Photoshop has changed the way we transform our imagination. If you are into any digital workplace, learning Photoshop can be a great help. Photoshop today is undoubtedly a center of creativity to which almost every digital domain, from web designing to animation, from photography to the digital magazine, is deeply connected. Today, when it comes to photography, it is not possible to imagine it without Photoshop. Check out the top Photoshop tips for beginners.
Photoshop Tips for Beginners
Good Photoshop skills can’t make a mediocre picture perfect unless you are into manipulation. However, it can help you enhance your best photo into a fantastic masterpiece. Learning Photoshop is a slow process; you should try it with enough practice. After all, it is digital art.
I will walk you through some basic Photoshop retouching skills in this article. These 5 easy Photoshop tips for beginners will be a great start to learning to process your photographs.
Learning Keyboard Shortcuts
Learning keyboard shortcuts will help you to speed up your processing workflow. There are a few key shortcuts for different tools in the toolbar. A few of the most widely used shortcuts are:
- V = move tool
- F – toggles through display screen modes
- Spacebar = temporary hand key
- B – paintbrush tool
- D – sets the foreground/background colors to default
- X – swaps between background and foreground color
- E – eraser tool
- S – stamp or cloning tool
- W – quick selection tool
- Ctrl+j – duplicates the selected layer
There are just a few of the most regularly used Photoshop shortcuts. When you start using the program more, your knowledge of shortcuts will gradually increase. Once you know the most used shortcuts retouching pace will be faster than ever.
Color Enhancing – Saturation versus Vibrance Photoshop Tips for Beginners
Color is another domain you can try while enhancing your photographs. Generally, when you are beginning in photography, enhancing the color of every image looks good, as if the colors are speaking out of the pictures. It will be much more helpful if you can understand the difference between saturation and vibrant work. Go to the Image menu and choose Adjustment under the menu.
As shown in the image to the right, select the Vibrate option. You will get two options on the menu – Vibrance, and Saturation. Vibrance increases the saturation of less saturated colors. This option avoids yellow and orange skin tones. Vibrant works best for portraits.
On the other hand, saturation increases the intensity of all the colors in your image equally. This may not be a good option for portraits or people’s photos. I recommend this: slowly start with vibrancy for the color enhancement and use saturation later if you want to pump up the color more.
If you compare the two photos below, you will understand how vibrant is only responsible for increasing the intensity of less saturated colors. In contrast, saturation increases the power of all colors equally.
Adding a Vignette Photoshop Tips for Beginners
Vignetting is a technique to darken the edges of your frame so that the eyes move to the subject more easily. This procedure works best when you have an issue in the center. Our eyes tend to move towards the brighter part of the image and recede on the darker side. This technique will result in dark space around the subject.
There are many manual ways to add vignetting to your photos, but I will talk about how to add vignetting to your images via Photoshop easily. Go to Filters Menu at the top, select “Lens Correction, ” then choose the Custom Tab on the right. The third section down is for adding a vignette. Slide the Amount to the left to darken and the Midpoint to adjust the size of the circle.4. Adding Sharpness and Details.
Sharpness
Adding sharpness is another technique for beginners in Photoshop. This will make your image look more detailed. I would suggest detailing most of your pictures with appropriate values. But make sure you sharpen or detail your images with a small matter if you upload images on Facebook because it compresses the images and adds some detail to make them a bit sharper. So when an already sharpened image is uploaded on Facebook, it may look too edgy.
Like any other technique, there are many ways you can add details in Photoshop. I will show you a straightforward process. Once you understand how this works, you can experiment with some of the other techniques.
- Firstly, Step 1. Duplicate the selected layer with a keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (PC) or Command+J oP MAC
- Secondly, Step 2. Open the High Pass filter: Filter > Other > High Pass on the top layer
- Step 3. Apply an appropriate value (just to see the edges in the image) and click Okay
- Step 4. Change the blending mode of the top layer to Overlay
- Finally, Step 5. Adjust the opacity of that layer to your taste
Layer blend mode photoshop beginners tips.
Photoshop Filter Gallery
Filters are automated effects you apply to your images with a few clicks. Filters can help you to achieve specific special effects or looks. There are various filters in Photoshop, which you can pick individually. Each filter results in different products when applied to other images. You can also apply more than one and stack them. Though I don’t use filters much, exploring if you are just starting in Photoshop is good. Later, when you are more familiar with advanced tools and techniques, you can try to create a similar effect from manual options and controls.
To apply a filter, select the layer and go to Filter > Filter Gallery. Before using any gallery filter, make sure to change your image to 8-bit. You can do that by going to Image > Mode > 8 bits/channel.
I hope these 5 essential Photoshop tips will help you to retouch and enhance your photos. If you have others suitable for beginners, please share in the comments below.
