse one or the circle. Remember for ellipses and for circles, you hold on the Shift key, and it will be a circle. Now we go "File" "Place Embedded", You can select any image you want, this lovely lady again and the lady goes in the shape. Again, you always go back to the "Move Tool" and if you want to change the frame, you select the "Frame Thumbnail". If you want to change the image, you select the "Image Thumbnail" and "Edit" "Free Transform", and then you can change it. Those are two ways of placing images into shapes. 30. Clipping Mask Exercise: Now we're going to do a practice exercise to practice the clipping mask or the frame tool whichever you prefer. I'll give you the option, the freedom to choose. Let's go ahead and close this little tab. We're going to go to File, Open this time, and not Open as Smart Object, because we're going to open a photoshop file. If we go back to our folders and select ''Clipping Mask'', what we're going to create is this. This is an example of a template where you use clipping mask or the frame tool. It's just divided into three, and you're going to have to add the pictures in them. I'm going to give you like a blank slate, a template which can be used for it. Let's go ahead and open templates and click on, "Open". What I've done is, I've divided the clipping masks, the clippings, the shapes or the frames, whatever you want to call them, into the left ones. This left one represents this layer. This middle layer represents this middle shape, and this right shape represents this one. If you're not sure, you can always use the eyes. We're going to have to place the correct image in each of these individually. Now, if we select the left clip, that's what we'll start with. We always have to highlight the layer that we're going to work with, because when I highlight a layer and I place an image, the new layer of the image will go directly above this one, above the one that's selected. We go ahead and go, File, Place Embedded. We're going to copy this. We're going to select this beautiful leafy plant thingy and go over here. Now maybe it looks okay, but remember, we need to make sure that the image goes into the shapes, so we have a gap over here. It might look okay, but it's not, because it needs to have a gap over here. Feel free to resize your image and move it accordingly. Once you're happy, you hold down the option key. You'll see the white square and the black arrow and click. Nice job. Now, we are going to do the same for the middle clip. We go File, Place Embedded, and let's have a look at what example looks like. That's like a cactus or succulents. There we go, succulents, and selected and press ''Place''. Remember, it's currently above the middle clip. This image is going to go in the middle clip. You can go ahead and move it and change it, resize it. When you're happy, you hover in between the layers and you hold down the Alt option key and you click. You can still move it around, and beautiful. The final one is the right clip. We're going to have the image inside the rights clip. We're going to go to File, Place Embedded, and let's have a look. So it's this image, beautiful. Select ''Place'', move it across, resize it maybe, and the same thing here, Alt or Option, until you see the white square and a black cursor, and click. That is our image with a clipping mask. Now, you could have also made this image with other clipping mask. Alternatively instead, you could have done the same thing and you would have just go to the rectangle tool and draw your rectangles, and place the image inside. Whichever technique you prefer. 31. Editing Templates: Now we're going to look at some templates, which you can only do with the use of clipping mask. You can go ahead and close this, and save or don't save, this is up to you. So now I'm going to show you some existing Photoshop templates that are free if you have the Adobe Photoshop license. If you click on "Create new" and you go to web, let's say, and you scroll down, you'll see a whole lot of free templates that you can use and you can change content of. Now we're going to look at one of these and we're going to change the content and we're going to look at Mobile and look at Bold Social Media Set, and that's what we're going to change the content of. Now, if you don't have access to this, I have actually saved it in our desktop. So if I close, minimize this and I go back to the Photoshop essentials folder, 11 templates, I've saved this template over here. It's the same one, so you can either open this one or open it straight from Photoshop by going to File, New and looking the templates over here. Now the confusing part of this is the numerous art boards. It's a good chance for you to work with multiple art boards. You'll see the eye next to it as usual, so you can always hide. If they get too overwhelming, you can just hide all of them and just keep one; just keep the one you're working on or you can show all of them. Make sure that if the arrow faces down and it's starting to look really messy, just make that arrow face to the right so you close temporarily the art boards. It's a bit less messy. We're going to edit the content of a couple of these, going to look at maybe the nicest ones and we're going to start with this one. We're going to use clipping mask here and place an image in each of these shapes. We make sure that we expense Sale 1, and we'll see a whole bunch of layers over here: the text, which we can close, the filters which, we will at later, and the shapes over here highlighted in red. You've got the left one, top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right. Let's start with the top left. You highlight this layer, and you can go to File, Place Embedded and you can choose the same images we were working on, it's totally up to you, or you can look at some more images over there. Select another image. Or feel free to go to your image adjustments or to your selections and masks and choose some other images. You're also absolutely welcome to choose your own images if you wanted to. I'm going to go ahead and choose this image, because again, it's sale, sunglasses. Then once you've placed it, you press Enter, Return. Remember, you hold down the Alt or Option key and click, and beautiful. Now we're going to select the top right shape. Now the top right layer is over here. Always look at the thumbnail. If you click on it, it always highlight it as well. Then we're going go to File, Place Embedded and you can choose another image and Alt and click. You can choose another one, but before you do so, make sure you highlight this. You click on it with the Move tool and you highlight in the Layers panel and then go File, Place Embedded, and can choose another image. I'm going to choose the lady again and place it here and Alt and click. Then the final bit, click over here and choose another image. Choose the hand and click and drag. Maybe it's a wedding ring sale. Who knows? You can always adjust it. Click and drag, and then back to your layers and hold down the Alt key. Always make sure that the layer of the image sits directly above the layer of the shape, Alt and click, and there we go. We've just used a clipping mask option to update a template. Now if you wanted to change the text, let's say, you just need to make sure that you select the sale text and then you go to the Type tool. You can change this or you can type my name if you want. Make it caps lock by going to Type Options and there you go. You don't have to do that. You can also change the shapes if you select the shape. If you wanted to change that shape, you would have to go to the Shape tool and go to Fill and you can change it and make it pink and a world without something much, isn't it? But yeah, you can change that color too. Just going to make it white again. You could also make it transparent if you go to opacity. Make sure that layer is selected, go to opacity, reduce the opacity, it's also an option, and go back to the Move tool. What you can also do if you close all the other folders and just extend the filter folder, you can look at some filters here. It's pretty cool. Green filter, magenta filter, black and white filter, which is quite nice, and the vintage filter. So that is how you update a template using clipping mask in Adobe Photoshop. Now again, you can always go back to your preferences and change the interface. That's a little bit better, isn't it? Click on "Okay". Now, let's look at a few more that we're going to change. Maybe we can do this one. Click on this shape and go to File, Place Embedded and choose another image and press "Place" and click and drag. Isn't that gorgeous? In this case, we don't actually even need a clipping mask, which is quite nice. Let's look at a few other ones. We have the dance one. You can go File, Place Embedded, choose her again, she is the only one that looks like dancing, and again. So for some of them, you don't need clipping masks, for others, you do, but it's always good to know. The final thing I'll finish on is saving. Say you were quite happy with Sale 1 and you would like to export just Sale 1 as an artboards. What you would have to do is make sure you select the Sale 1 artboard, and you go to File, Export, Artboards to Files, and you have this panel and you can name it whatever you want. I'm just looking where I'm saving it; in that folder, and make sure you take export selected artboards. So when doing this, it will only export this artboard. Then you click on "Run" and it's doing it's thing. Click on "Okay", going to go ahead and try and find it and there we go. It's in my templates. That is how you export a file within a multi artboard document. I hope you have fun updating this. I would love for you to show me the files you're working on and for you to update all this content and create some really cool graphics for social media. Good luck and see you soon. 32. Clipping in Text: Now that we've learned the famous clipping mask tool, we're going to learn how to add a clipping mask to text, which is pretty easy now that we know how to work with clipping masks. So if you can double-click on "Clipping Mask Text" please and open that folder. This is something that we'll be creating. Placing an image inside text, so you can go ahead and open this document. What we can do is practice creating an additional artboard. So make sure you select that artboard and you close it so it's not in the way. Now, if you could go to the Artboard Tool and either you see the plus here or you click on the plus over there, and just create an additional artboard. Great. Make sure you go back to the Move Tool as a default. Now, we're going to go to the Type Tool. You might want to zoom in and we're going to create a text frame. So we're going to click and drag and create quite a big text frame and you're going to type in whatever you want. I'm going to type in clipping and I'm going to highlight this text and make it very big. Make sure you find a bold font, could be anything, and you make it pretty big by changing the font size. You can use my trick where you highlight the little value box and press the upward arrow on your keyboard, goes really big. If you want, you can actually choose another word. I'm just going to choose my name because then I can make the font just a bit bigger and you can see the image a bit better. Also, type in a number like 500. Bam, there we go. Now, for the image, make sure you go back to the Move Tool and you can move this around. If you go to the layer icon, of the text, which is the text layer, you can then go to "File", "Place Embedded", and place an image directly on top. I've added some other backgrounds that you can use, you can also use these ones. Or you can go to this folder and go to Clipping Mask Texts and I've placed a few cool, beautiful looking images over here. Wow. Then you can resize it according to how you want and then hold down the Alt or Option key and click and beautiful. Then we can do it again, and again, I believe in repetition. So we go to the Type Tool and we make sure we don't click directly in this text frame, we can click and drag another text frame away from the existing one. You can type whatever you want. You might want to make your font, your frame bigger so you can see the whole text, Command A, Delete, and you can type something else. I'll just type in hello and make my frame bigger. I can move it by going to the Move Tool of my text. I'm going to change my font over here. I think I'm going to go for another font and try and find a font that's a bit more maybe thicker. I can also change some font options if I needed to, and voila. I'm going to go to "File", "Place Embedded" and choose another image this time and place it, and resize it, and make sure that the image sits directly on top of the hello text and an Alt and click. There we go. That is adding a clipping mask to texts. So congratulations and see you soon. 33. Saving & Exporting: Now for the final part of this course, we're going to cover how to save and export Photoshop files. I'm just going to choose any document, so if I go to Photoshop Beginners Essentials, the folder, all of these zip files, and if I go to four, Layer Mask, there is a file over here, Layer Mask psd Photoshop file. I'm going to show you how to save this file in different formats. First of all, if I wanted to save this as a Photoshop file, I would have to go File, Save As, save on my computer. Again save it to my Desktop, and it will be a Photoshop file, psd. I click on "Save," and it will appear on my desktop, and here it is. Now if you're using a PC, it will have the ps to Photoshop icon. Great. Now let's look at another way of saving it. If I go to File, Save As, save on my computer, and I go to Format, I have a wide range of formats that I can save it to. Probably the most used one will be JPEG. You could also save it as a PDF or a PNG, which we'll look at later. A TIFF is a very high-quality file. Let's select JPEG, and again, I'll save it to my desktop and click on "Save." Now this window will come up, and here I get to choose the quality. The higher the quality, the larger the file size, so this is a preview of the size of the file. It's currently 1.5 megabytes. Now, if you wanted to reduce the file size, you would have to reduce the quality a little bit. Now you can see it's almost 500 kilobytes, so half a megabyte. You can play with this and determine the file size and find the sweet spot between achieving a high-quality image whilst keeping it a small file size. You could choose any option you want, and when you're happy, you click on "Okay." You minimize it, and there we go. That's my JPEG. Now let's go back to our Photoshop file. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide the background layer, BG, so that there is no background layer. You can currently only see the pixel grid. I'm going to go to File, Save As, Save On Your Computer, and I'm going to choose PNG. The reason I choose PNG is because PNG gives you the option of having a clear or transparent background, which is very good for cutouts, for logos, for icons, for anything that you don't want a background for. Again, I'm going to save it to my desktop. Click on "Save." Again, I can choose between Large file size, Medium, and Small. I'm just going to choose Medium and click on "Okay." Again, I'm going to minimize this, and here it is. If I press "Return," it is a clear background. If I were to open this with Photoshop, you would see that it has no background except I guess I forgot to remove that little white bit, but it has no background. If I were to drag this to another document, it would have a clear background, it would be a cut out. Another thing you could do is you could go to File, Export and Export Layers to Files. What this will do is it would export every single layer in its own file. You can have a layer just for the background, a layer just for the nail polish, etc. File, Export, Layers to Files, and I'm going to select my desktop again, and I can choose a format I want it in, so I could save it as a PNG or a JPEG. Let's go with PNG and click on "Run." It's currently saving each individual layer as its own file. It didn't have too many layers, so we have the cutout of the nail polish and the background and apparently had a few backgrounds there. Now I did mention before that if you had multiple art boards, you can always go to File, Export Artboards to Files which is currently grayed out here because we currently have no artboards. Then that will be how you save individual and multiple artboards. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you get to practice everything and save all your files that you've been working on and make some really cool creations and be creative. I would love to see what you come up with. It's been a pleasure working with you. I'll see you soon. 34. Looking Ahead: Hey guys. Congratulations on completing this Adobe Photoshop CC beginners workshop essentials course. How exciting. I hope you go on and create lots of exciting Photoshop graphics. If you did like this course, then you will love my Adobe InDesign CC and Adobe Illustrator CC beginners workshop essentials, which are the sister courses of this course. So if you enjoyed this course, you will definitely enjoy those. So I hope you enjoyed this and I will definitely see you soon. 35. BONUS: Updates 2023 & 2022 : Hey, my friends. It's Kate Silver and I've got some Adobe Photoshop updates for 2023 and 2022 for you. Adobe introduced a few cool new features to Photoshop this year, so let me break them down for you. [MUSIC] My friends, let's look at Adobe Photoshop updates for 2023 up until 2021. Before we move on to 2023, I'm going to briefly cover updates introduced in 2021 because a bunch of new updates were introduced in that year and since then, it's just kept on improving. Then after that we're going to jump to 2023 and to see how these updates have changed. We've all heard all the trends with AI, artificial intelligence. Some are good, some are scary, but it's here. Some of you have tried AI generated chat, image generators and more. What is really cool though is Adobe Photoshop has used AI to power some of its updates and these are pretty exciting. Let's have a look at them. One of the best updates that Photoshop came up with is neural filters, which is powered by AI and they're basically a bunch of fun filters like skin smoothing, altering facial expressions, colorizing your old black and white photos and more. In here, you can see a good little preview, how it can alter facial expressions, the angle of the face, direction, flipping it, and also skin smoothing. We're going to have a really quick look at it. I've created a folder called bonus photoshop updates 2023, and there's also a zip file for this. Go ahead and download this, double-click, and I've created just a couple of folders. Let's start with skin smoothing and you can choose one of the images. You can either right-click and open with Adobe Photoshop or file Open as Smart Object. Then in order to go to neural filters, we go to Filter, Neural Filters and here you can see a a bunch of existing neural filters and you might have to download some of them, they're like plugins. I just want to say that a lot of these are still in Beta and underdevelopment. I just think they're going to get better and better as the years go by. Also full disclosure, I really like wrinkles and I like aging. But anyway, let's move on. You can just blur the face and you can see it's starting to smooth or reduce, which is cool and then smoothing as well. But don't do it too much because obviously it will look a bit weird. That's one of them, skin smoothing. You also have smart portraits. We can download that. If you need to zoom in, that's command or control plus, you can see a bit better. Let's go back to skin smoothing, blurs, smooth. Smart portrait, this is really creepy. You can make him smile. Does take a little while to process and there is the smile. It's a bit of further development from liquefy, which I teach in my Adobe Photoshop beginner's course but AI powered. You can make the person look younger or older facial age. Wow that's creepy, that's amazing, we can make a person look younger. It's also very scary. I personally think. This is pretty cool and there's a whole bunch of them that in 2023 have been added as well, a bunch of new neural filters. You can go ahead and close this and we're going to move on to the next updates. Press "Cancel", and voila. That was pretty much it for the first update from 2021. That was neural filters. Let's move on to the next cool update and that is sky replacement. You can now replace the sky in any photo, you can add clouds, sunsets and it's especially great if the shooting conditions are less and ideal, for instance, rainy London. Let's have a tiny little look about how to do that. Again, we go back to that little folder that I created and go to sky replacement and you can choose any picture really. Let's try this one and open with Adobe Photoshop. By the way, like I've mentioned in my previous course, you can right-click and convert it into a smart object if you wanted to just to keep this image safe. If you don't know what that means, then have a look at my Photoshop beginner's course. To replace the sky, you can go to Edit, Sky Replacement. As easy as that. Let's see. Wow, I am completely flabbergasted and amazed by this. I find this incredible. What just happened? Wow. You can change it. That's a bit much. Make it a bit more gloomy, change the edge, the temperature, more yellow. You can also change the actual image. Let's try with clouds. Oh my God. [LAUGHTER] Let's try another image, this is just too amazing. Pinky skies. I'm completely amazed by this. I don't know if you are, but I am and I'm definitely going to be using this one. Just so you know, since 2021, this has improved and improved and Photoshop keeps on improving, which is awesome. Don't Save. That was pretty much it for the second update from '21 sky replacement. Let's move on to another super cool and useful update and it's called the discover panel. As you can see here in a quick demo, you can search for the discover panel. Let's say remove background and you can choose from quick actions where Photoshop will do it for you or tutorials. That is super cool. Let's go back to Photoshop and let's have a little look at how it works. Have any image open and the discover panel will be here. The beautiful magnifying glass and you can quickly search something, so Skip Tour, Remove Backgrounds. There we go. Click and wow, that's scary. It's just amazing how quick it is. Personally, I still like to remove my own backgrounds like I taught you in the Photoshop course, because sometimes it doesn't do the best job. As you can see, it's exactly how I taught you in the course. It's with a layer mask. That's pretty cool, so check it out. That was it for the third update in 2021, the Discover panel. You can discover and search all bunch of things in Photoshop as long as you click on this button. Pretty cool. So the next and four Photoshop 2021 updates was live shapes. Which to me basically means that it's more like Adobe Illustrator. You have way more options and freedom in the Properties panel to modify shapes really. As you can see, there's the little widgets here to round corners, which I use all the time in Illustrator and now it's available in Photoshop. So it really made my life easier basically. There's also a triangle tool which is new. You can find it here in the shape tool. If you go to shapes, you can now see the triangle tool and that's new. Click and drag and there's our little famous widget, click and drag. Well, that's pretty much it. That was it for live shapes. Let's move on to the final 2021 Photoshop updates. That is reset smart object, which is super practical. Let's say I have done a bunch of stuff with this image. As long as it's a smart object, if I right-click and convert it to smart object. Then I do a bunch of changes to this. So I re-size it. Either stored it, looks terrible. I rotate, it looks even worse. Now Photoshop gives me this, which is resetting smart object to its original state. Which is super cool and useful, especially if you made a lot of mistakes. So that was it for Adobe Photoshop 2021 updates. Like promised, we're going to move on to 2023. So basically, maybe you've noticed that I'm skipping 2022. That's because 2022 was basically the neural filters that you've seen, just improved, it's just been worked on so there weren't a major updates. Let's look at Adobe Photoshop 2023 changes. I would say the first major one is improvement of the object selection tool, which is really cool. So it just makes it even faster and better and easier to select an object or subject in this case. Example, I can go to the object selection tool which is here, shortcut W. Make sure I have my layer selected. Maybe I'll zoom in. As I zoom in, you'll see how incredible this is. It literally highlights the objects individually, which is incredible, I find. Let's say I just want to keep the lady. I can click and now she's selected and I can just create a mask. Click and bye bye everyone else. We've chopped his leg off, but yeah. That was update number one in 2023. Selection improvements, especially the objects selection tool is way better at detecting and making selections. Super awesome. The next one is linked to the previous one. It's one click, delete and fill. In my previous course and in one of my YouTube videos, I teach you how to use the Content Aware Fill, which basically means that I select something in my image and I can hide it, replace it, fill it automatically with something in the background so it looks seamless. There we go. That's the word. You can use one of these shortcuts. If you're using a Mac, Shift Delete. If you're using Windows, Shift Backspace. Let's see how it works. I'm using a Mac so I'm pressing Shift Delete. But if you're using a PC, Shift Backspace. Now it didn't work and that's potentially because it's a smart object so I'm just going to rasterize this so that it's no longer a smart object. Let's try now, Shift Backspace or Delete. This panel will come up and let's press "Okay". I didn't do the best job. I guess sometimes it works better than other times. Let's try again. Going to go back to the object selection tool. Let's try it with this and now Shift Backspace or Shift Delete. This is a bit better. I guess it depends on what you select and it's not perfect. But in this case, it did a good job. That's update from 2023. Number 2, the quick Content Aware Fill, which can be very useful. One of the other really cool neural filters that have been added in 2023, photo restoration neural filter. That basically means that you can restore old photos with new restoration neural filters. It's powered by AI, which is awesome. It basically restores your old and damaged family photos, which is amazing as you can see here. If you have any old photos to restore, check it out, try it out. It's important to mention that it's currently still under the Beta section. So you still, again, like before you have to download and enable the filter so it would be in filters, neural filters. You'd have to download here photo restoration and download like with all the other filters. Then you click on Photo restoration. Make sure to turn it on just like a British switch. Now go ahead and feel free to use your own family photos. Just a side note that when you want to leave the neural filters, just make sure you click on Cancel here. Then you can go ahead and open an image. That was it for Photoshop update Number 3, photo restoration neural filter. Now the next few updates that we're going to look at are actually Photoshop Beta updates. That just means that they're completely under construction, they're in Beta. They're not yet completely done. It also means that we are going to have to install a Photoshop Beta app, a separate Beta app on Creative Cloud. Now you don't have to do this so don't worry if you don't feel like it. Feel free to sit back, relax and listen if you prefer, or you can do it with me and learn how to use it, that is totally up to you. I'm going to go to the Creative Cloud app and click on Beta apps. Then you'll see Photoshop Beta. You can click on Install and it will do its thing. The logo will be white and blue and you can go ahead and click on that. All these updates that will be in this Beta app will eventually be integrated into Photoshop. You don't have to know all these. These are just extra tools that I'm showing you for fun and because this is like looking into the future of Photoshop. A case of the first Photoshop Beta updates for 2023 is Live Gaussian Blur. Live Gaussian Blur is a filter that's based on an existing Gaussian Blur filter inside Photoshop. The difference between the previous one in the current one is that you can actually change things and manipulate it live. You don't have to select something in advance. You can actually adjust the blur and zoom in and change it as you go, which makes everything a bit faster and easier to use. Let me show you what I mean. I'm going to go to Photoshop Beta. I'm going to go to File, Open. I'm going to choose any image. Go to Open, and let's have a little look. I'm going to go to Filter, Blur, and there it is; Live Gaussian Blur. Click and this panel is going to come up, which as you can see is already blurring stuff. Now what I love about this is there's a little brush here. Plus to add blur and minus to remove. You can actually remove the blur from the subjects or objects, which is awesome. Then if you would like to make your brush bigger, like I showed you in the Photoshop courses that I teach, you can adjust the brush size with the bracket. The right square bracket to make it bigger and the left one to make it smaller. Then you can remove it, which is pretty cool. Photoshop did not have that before. The Gaussian Blur did not let you do that. I think this is pretty cool and it's just going to keep on improving. I can adjust the blur, add more blur, add less blur. That is one step less to do. Press Okay when you're done. That was it for Live Gaussian Blur. The first Photoshop Beta 2023 update , Live Gaussian Blur. Now let's move on to the next one, the second Beta Photoshop update of 2023, and That's Live Gradient. Again, this you can also only add in the Photoshop Beta app for now. It's cool because you can add a gradient directly and add gradients anywhere and change it and it's just way faster to use. I'll show you. Going to go back to the Photoshop Beta app. Either choose another image or you can just undo, Command Z or Control Z, and revert back to before. Then go ahead and go to the Gradient Tool and then click and drag. That's it. That's how amazing this is. All you have to do is click and drag and it automatically adds a blur to the image, which is awesome. How cool is that? You can also change the color. Just click on the color here and the color will change. Photoshop didn't make it that simple before. You had to do a whole maneuver, a whole process, to add a gradient. I am super happy with that. That was it for Photoshop Beta Update Number 2 , Live Gradient. Now the final one is the one I was most excited about. It's Backdrop Neural Filters. It's powered by AI. It basically means basically you're able to type a prompt or a description, and it will create a unique image according to what you wrote just like the AI software DALL-E which is super cool. Then you're able to use that unique image that you just created as a backdrop image, which is such a cool concept. Now I was super excited about this. But sadly I've tried it, and for the moment, for right now, it didn't work on mine. I'm still going to try it again with you. But let's have a look. To access this, we can go to Filter, Neural Filters, and have a look at backdrop. Again, turn the switch on. Now as I try to do that, sadly, for me, it doesn't work for some reason. It might do with something in my computer, but it doesn't work. But basically, you can write down a description or a prompt and it would create a unique image according to that description. That image will be used as a backdrop for this existing image, which is super cool. Now the good news is that there is another really cool filter that does seem to work for now. We get to practice this now. It's called the landscape mixer. Make sure you turn it on just like a British plug or switch. This is another Neural filter powered by AI. You're basically able to change the background of an image using any of these existing images. It will change the background tone accordingly. Now, at first, I clicked and I got frustrated because it didn't work for me. But then I realized that actually I have to untick Harmonize subject. Once I untick Harmonize subject and I click on an image, it does work and it does change the tone accordingly, which is cool. Go ahead and try this. This is a super cool. It's all trees and grass and greenery, whatever it's called. That's really cool. Now we've got snow. I'm happy with this, and I think it's just going to get better and better. Now, just make sure you do not untick preserve subject because if you do, it will overrides the subject and it will look a bit like a horror movie. That was it for now. Don't forget to press Okay or Cancel to exit the Neural Filters. I would love to see you use all these exciting new Neural Filters and updates that I just showed you and use it in your own images and your own designs. Please post it in the project section below. I would love to have a look at them. My friends, that was pretty much it for Adobe Photoshop updates for 2023 and 2022. I would love to hear which one is your personal favorite update so please write it down in the comments section below. Adobe is constantly trying to improve their softwares to make their loyal users like me very happy. Follow me to stay notified on more Adobe software updates. Viola. see you soon.