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10 Photoshop Tips for Beginners
Adobe Photoshop is perhaps the most well-known of all the Adobe products. It is an incredibly powerful image editing software and has long been the industry standard when it comes to photo manipulation. Its features are comprehensive, and the possibilities it opens up are endless; from major adjustments to the smallest tweaks, or even creating art from scratch.
With Adobe Photoshop being such a complex program, it has gained a reputation as not being the most beginner-friendly. However, if you know where to start, it is a tool that can actually be used with relative ease. To save you feeling overwhelmed when starting, we’ve compiled a list of 10 handy things you can do in Adobe Photoshop, and how to actually do these essential actions. If you’ve always wanted to learn Photoshop but never known where to start, this guide will ease you in and give you a base knowledge that you can build on. Here are our 10 Photoshop tips for beginners.
1. Layers
Layers is Photoshop’s most powerful organisational tool. The Layer Panel shows what layers you have in your image. You can add new layers, sort layers into folders, delete layers and experiment with their blending styles. Lock layers you’re finished with, turn on or off layers visibility as needed, and adjust the hierarchy so that everything shows in order.
By working with layers in Photoshop you are working non-destructively. This means the original image remains unedited – so any mistakes aren’t an issue.
2. Transform
The Transform Tool is the easiest and simplest way to rotate, resize, and manipulate images. The most commonly used is Free Transform, which allows you to quickly scale and rotate your image. The easiest way to use this tool is to press CTRL + T (CMD + T on a Mac). This brings up a bounding box around your image. Grab one of the handles and simply click to resize.
Hover over a corner until you see a curved arrow to rotate. You can also right-click on your image to give you more options, such as flip image, rotate by a set amount, skew, distort, and more. Play around with these options to get a feel for what each one does.
3. Crop
The crop tool lets you cut your image down to a specific size or aspect ratio. For example, taking a photo and cropping it to a perfect square for Instagram. Select the crop tool from the tool panel to bring up the cropping bounding box and option. If you want a specific aspect ratio, as we do for this example, select it from the dropdown menu at the top of the screen. We select 1:1 (square), which limits the bounding box to a 1:1 ratio and means we can freely crop knowing we will get a perfectly square result.
4. Spot Healing
The Spot Healing tool is perfect for getting rid of any blemishes in your image, or even background objects you’d rather weren’t there. Start by selecting your Spot Healing tool from the Tool Panel (if you can’t see it, press Shit + J until you see it highlighted). In our example, we want to remove the seagulls from the image. We simply draw over them, and Photoshop’s AI takes in the surrounding area and magically fills in our drawing area with the background. Great for removing an annoying spot from a selfie, or a bystander in the background of your shots.
5. Magic Wand Tool
The Magic Wand Tool is a selection tool that is ideal for working with a background or subject that has a fairly consistent colour (such as a clear blue sky.) The Magic Wand Tool is best used to easily select large areas of colour. Great for green-screen shots, as well as background erasure. To use the Magic Wand Tool, select it from the tool panel. Then simply click on the colour you want to erase. Alter the settings at the top to vary the result; Add to the selection means you can click multiple times and each colour will be added to the selection. Subtract does this in reverse. Sample size tells Photoshop how specific to be when selecting a colour, and tolerance dictates how many hues of the colour are selected – the higher the number the more generous it will be in the selection.
6. Filter Gallery
Filters in Photoshop are automated effects that you can apply to your images for a stylistic result. The best thing about filters is that it takes only a few clicks to get a dramatic result. Filters can also be layered on top of one another to create truly fantastic effects. Filters are a great place to start for beginners as they allow you to see what Photoshop can really do. We recommend you spend some time playing around with various filters and settings to see what each individual one can achieve.
Go to Filter > Filter Gallery to start. If this is greyed out, you’ll need to convert your image to 8-bit. To do this, go to Image > Mode > 8bits/channel.
7. Adjustment Layers
Adjustment Layers allow you to apply edits to your images in a non-destructive way. Adjustment Layers sit above the image and can make multiple edits to the image, such as contrast, colour, convert to black & white and more. Adjustment layers can be turned on or off easily with the eye symbol beside the layer. To create an Adjustment Layer, select the half black, half white circle in the Layers Panel.
8. Layer Styles
Layer Styles are special effects that can be quickly generated and applied to any individual layer. You can select from a whole variety of styles, from Drop Shadows, Strokes, Glows and more. At first glance, the Layer Styles menu seems more complicated than it really is, and we recommend that you create a simple shape on a new layer and experiment to see what each option will generate. To access the Layers Styles, double click on a layer’s thumbnail, or use the FX icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel.
9. Text
Adding text to your image in Photoshop is easy. Simply select the Text tool from the Tool Panel and click and drag a text bounding box. This will fill with Lorem Ipsum initially, which is simply placeholder text. Delete this, type what you want, and then style it. You can change the font, size, kerning, spacing and colour within the Properties window. This should open automatically when you’ve selected the text tool, but if it doesn’t go to Windows > Properties to enable it.
10. Magnetic Lasso
The Magnetic Lasso is a tool that will make editing super easy, and also pave with way for learning the most important tool in the Photoshop arsenal: the Pen Tool.
The Magnetic Lasso is a selection tool that helps you to trace the outline of part of your image. It works best when there is a contrast between the subject and the background. The Magnetic Lasso works by the user dragging close to the subject’s edge, and it, like the name says, stick to the outline. Simply click the mouse once and go to start.
To access the Magnetic Lasso, click and hold your mouse over the standard lasso until a menu pops up – select the lasso with the magnet symbol and you’re ready to go.
Bonus Tips
Always Undo
Don’t be afraid of mistakes when you first start using Photoshop. Experimenting is how you’ll get the best grasp of the software. But what to do when you do make a mistake? Simple undo with Ctrl + Z. This will take you one step back in your editing. Press it again, another step back, and so on.
Keyboard Shortcuts
There are so many tools in Photoshop. Learning keyboard shortcuts will help you to spend less time selecting tools and more time working on your image. To speed up your workflow, here are a few of the most widely used shortcuts:
V = Move
B = Paintbrush Tool
E = Eraser Tool
D = Sets foreground and background colours to default
X = Swaps between background and foreground colour
W = Quick Selection Tool
Ctrl + Z = Undo
Ctrl + T = Transform
Ctrl + J = Duplicates the selected Layer
The more you use Photoshop, the more your knowledge of these shortcuts will increase. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts to view all the available shortcuts, and even make your own.
Get Practising
This list barely scratches the surface on the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop. Instead, these ten skills should help you to get some impressive results fairly easily, but importantly, get you started in learning Photoshop. As you become more confident and try new things, you’ll see endless potential in what you can create. The best way to learn Photoshop is to practice, practice, practice. Try different things, experiment with the different tools. Set yourself a task and try to achieve it using the tools above. Watch videos online that go over a particular tool in-depth, read more tutorials and blogs (such as colesclassroom’s blog on how to change the color of something in photoshop). Ultimately, you’ll only progress in Photoshop by spending time using it, so open it up, grab a picture, and get started.
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