Learn Photoshop in 1 hour | 2025 features

1. Learn Photoshop 2025 in 1 hour: Welcome to the wonderful world of Photoshop. I'm Chris Baron, you're the instructor together. We're going to do a lot of fun projects in Photoshop all without any previous experience. We are going to take it step by step and explore the program, the hot keys, and all sorts of techniques so you can get awesome results in no time at all. The goal is to get up and running with Photoshop as fast as possible. No boarding theory you're going to learn by working along. We're going to use artificial intelligence to create awesome designs. We're going to improve our portrait shots, we're going to remove people from their background and a lot more. This course is packed with information so you can get great results without any headaches. To get the best experience, please watch this course twice the first time around just to see the process and the techniques. When you get to the end of the video, rewind from the start and work along by pausing as often as you need to. I repeat, don't try to work along on your first viewing. Instead, watch every lecture twice and the second time. Pause as often as you need to so you can work along. Now, how do you get Photoshop from Adobe.com That's the only place for it, no other option. Now the best plan is this one here called photography. Prices will vary depending on your country. Now don't get the individual plan because it doesn't help. The photography plan is the best. Use any laptop or desktop computer, it doesn't matter, but please don't use a phone or a tablet. Now, in the next video, I'm going to teach you how to set up Photoshop and we're going to get straight to work. Before that, a quick word about me, I'm Chris Barn, I'm going to do Certified instructor and I've been teaching since 2013. I focus on getting maximum results with as little effort as possible. I've been a freelancer, so I know results are all of that matter. That's what I'm going to teach you, how to be fast and efficient so you won't waste a whole day on a small project. This is a crash course where I'm going to show you my best techniques. Now in Photoshop, there are many ways of doing the same thing in multiple ways. I'm not going to show you every single option because we would be here all day. Instead, I'm going to focus on what gives you the best possible outcome as fast as possible. With that being said, sign up to Adobe.com You have a free seven day trial, which is more than enough for this course. Pause the video, install Photoshop, and when you're ready, move on to the next video. 2. Explore the interface & how layers work: Welcome back. I hope you've installed Photoshop from Adobe.com If not, please pause and go for it. Okay, now this is the latest version of Photoshop, and we're looking at the welcome screen here we can see some of my recent projects which are specific to my computer, of course, and a few tutorials here and there, which I'd like to close by clicking here. Now the most important thing is starting a new project. Use this button here, or what I like to do is hit Control, That's command. On a Mac, you're going to get this new document window, but here's the main thing, Just about every setting can be changed later on without any major issues. What I recommend for this course is you go to the web tab from here. The Web large preset is a great starting point, but you should do one thing. Please uncheck this artboards feature. We don't need it. The size standard, 1920 by 1080. Now there a lot of other things here that may catch your eye, such as these templates here. My advice, stay away from them. For the beginners, they're going to make your life quite difficult. Let's hit this button to create a new project. Now, Photoshop interface may be different on your end. Let's fix that. So we're both looking at the same thing In the top right side, please click here. From this list, we're looking for essentials. Then just to be sure with all set, I'm going to click again, but this time I'm going to choose Reset Essentials. And now we are both on the same page. Here's what you need to know Now, This white part is called the canvas. The canvas is by far the most important area. This is where you should focus for most of the time. Very closely related to it is the layer spanel. This is right here. Let me show you how this works. I'm going to hit and I'm going to get the rectangle tool. It's this one here with it. I'm going to click and drag. Now we have a shape both on the canvas and in the layout spanel. These are always tied together, they are completely dependent on one another. The canvas shows you the actual design, the layout panel gives you information about it. For example, this is a shape layer that set at 100% opacity and it has a normal blending mode. Different approach is this. If you're the driver, the canvas is the wind screen to which you can actually see the road. Then the layout panel is your dashboard where you see info like the speed of the car, the revs, the fuel, and so on. Now to recap, the most important thing is one, the canvas, and then to the layout panel. The third thing is the tool bar on the left side. This is where you get all sorts of tools like the brush tool, the type tool shapes, and so on. That's quite a lot of them, but we'll only use a handful. No worries. Now, the fourth thing is the main menu, the one up top. This is huge, but the most important actions have hot keys. That's going to be quite easy. Finally, there's number five, the options bar, which is this area here. As you switch from Tool to tool, you're going to see different options in this area. Yeah, overall that's Photoshop interface. You have a cheat sheet attached so you don't have to memorize anything or write anything down. Now regarding layers, these are transparent pieces of paper that stack on top of each other. Let me switch to a different project. Now, if I go into full screen mode and you can only see the canvas, it seems like this is one single image, right? But actually here you can see lots and lots of layers that are organized into folders into groups. It's exactly like on your computer where we have programs and movies, and photos all neatly organized into folders. This is how it works in Photoshop as well. Now why do we use layers? The idea is that we can isolate certain things. We have more flexibility. Say that we need to make the bottle bigger, but just the bottle, nothing else? Well, we have a separate layer for that. That means we can grab it and we can edit it in any way that we want. You don't need to work along by the way, just focus on how layers work Now, what if we want to change the color of the background? We don't want to change the bottle or anything else. Well, again, there's a separate layer for that. That means we get complete flexibility. This is the power of layers. They allow you to edit separate parts of your design without affecting everything else. You can create as many layers or folders as you want. It's really up to you if you want to do individual fruit or one single layer is enough for all fruit. Now please note one thing that's quite important. These layers stack from top to bottom. This means that if I click and hold and move the background at the top of the layer spannel won't see anything else. This is what I mean, from top to bottom in the layer panel. What's on top in the layer spanel is also going to be on top on the canvas. In this case, the background is covering the entire canvas. If you have the logo underneath it, obviously you won't see it. Why? Because it's underneath it in the layers panel. You would have to switch this order. Now, if you remember, they stack from top to bottom, you're going to be good to go. Before we go, please take a look at the top right side here. We have this color panel, but we're not actually going to use it. Let's free up some space by clicking here on this very small icon. Now from this list, choose closed tab group. And now we have much more space for the properties panel, which is very useful. Then switch to the move to wall. The hot key is V, that's another one here. But we actually want the move to wall, Click and hold. And you can see every tool here. Again, we want to move to wall. Okay, great. Now right next to it we have a feature called auto select. Please disable it. This is quite important. Uncheck this option, now we're ready to go. Let's take a quick break. 3. Open and save images & projects: Welcome back. Please get the rectangle tool hot key, It's this one here. Now, please drag out three shapes in total. You go to the canvas, you click and you drag. The size is not important right now. Repeat a few times. Now switch back to the move tool. The hot key is V. By the way, this is something you're going to do all of the time. After you do any work, you should always come back to the move tool. Next, please look at the layers panel. Let's double click here. And that's going to allow us to rename every layer. Now why should we do that? So we can easily identify them, call them whatever you want. Take your time with it. Maybe shape 12.3 in this case. Okay, Next, let's double click this area here. This is how we're going to change the color above shapes. Now this new window is called the color picker, and it's quite easy to use play around with it. And you're going to see the changes immediately on the canvas. Okay, please take your time and change all three colors. You want them fairly different? I'm going to move ahead because here's what you need to work on, here's what you need to practice. Now to select a layer, you can use the layers panel. Of course. Click on any of them, and this highlight means that it's selected. Then if you go to the canvas and you have the moved well selected, you can click and move that specific layer around quite easy. But here's a faster way. Hold down the control key, That's the command key on a Mac and now click on any other shape. Just like that, I've selected the different shape, holding control and clicking. That's the fastest way to work. That's what you should do as well. Keep your mouse over the canvas and control click to select layers. Every click means you're going to select a new layer. If you want to select several ones, you're going to have to hold control and shift. Try it out and place these layers on one side, then move them on the other side. That's control and shift to select multiple layers. And you can also deselect by using the same approach. You have an exercise attached that's going to help you practice selecting and moving layers around. Remember, layers stack from the top to the bottom of the layouts panel. If you need to change that order, you can click and drag. And just like that it's done. Now let's just assume that this is done, our work is finished. Quite impressive, right? In any case, let's save it. And Quartet saving it means saving the project itself with all of these layers. You're going to get a PSD file, that's the source file, use control S, and you're going to get this window, choose any name and you're good to go. Now, saving the PSD is useful because you can always come back and edit anything here. But if you want to share your work with the world, you're going to need to export it as a PNG or a Jpeg. This is done by going to the top menu to file, then export, and finally, export. As once you click here, you're going to get this new window and you can choose quite a lot of things. File format, I recommend PNG for the maximum quality. You can shrink the file by using this scale feature. This is quite useful if the file size is way too big. And you can see the file size here and the rest of the settings, okay, as they are right here. That's saving and exporting. Now what about opening? You simply double click it and that's that. Now opening an image out a few ways, but here's what I recommend. Use control, That's command on a Mac. This is going to give you a new window and you can browse with your files just in case you see another screen. This one here open from Creative Cloud. You can click here on your computer. And now you can select a file and you're going to start a new project. Now the second way of opening an image is to drag and drop it from your computer. You can minimize Photoshop, find an image, drag it, and then drop it above the canvas. Now the main difference is the fact that you can resize, reposition it before you place it. Just in case you have several projects opened and you want to move layers from project to project. Here's how this goes. You select the layer from the canvas, not from the layers panel from the canvas. Then you click Hold, And you move over to the second tab a while, until Photoshop shows that you're still holding the click. Then move over to the canvas. Now you can let go. Great stuff, let's do this again. We move to this tab and we're going to control click to select one layer. Again, you can always use Control Shift click to select several ones. Now with them selected and whilst on the move tool, we can click hold and move over to the other tab. Wait until you see it, and then after the second or so, move your mouse down above the canvas and let go. And that's how you do it. Now to recap, you can double click the layers name to rename it. When working with shapes, you can double click the thumbnail to get the color picker. If you want to select a layer from the canvas, hold control and click on it. If you need multiple layers, hold control and shift. If you want to move layers to a different tab, select the layer from the canvas. Click hold. Move over to the different tab and let go above the second canvas. If you want to export your work to share it with the world use file, Export, Export. As if you want to open any image, use control that's command or drag it from your computer above the canvas. With that, let's continue. 4. Generative fill - Artificial Intelligence in PS: Welcome back. The term generative fill may not tell you a lot, but it's basically artificial intelligence inside Photoshop. This only works in the latest Photoshop version and you do need an Internet connection. Here's how this works. We're going to select a part of an image with any selection tool. I recommend using the marquee tool, Hot key, M. It's this one here. For the rectangular shapes, I'm going to click and drag in this top region. Now you can see this bar right here, but we're only interested in generative fill. Click here and you're going to get a new field. This is where you can tell Photoshop what you want to do. In this case, I want to add another window in this place that I've just selected. Type that in window and hit Enter. This is going to take a few seconds depending on your Internet speed and the complexity of your request. Just like magic. There you go. You do have three choices to try out. This is magical, this is fantastic. This is the new and improved Photoshop. Notice there's a new layer here called window Now, does it always work so well? No, but in most cases, it does work quite well. And overall, it's a great feature. Now generative L can also remove things. Let's select this bike again, I'm using the marquee tool. Click and drag out a box. Now in this case, you don't need to worry about which layer is selected. It simply works just like that. Okay, now say that we want to remove this bike. Well, no problem. Hit generativel, but don't put anything in that field. Leave it empty. Hit Enter, and Photoshop will automatically analyze eperthang, then bike is gone. Just like that. Now I always suggest you scroll through these options and see which version looks the most realistic. In case you're not happy, simply try again. Generate again. Now, what's a building without an entrance? Right, with the same marquee tool. Click and drag out a box. In case you're not happy with the size, use control D to select. Now you can drag again. Okay, let's type something like front door, which would make quite a lot of sense here. This being a building. Yeah, this is incredible stuff. It works just like that. Nothing else. Of course, in case you're not happy, you can always hide these layers and you're going to get back the original image just like that. This is generative fill. Let's switch to a new photo here. I think it would be quite funny to add a shark in the background. Let's have some fun with it. Type that in a shark and then wait for the few seconds. Now the possibilities are endless. You can use this for, you have serious projects or you can have a laugh like in this case, this is actually quite believable. Let's switch photos yet again. Now this old man is quite charming, but I want to remove something from his hand. Well, not a problem with the marquee tool. You can select it, then you can use generative fill with an empty field. Then after a few seconds, boom, Just like that, this is a fantastic feature, which is incredibly powerful. This is absolutely fantastic. To that end, you can use it just about everywhere, for example. We can use it to remove this sign. There's more focus on the old man. Well, let's make it happen, select it, use an empty field head Enter. And just like that, you can use it to add or remove just about anything. This works best for fairly large photos overall. Small selections, that's something to be aware of. Big photos, Small selections just for the fun of it. Let me add a coffee cup in his hand. I think that's a bit more appropriate for this particular scene. Now you have all these photos attached. Go and have fun with it in case you want to download some more photos with no strings attached, use unsplash.com Here you're going to find lovely photos of all sorts. But avoid these ones with the label unsplash plus, because those require a membership still, you have a lot of free ones. Go ahead and have fun with generative fill, add or remove anything. 5. Resize photos & place them into any shapes: Welcome back. When you want to resize an image, you have a few options. The first one is great for shrinking them. And that's the crop tool. The hot key is C. Please click and hold and make sure you have the right one selected. Now for this specific tool, the options bar is quite important. Please pause and make sure you have the same settings, especially on this drop down here, the fill drop down. When you activate the crop tool, you're going to see these handles on all sides. If you don't see them, use control zero to zoom out That commands though, on a Mac now you can grab any one of them and then remove parts of that image. And that's that's the crop tool, by the way. Notice there are no more handles even though you're still on the crop tool. Not a problem. Switch to any other tool. I prefer the move tool and then switch back to the crop tool again. Hot Kc, here you are, the handles of back. You can also use the crop tool like so. You drag out the box and you're going to get this preview. Of course you can move this box, you can resize it whatever you want. When you're ready enter and you have done crop tool, the first way to resize an image, specifically to shrink it, The second way is to use control, that's command on a Mac. Now one thing, when you open an image with control, you may see this layer is called Background and there's a lock next to it. This means you can't use control just yet to fix it. Simply double click here, you're going to get a new window. But just hit okay, and now you're good to go. Now you can use control for transform here. You're going to get some similar handles. But before you do anything, let's have a look at the options bar here. You want to make sure that the chain icon is pressed. This is quite important now. You can go to any side click, hold and resize the image. If you're looking for the specific size, you can use these two fields. Here stands for the width, H for height also show up in the property spanel, but these values are by default, percentages. If you want to use pixels, you're going to have to write Clk. Okay? Now you can see the existing pixel value. Select that number and replace it with anything that you want, say 2000 pixels. Because the chain icon is pressed, the height will automatically change as well. This is fantastic. Then there will use this check mark to finish up. That's how you use control. But the thing is, you may get this extra space all around your image. Now to get rid of it, go to the top menu to image from this list. You're looking for the trim. This does exactly what it sounds like. It will trim or cut away any excess space from this new window. Choose the first option and make sure all four boxes are checked here. Okay. And you're good to go now. This is a great time to talk about zooming in and out, but it's much easier than you think. The hot key is z, z. For zooming Now you click hold and you do the following. You move towards the right to zoom in. Then on the flip side, click and hold and move towards the left to zoom out. It's as easy as that. You could potentially click several times and do this and that the best way is exactly like I said, click hold and move towards the left or towards the right when you want to see the entire picture. Say you have to zoomed in, no problem. Use control zero, That's command zero, and that's going to fit the image to the screen. Now here's the final thing I want to show you. Hit U and get the rectangle to hold. But this also works with all the shapes right here. Now add any rectangle to the screen. The size really doesn't matter because you can always resize it with control. Now this rectangle is above the photo in the layer spannel. We need to flip this around, go to the layers panel and move it down. The photo is now above the shape, great. Now select the image, make sure that's selected, and then use Alt control, That's option command on a Mac. Now you've just created the clipping mask. That means you've inserted the photo into the layer that's underneath it. Now with the photo selected with the move to active, you can reposition it if needed. You can use control and resize the photo. Take your time with it and explore in case the rectangle isn't right. You can obviously selected in the layers panel and then move it about. But one thing about resizing shapes, you may want to resize it right now. You obviously want to use control. Now the chain icon should be pressed great. But here's the thing. Maybe you want to simply make the shape taller, but not wider as well. Now by default this does not work. The shape is going to grow on both sides. Here's the fix hold shift and now you have complete freedom. You can see how it's becoming taller but not wider. That's the fix hold shift when resizing shapes to get complete control. Okay, now let's create a gallery. Start a new project with the default settings 1920 by 1080. I want you to create a collage of six photos, an image gallery. Now add a rectangle on the canvas, any size for now. Then go to one slash.com or use any other website and drag in a photo size it just a bit. It doesn't have to be perfect because next, after you hit Enter, we're going to use Alt control. Now the image is inside the rectangle, great. Now let's add another shape right next to it and repeat this process again. Add a shape, then above it, add a photo with a photo selected. Use Alt control to insert it into that layer. Let me speed ahead. Say you have an empty space right here. You can use the crop tool to resize the canvas or you can select all of these rectangles and then use control on them. Now they're going to fit just fine. Now if you really want to impress me, make all six rectangles the same size. Remember control and then Reichlick in these fields to switch to pixels. Here's the thing, the width of the canvas is 1920. Divide that into three, and that's 640 pixels. That's the width, 640. Then for the height, that's 1080/3 that's 36,300.60 pixels. And that's how you can create a beautiful gallery. Fill it with photos from your own country, and post it to the platform. Have fun with it. 6. Work with text like a pro: Welcome back. I'm sure you want to add some text to your designs. Here's how this goes. Activate the type tool, hot key, and then you have two choices. First of all, you can click and start typing. Now, Photoshop is going to create a new layer automatically. When you use this method, click and start typing. You're going to create what's called point text. You're going to find out what that means in a second. Now please be aware that automatically you're going to get a couple of words in Latin, that's dummy text, popularly called lipsum. If this annoys you and you want to get rid of that, please do the following. I'm going to hit escape and then control K, that's command on a Mac. Now go to type, it's in the bottom half of this window. From here you have this option that's enabled by default, fill new type layers with placeholder text. That's the Latin text. If you don't like it, you can simply uncheck this box, and that's it. It's really up to you, it's a personal preference. Back to it. The first way of creating text is to simply click and then start typing. Great, this is going to give you point text all fine and well. Now the second method is the following. You click and you drag out a box that is going to constrain your text to that region. Again, in this latest version, you're going to get some lower Mepsm. By default this is called paragraph text. Now as you can imagine, this is better suited for large amounts of text because you can find tune it through these handles and this is going to make it easier to position it in a design. Now, at any point you can swap between these two methods by rechlicking the layer in the layers panel. I'm going to do that for my point text. As you can see in this long list, I have the option of converting it to paragraph text. I'm going to hit it and then I'm going to move back to my canvas. Now if I click on it with a type tool, you're going to notice it has this box. If you want to add more characters, they won't show up. But you can of course, resize this box and that's all fine And well now let me do the same thing for the other layer, right? Click it in the layers panel and choose convert to point text. Now those handles are going to be gone, but you may get a warning message that says, hey, you have some extra text that's outside the visible area. Now when you'll convert it to point text, Photoshop is going to remove that. It's going to delete it. Happy with that, press. Okay. I'm going to hit cancel and I'm going to expand it so I can keep all of my paragraphs. Okay. Let me do that again. Right. Okay. Now the handles have gone away. Now, here's the thing. When you want to finish editing, you have a few choices. The first thing, you can commit your text layers by clicking anywhere in an empty area, you can see how my cursor changes. Now this means if I click, I'm going to commit to my changes. Let me show you again now you see how there's a range here. If I go outside of this range and I click, that's it, I'm going to finish writing. That's the first way. The second way to simply use the check mark from the options bar, this one here, nothing all that fancy. Then the third way of committing is to use the numerical enter. That's the enter from the right side of your keyboard. If you use the main one, you're just going to move to a different line, to a new line. Remember it's the numerical enter. Now, most likely this is not how you want your text to look like. To make any changes, I suggest you use the character panel. Now if you don't have it opened, just go to the top menu to window. Then from here go to character. Now from this new panel, you can change just about anything that you want. The first thing here is the font family. This is quite simple, it tells you what you're currently using. Now, the default one in Photoshop is Myriad Pro. If you're not seeing that, no problem. Let's do the following thing. In the top right side, click on this very small icon. Now from this list, choose reset character. This is going to show us the default settings. To the right side, we have what's called font weight font style. Here you can expect to find quite a few. In general, you're going to have light, regular bold, italic, and so on. Each type face will have its own styles. You may find ones that have over ten styles, like in the case of Myriad Pro maybe, but other ones may have only one single style. It's really up to you. The best place to get new type faces is Google Fonts. It's as simple as downloading the archive, extracting it, and copy pasting the files to see Windows fonts. Now moving on to the font size, I like to type in my values manually, and I've gotten used to using pexels instead of points. That's what I recommend you use as well. Now to change the unit of measurement, hit control K from here, from this new window. Choose units and rulers. In the top left, you're going to find type. Here, I recommend you use pixels. Okay, let me close this window. Now, when you want to adjust the size, you have various options. You can click and then use your mouse scroll and you can add shift. And that's going to make the value jump in ten pixel increments. Another way you can also type in the value and hit Enter. And finally, you could potentially use this drop down to choose one of these existing values. Now personally, I recommend you click and use your mouth scroll. That's what I use in my day to day work. Next we have something that's called leading or line height. Now I prefer line height because I think it's self explanatory. Line height controls the amount of space, vertical space between lines of text. Now, this is great for the improving readability, and I think it's a must when it comes down to paragraphs. Please be generous with it. Now, by default, auto, it doesn't work all that well. It makes the text look cramped, squeezed in. Nobody wants to read something that looks like this, for example, All squashed together. My advice is you use the following multiplier 1.5 maybe two x the size of the font. That's a great reference. If my text layer is set at maybe 15 pixels, my line height should be around 30 pixels. No more than two x though. Now as you can see, in this case it's a bit much. Two x is a bit much. But if I scale it down to something like 26, this is easy to read. It looks lovely and is great. Now, there are other options here and this panel, but most of them aren't very important. It's really for those users who are really into typography, I wouldn't get intimidated by all of this. Now let's focus on the color, which is so easy to adjust. Initially the text uses the full ground color, but with a click right here, you get the color picker and you can immediately change it, just like that. There's no fuss about it. The most important thing when working with text is contrast. Here's what you want to avoid. White text on a light background or dark text on a dark background. Now that's not good. Here's what I consider the ideal situation. It's pure white text on a colored, saturated background. Now, in case you simply can't change the image and you have something fairly busy, here are two options. The first one is a drop shadow with the text layer selected. Go to the bottom of the layers panel. Click on this X icon. And from this list, choose drop shadow. Here you're going to need low values. Don't exaggerate your shadows should be subtle. Use pure black and then lower the opacity. Now, same thing for the distance and size. Use only a few pixels, something like this. Overall, this should make your text easier to read. Again, just a subtle shadow. Now the alternative is to grab the rectangle tool, hot keyu, and then simply add a box. Now this obviously needs to be placed underneath the text in the layer spanel. Now make it any color that you want, but the key is to lower its capacity from this place right here. This can also help you quite a lot. You may need to move it about, but yeah, this can help you quite a lot. Now overall, please use a great clean image that gives you maximum contrast. That's the best way to go about it, but if you can't manage, try either of these techniques. With that, let's take a quick break. 7. Real World: Selections & Adjustment layers: Welcome back. Selections are incredibly important in Photoshop because they allow you to work on a single part of your image. Take this nature scene, now the sky is quite gray. I would like to add some blue in it. Here's how selections help us hit W. To activate the quick selection tool, click and hold and make sure you have the right one selected. Okay, now from the options bar, click here to see the current settings. We want the hardness set to 100% Now as for the size, you could use this slider, but I suggest you use your square bracket keys on your keyboard. Now the left one shrinks, it shrinks the brush, and then the right one makes it bigger. Okay, now with the quick selection tool, I'm going to brush over the sky. You can tell when it's selected because you're going to see this outline, these marching ends. Now what does that mean? Only that part of the image is selected. Everything that we do from this point on will only impact this area. Now I like to use adjustment layers. Go to the bottom of the layers panel and click here. From this list, let's choose hue and saturation. Okay, great. Now in the property spanel just above, let's enable colorize. Let's change the hue value to a nice blue, say about 220 or so. Here it is. We isolated the sky with a quick selection tool, AKA, we made the selection and then we added blue to our sky with an adjustment layer. Let's switch to a new photo. Let's try this again. The quick selection tool, hot key, Change the brush size if needed and then begin to paint. Inevitably, this is going to happen. The selection is going to grow way too much. It was bound to happen here with the red nails. What now? Quite easy. Hold down the Alt key. That's the option key on the Mac. Notice the minus symbol on the cursor. That's the Alt key in action. Now while you're holding it, you can shrink your selection. Simply go over those unwanted parts, and then simply click, and that's how the selection shrinks. Then when you're ready, let go of the Alt key and then continue growing the selection. What I suggest is you make the brush smaller of those fine details here. I'm good to go. The selection is nice and ready. Now we can add an adjustment layer. Click here and let me show you a track. Let's go with black and white. Now the lips lose all color, but it would be cool if this were the other way around. No worries. Hit control where you can remember for invert. Now this is a lovely effect, but what happened? We selected the lips and then we added an adjustment layer to make them black and white. Then we inverted the black and white effect. We told photo shop to apply it everywhere except the lips which I selected. That's control. Let's switch to this city photo now. This is quite beautiful but it's really too dark. In the bottom half, I'm going to quickly select, I'm going to go quite fast, but you can always take your time with it. After this is all said and done and you have your selection, let's add another adjustment layer for the example, brightness and contrast. Raise this up to say plus 70 and then for Doddle slider, maybe plus 25 and see how much of a difference this makes. This is the power of selections and adjustment layers. The great thing is you can always hide this effect by clicking on this icon. That's how you can see the before and after. Or you can save this PSD and come back to it and edit it. One final example, let's switch to this photo here I'm going to quickly grab the C again. Quite rough, nothing special. You should take your time with it when you're working on your own. Now, enable the following adjustment layer, Vibrant here. You can raise this up to say plus 65. If that's not enough, go with plus 50 for the second one. For saturation, now the C pops a lot more. Now, selections are awesome. This is one of the best tools for the job, the quick selection tool. But here's the thing, just in case you can't manage, you have a brand new selection tool, hockey click, and then hold to reveal. This is called the object selection tool and it takes a few seconds to load up. Basically, photo shop is now analyzing the image. You can see the loading right here. After the while, it's going to allow you to click once to select a part of the image. You can see how if I hover over certain areas, we get these pink lines. This means we can select the feet on the left side, or maybe the sky, maybe the C the bottle, maybe the ice cream. Click on any of them, then you're going to select them. Just like that. Again, just make sure you have a bit of patience because this takes time to process. But once you have that selection, you can use any adjustment layer with any other technique just in case you want to get rid of a selection. You can always use control D, D, S and D. Select. With that, let's take a quick break. 8. Photoshop's one-click wonders: Welcome back. Photoshop is a lot smarter, especially in this latest edition. The name neural filter may not tell you a lot, but this is a fantastic feature. Let me show you an example. We have this black and white photo. Maybe you found it in the attic or in the garage. It looks nice, but what if it was in color? Well, go to the top menu to filter from here. Go to neural filters, strange name, whether it's basically artificial intelligence. Now you're going to get a new interface. Now under color you're going to see something called Colorize. You may have to download it initially, whether that only takes a few seconds, then you flip the switch and it's magic. It didn't do a good job. It did great, absolutely beautiful stuff. Now it does come with various options here, but honestly, there's no need for that. Let's switch to another scene. Maybe something in nature. Here's a great photo. Now let's do the same thing. Go to the top menu to filter from here. Neural filter, once the interface is loaded up, use Colorize. This is truly a one click wonder now does it always work this well? Of course not, but that's where you can start playing with those sliders. Here's another neural filter. That's fantastic. Now you should know that in Photoshop you can't enlarge a photo without losing quality. Now, things have gotten better over the years, but in general, when you blow up an image, going to get blurry, pixelated, low quality results. Well, with neural filters, things are fantastic here. We can use this design. I'm going to use Alt control to check out the current size. If you want to change the unit of measurement, use this drop down so you can better understand this size. Switch from centimeters to inches to whatever you feel comfortable with. Now trouble is you need it a lot larger, say three times bigger. Well, go to the top menu to filter, then neural filters. What we're looking for is this one here called Super Zoom. Remember, you have to flip the switch to enable it. Now here's the thing. Please be aware, this is going to require a lot of resources. It's going to take quite some time to process. When you use this magnifying glass, I'm going to tap it twice. We're going to three X or image. That's a huge improvement. Now, there are only a few options here like enhance image or remove artifacts, but I'm just going to put it now. The output is quite important though. Typically a new document works best. Now after that's ready, you're going to hit okay. Then you can check out the new size with the same hot key, Alt control. That's option command on a Mac. Indeed, it's much bigger. Now, the best use of this super zoom feature is when you already have a decent sized image. If you have something super tiny, it won't do a great job. Now, one final neural filter. Let's improve our poltrate shots. Now here's the thing. I always suggest you do subtle improvements. You got to work on yourself, on your diet, working out, and whatnot, so you can be the best that you can be. Slight improvements in photo shop are fine, but don't exaggerate. Here's a photo of myself. Let's enable neural filters yet again, the first thing I want to do is enable skin smoothing. This doesn't always do a good job, but it's worth trying. Now, flip the switch and set the blur value to about 25 or so. I do recommend low values, especially for blur. Then bump up the second slider to about 20 or 25. Now this should hide most blemishes and imperfections. It may also help unify the skin color. Less imperfections, less variation. Like you're wearing a foundation of swords. This is a good improvement. And you can use this button here to see the before and after. I recommend you constantly use that. Next, let's enable small potrait. This is quite powerful, we have to be careful with that. One thing that it does very well is improving the hair. Let's go for plus ten. This should be quite nice. It does work great. But you can see it affects my beard as well. But yeah, overall, this is a great improvement. You can really see the difference now. Facial age typically works well as well. Minus ten or so should make for a small improvement. Overall, I think. Yeah, this is pretty good. Beyond that, these are the ones, they're not all that great. They may give you quite strange results. You can play with them, experiment. But I suggest you look under the settings for one slider in particular. That's this one here. Retain unique features. If you're not careful, you may transform yourself into a different person. But yeah, overall, these are neural filters, a fantastic way to improve your photos and just a few clicks. 9. Replace a background | Cut away a person: Welcome back. Here's a very popular request. Say you want to remove this background and replace it with a different one. Now, there are loads of ways of doing this in Photoshop, but we can do it in a method of clicks and still have a realistic look. With the help of neural filters, we can do just that. First of all, the image is from unsplash.com and if we use Alt control C, you can see that this is a huge image. This is quite important because the bigger the image, the better the results. Okay, let's go to the layer spanel, right click, and then convert this layer to a smart object. This is something that's actually going to help us quite a lot. Next we need another photo that we want to use as a background image. This is what I've selected, but please be aware that when you drag it in it may be smaller. No problem. Use control zero if needed, then grab a Adel handle, hold Alt, and then drag outwards. And that's how you enlarge the image on all sides. Now if you can't manage, move to the Options bar and change this value from the W field. Of course, make sure that the chain icon is pressed. Okay, this is done. You can hit Enter. Now as you can tell, the image is covering the girl. Go to the layer spanel, click hold, and drag down the forest. Okay, it's completely hidden, but that's totally fine. Next, please hit on your keyboard. That should activate one of these tools through which we can make a selection. Now if you click here and hold, you're going to see you have a bunch of options and all of them have the same feature. And that's Select Subject is right here. This is what I want to use. This latest Photoshop version, you get this drop down icon and this gives you the power of the cloud. This means your selection is going to be that much better versus what Photoshop can do locally. Okay, click on Select Subject, and you're going to have to wait for a couple of seconds. Photoshop is going to connect to the Adobe servers, It's going to analyze the image, and then it's going to come back with a selection, all in just a couple of seconds. Now we have that selection. Now here's the thing. Go to the layers panel and click on this icon here between X and the Ying Yang looking symbol. Just like that, we've created a mask. But more than that, the original background went away. Now, while this isn't terrible, it's not great either. It seems fake. Well, let's use neural filters now. First of all, please make sure that before you do anything, you check the layouts panel, see this highlight. This means the mask is selected. Now if that's the case, and you go to the top menu to filter neural filters are going to be graded out. Now to fix it, click here on this. Thumbnail. On the thumbnail, not on the mask. Okay, Now we can go to the top menu to filter neural filters and we can continue working from this new interface. We're looking for harmonization, which sounds a bit strange, but it basically means make it look more realistic, turn the switch on, but nothing is going to happen. That's because you have to select the other layer, the forest layer. Once that's selected, Photoshop is going to take for a while. And then there you go. Now this makes it look more realistic. Basically, it blends the colors together, the girl doesn't stand out as much. Use this button to check the before and after. It's quite a big difference. The output, select Smart Filter and then hit Ok. Now, no word is if you didn't get it, we're going to do it again in a second. But let's take this one step further. That's another neural filter. It's called depth blur and this is absolutely perfect here. Let's try it out. First of all, hold the control key and select the other layer. Select both of them. Now use control E as Eric. This is going to combine the two into one single layer. Now the official term is merge. Now that we have one single layer, let's go to the top to filter. And then neural filters from here look up Defler and then crank it up to the max. Now my advice is you have focused subject enabled. Okay, that's going to give you a great result. This looks even better. When you're done. You can export it, you can go to file export as, or you can use that very long hot key. But let's do this once again. I'm going to use control to open a different landscape image. This time it's a beach and it has a lovely sunset in the background. Next I'm going to drag the girl inside Photo shop. Don't use control, just drag it in. Hit Enter, and then hit if it's not already selected. Okay, now from the options bar, you select Subject And wait a couple of seconds. Okay, now that we have a selection click here to create a mask that's going to throw away the background, okay. Lovely. Click on the thumbnail to actually select the layer, then go to the top menu to filter neural filters. Okay, from this interface, choose Harmonization, and then choose the beach layer. Wait a second, then we are great. The colors match it. Okay. And that's it. Now if you want to take it further, hold control and select the other layer, then use control. Now that this is one single layer, go to the same top menu to filter. And then finally we're going to enable a depth blur. Now for the settings for this blur, I'm thinking maybe around 90 for the blur and maybe about 20 for the haze. But yeah, overall, that's how you can quickly combine two images and make them look real. Now, the question is, does this always work? No. Do you always need big photos? Yes, totally, 100% But yeah, overall, this is the quickest way of doing it. Try it out and see how you do, remember. Have fun with it. Good luck. 10. Final thoughts: Welcome back. I hope you had fun with all of these tools and features. I know Photoshop can feel intimidating and overwhelming, but it's a matter of practicing and getting used to it. My advice is you go through every video and use different images, see what works and what doesn't. It's natural to get stuck from time to time or get a result that doesn't look all that great. It's part of the learning process. Remember ask questions when you can't manage And remember to have fun with it. Learning Photoshop can be awesome if you approach it with a great attitude that makes all the difference. And that's because it's like learning to swim or ride a bike. You will swallow some water, you will scrape your knees, and that's totally fine. The important thing is you don't give up and you keep practicing With that being said, thank you for choosing me as your instructor. This is Chris Barn signing out. Thank you so much.