Photoshop is an incredible tool for graphic design, but there is certainly a lot to learn for new designers, and there’s always more to master for those who are already experienced. If you’re currently working as a designer and looking to improve your skills, you probably find that time is a major constraint to improving your abilities.
If so, you’ll need to develop a plan to improve your skills step-by-step in the time that you have available. If you’re an aspiring designer, you may have no idea where to start in order to achieve the level of success of some of the Photoshop masters that we see online. In this, article we’ll look at ten steps you can take to progressively build your skills using resources that are readily available.
1. Follow Tutorials
Psdtuts+ is obviously focused on providing excellent quality tutorials for readers. Like Psdtuts+, there are a growing number of other websites and blogs that regularly publish Photoshop tutorials. All of these sites are valuable resources for improving your skills, whether you’re looking to develop specific skills or just looking to improve in general.
In order to take advantage of the tutorial sites that are available, subscribe to a few that you like the most so you don’t miss out on new posts (you may also want to bookmark other tutorial sites in case you want to find them in the future). With the amount of content that is published, you’ll never be able to work through each tutorial, and you’re unlikely to have an interest in all of them anyway.
Try to get in the habit of picking one or two per week to attempt on your own. For most of us, learning is much easier when we’re actually doing something ourselves, so working through the tutorials is essential rather than just browsing through them. If you use Google Reader you can star the tutorials that interest you the most so you’ll be able to easily find them when you have some spare time.
About six months ago Collis published a list of his favorite tutorial sites, which included: Tutorial9, PS Hero, Tutzor, PhotoshopStar, Tutorial Dog, Abduzeedo, PhotoshopGUIDesign, Worth1000, Digital Grin, and Photoshop Support. In addition to Collis’ list, PSD Learning, PSDFAN, PhotoshopTutorials.ws, and Photoshop Essentials are also good resources.
2. Experiment
The best way to learn anything new is to experience it for yourself. While following tutorials can be incredibly helpful, you should also take some time to just experiment on your own to see what you can create. You can try to apply things you have learned from tutorials, or just experiment with things you’re not familiar with. Photoshop has so many different functions, features and settings that you’ll really need to become familiar with them in order to understand their potential.
Free form experimentation can open up your creativity and help you to get more comfortable with Photoshop. In order to ever be able to put the lessons you learn from others into practice in real world scenarios, you’ll need to be able to do some experimentation and adaptation. There may be some tutorials that teach you exactly what you need to do, but more likely they’ll teach you a skill or technique that can be used on your own projects, but you’ll need to adjust it to fit with your particular needs.
When working with experimentation, find something that works best for you in terms of learning new things. I like to work with large images by experimenting with wallpaper design because the large canvas size opens up all kinds of opportunities and you can take it in just about any direction that you want.
3. Start with the Fundamentals
There’s so much to learn with Photoshop and so many possibilities that it is essential to get a firm grasp of the basics and fundamentals before attempting to move too far along. Like anything else, the foundation of your Photoshop knowledge is critical to the end result. If you’re new, rather than trying to follow along with advanced tutorials, take some time to get familiar with the basics before anything else.
Elite by Design published an excellent three-part series a few months ago on How to Master Photoshop in Just One Week. Part one of that series starts with some tutorials on all of the basics of Photoshop, including the interface, the tools, shortcuts and more. Having a solid working knowledge of these items will make it much easier when you want to work on something more complex later. Part two of the series covers such topics as typography, web components and photo manipulation. Part three covers more advanced tutorials.
On the subject of fundamentals, Psdtuts+ has some resources including: A Comprehensive Introduction to Photoshop Selection Techniques, Tools & Tips: Photoshop Actions, Tools & Tips, Smart Objects and Smart Filters, Tools & Tips, Photoshop Brushes, and 30+ Useful Resources for Improving Your Photoshop Efficiency.
4. Participate in Groups and Get Feedback
After you’ve learned by following tutorials and you’ve done some experimentation on your own, it can be helpful to get feedback and constructive criticism from other designers. There are groups of graphic designers all over the place that can be excellent sources of feedback. Psdtuts+ has its own Flickr group for this purpose and a number of other design blogs have their own groups as well. Additionally, there are hundreds of Flickr groups for designers that are not associated with a specific blog or website.
The Psdtuts+ Flickr group is very active with over 11,000 items and 4,000 members. Groups like this are great places to share your work with other designers who are also interested in improving their own skills. You can get involved by providing feedback to others on their work, and you’ll likely get more of a response on your own work. If you’re interested in a place where you can comfortably share your experimental work to continue the learning process, try some Flickr groups.
