Learn Adobe Photoshop In 10 Minutes: The Basics & Fundamentals For Beginners

1. Introduction: We're going to learn Photoshop in ten minutes. If you've never used Photoshop or you just have a general feel of it. You're in the right place. Hi, I'm Sean. I'm a digital artists that specializes in digital applications like Photoshop and other Adobe programs on a day-to-day basis, your time is valuable and I want to make sure that it does not go to waste. That's why I've designed this course to give you the most amount of information in the shortest amount of time, there's going to be five different modules, each just being two minutes long. I'll provide the images I'm going to be using in this course so you can follow along easier. Now, obviously there's only so much I can tell you in only ten minutes, but what I can do is give you enough information so you not only feel comfortable using Photoshop, but you'll also be able to experiment with different processes and techniques right away. I'll be using Windows for this tutorial, but everything should be relatively the same if you're using Mac, this course is going to be very fast pace. So I really need your attention if you end up finding that it's too fast pace or just want a more informative course. I do have another beginners Photoshop course that takes a much deeper dive into the program. So if that said, we're going to jump right into it starting with the general structure and feel a Photoshop. 2. Layout and Files: When you open up Photoshop, you should see a screen like this to create a new document, come over here and press Create new, a new menu should pop up that looks like this. Let's click on Print, go to letter size and press Create. This will bring up the main working area with our newly created file to make sure your Photoshop looks like mine. Come up to the top right corner and click this square, select essentials and press reset. Photoshop works as a tab based system, meaning anything can be moved around and Dr. new locations. Let's close the Learn tab by pressing the More Options button and selecting Close. Let's do the same for libraries. If you ever need to bring a window back, you can go up to Window and find exactly what you need. This will reopen the tab and docket for you. Your left is your toolbar will you'll find things such as selection, text and drawing tools. On top, you'll find the options for any tool you select. And on the very top are various menus, tools, and processes for any given situation. If you want to work directly with an image, go up to File Open. This will bring up your file explorer where you can import any image you want. Let's open the yellow flower and triangle images at the same time, you can download these images from the resource section below. By holding Control, you can select multiple images, double-click or press Open in two new files will open up with those images in Photoshop. Notice that we now have three tabs open at the top. If we click on our untitled tab, this will bring back our blank document we created earlier. This allows us to go back and forth between projects. If you want to add more images to a single document, first, make sure your move tool selected the shortcut for that is if V and make sure to uncheck auto select, then go over to the triangle ImageNet. Now, click and drag the image to the yellow flower tab while still holding wafer Photoshop to transition to your other document in place that image onto the background. It's very important that you don't let go until you're hovering over your work area. From here, you can move in size that image, resize an image, press Control or Command T. This will give you anchor points which you can drag out when done, press the check mark or enter. This process can be repeated and be used with any image you want. 3. Layers: Understanding layers is essential when it comes to using Photoshop. They have many uses, but they mainly allow you to control specific parts of your image. Look down to the right and you will see the Layers window. Make sure layers is selected. If you followed the previous section correctly, you should notice that there are two layers. A background layer, which is the yellow flower in layer one, which is the purple triangles. You can see a small image in each layer which should give you an idea of what's in that layer. So work with a layered, you must select it, select Layer one. Any change you do will be made on that layer. If I click this, I, the layer will be hidden. Pressing this again will toggle the layer back to visible. Organization matters. That means the top most layer will show first and your work area. Notice the background layer is locked. That means we can arrange it to fix this. Double-click the layer press Okay, and it will be unlocked and renamed to layer 0. Now click the click and drag layer 0 up until you see a balloon line like this. Notice the triangles disappeared, yet the layer is still visible. That's because layer 0 is now on top showing first and layer one is behind it. You can arrange in any way you'd like to create a new layer. Press the plus button here. This will add a third transplant transparent layer on top. If I hide layer 01, you will see layer three, which is gray and white checkers. Whenever you see this pattern, it means it's transparent. You can see through to the next layer. That's why we can see through this large triangle into the layer below it. If I go into layer one and find opacity, I can change how transparent the entire layer is. So I can see through this image and into the layer underneath it. And just a little trick here, you can hover over the text of opacity and click and drag left or right to adjust it. This goes for many of the adjustments in Photoshop. You can also experiment with different blending modes found directly to the left. There's several modes to choose from. Or Photoshop tries to blend the layer you have selected into the layer underneath it. A common one is overlay. And you can see how it blends into the flower image. 4. Selection: If you want to edit a specific part of your image or cut out a background, you need to understand how to select something. I've opened up this image here showing three pairs, and I also have a layer underneath that's showing a simple blue background. If you look to the left, you'll see a bunch of symbols stack up buying shop top of each other. This is your toolbar. This first one is your Move Tool, and below that or three different selection tools, you can right-click them to see even more tools. Right-click here and select the Polygonal Lasso tool. This tool works by making a series of points around your subject. Left-click to create a point. Move your mouse and click again to create another. When you connect the last point to the starting point, you should see a moving line like this. If you need to restart, you can try again by pressing Control or Command D to de-select. After you've selected something, you can add more to the selection by holding down Shift and starting a new shape. You can also take away from this selection by holding down Alt. Now equip your move tool and hover over your selection. You can drag that part of the image and place it anywhere you'd like. You'll notice that we can now see through into the blue background from where the pair was. Let's say I want to separate those pairs and put them onto that blue background. To do this, we need to select just the pairs to undo what you did, press Control or Command Z repeatedly until you get back here. Because of the nature of this image, we can select these pairs very quickly by going up to Select Subject. Photoshop will try to select the subject of this image, and it does so fairly accurately. From here, press Control or Command J to separate the selection onto a new layer. Then we can go ahead and hide our original layer, which will give us this image. 5. Adjustments: Adjustments are used for basic photo editing. This is where you can change the properties in your image. Let's just color or brightness. I've opened up the yellow flower image as it could use some enhancing. The best way to adjust your image is through adjustment layers. Look over to the right and find the adjustments tab. If you don't see it, go up to Window and make sure adjustments is checked. When you look at this tab, you'll see several different symbols. The symbols are different types of adjustments. Let's try clicking the one that looks like the sun brightness and contrast. Clicking this will add a new adjustment layer and will be placed above your selected layer. This should also open up your Properties tab, which you can use sliders to adjust your image. This image needs some more brightness and contrast. So let's move those layers up until we reach something we're happy with. Try not to overdo it. You usually want to find the brightest part of your image in brain it just enough so you don't lose any detail. I often hide and unhide my adjustment layer to see the changes I made. This flower could use some saturation. Go back to the adjustments tab and find the triangle symbol, which is vibrance. Vibrance will intensify the colors in your image that aren't as colorful, while saturation will intensify every color. Generally you only want to add a little bit of each. Be careful not to add too much, otherwise it will look unnatural. So let's add a little bit and check the before and after. Okay, that looks good. The best way to learn about different adjustments is to add them and experiment. You can do a lot of different things with them, but I want to show you what you can do with these layers. I can make a copy of my brightness layer by selecting it and pressing Control or Command J. This will double the effect. If it's too much, I can either delete it or lower the opacity to get a lesser effect. When you start stacking up adjustments, it can get a little unorganized. If I select these layers by holding Control and then press Control or Command G, it will group these layers into a folder. I can always open this folder and toggle the visibility to see all the adjustments at once. 6. Exporting and Saving: When you have an image you're happy with, you can export it and save it to export, go to File, Save As this will open your file explorer. First, find a place you want to put the image. Then I'd recommend naming your image just something memorable like flower underscore, edit. Next, click the drop-down menu where it says Save As type. These are all the different file types photoshop has to offer. And most of them you don't have to worry about. The most common one is JPEG. Make sure you select JPEG only and not any of the other ones. Finally, press Save. Make sure the quality is max. Press Okay. And your file will be saved to your folder. I want to show you some of the other common file types. Go back up to File, save As, and look at the file types. Jpeg will save your image with good-quality and take up the least amount of space. It's the easiest file to share across the Internet. Png will save your image with transparency, but it'll take up more space. Tiff files will save your image with the highest quality, but it will take up the most amount of space. If you're working on a project that requires more time to finish, you're going to want to save it as a PSD file, which is the standard Photoshop file. Using this will save all of your layers and actions. So you can pick up right where you left off. Let's press save and open up our files. You should see two files JPEG of our edited image in our PSD file. I'm going to close out photoshop completely. In double-click. The PSD file. Photoshop should automatically launched and it should open up with the file we were just working on. Here's something about saving you might have not known. Let me add a new layer in, direct your attention directly to the project tab. If you ever see this asterix right here, that means you have unsaved changes. To save your changes, simply press Control or Command S and the asterix will disappear, saving your changes.