50 best Photoshop tutorials - Features. Learn techniques for Photoshop across art, illustration, graphics and photography in these tutorials from the world's best practitioners. Photoshop is a very versatile software tool, as flexible for seamlessly compositing disparate elements into a beautiful photomotage as it is making your photos look even more stunning. It also provides an effortless platform for creating dynamic graphics for both web and print - and let's not forget its pragmatic usefulness as a day-to-day tool for tranforming graphics and photos into the perfect format for your output requirements.
Here we've created a round-up of the best Photoshop tutorials from the past decade of Digital Arts, covering everything from collage and illustration to photography and typography. Some require a recent version of the software, such as Photoshop CC or Photoshop CS6 - but many will work in Photoshop CS, CS2, CS3, CS4 or CS5. Photoshop tutorial types Photo-illustration and collage Advanced compositing techniques. Build experiments into your workflow. Time needed Four hours Skills Retouch skin. Use the Pen tool, anchor points and smart filters. Learn quick masking techniques When creating artwork for a client, you should always expect the unexpected.
Not only can the creative brief alter halfway through a project, but the client can change their mind and add lots of amendments within your existing artwork. To avoid re-doing parts of your work from scratch, it’s imperative to ensure you plan ahead and learn how to work in a way that will stop you pulling your hair out when clients present you with changes. In this tutorial, you’ll find out how to create artwork that is strong in its foundation, yet still enables you to experiment along the way.
The process might even speed up your workflow. 01 Draw around the main object of your image with the Pen tool in Photoshop – here, the basketball player – and save the path. 03 The overall figure now needs bringing out more, through highlights and contrast. Retouch images with frequency separation. Software: Photoshop CS2 or later Project time: 1-2 hours Skills: Learn a non-destructive retouching workflow, separate an image by spatial frequencies, recontour shadows and highlights One of the black arts of photographic retouching is how to achieve the impossibly smooth, yet sharply rendered skin, textures and fabrics seen in fashion and beauty images.
Photoshop has its own high quality smoothing and sharpening filters, but the two processes tend to be somewhat contradictory. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through how I retouch an image from start to finish, using a technique that enables you to selectively process not only different areas of an image, but also different detail levels. Frequency separation involves creating a high detail (high spatial frequency) layer and a low detail layer from a source image - a particularly clever method of doing this was popularised by Sean Baker, a Maryland-based photographer and retoucher. Step 01 Step 02 Select the low frequency layer. Step 03. Plot your pictures. It's easy to add a variety of elements to a movie poster through portraiture, colour schemes and composition. This could go some way to explaining why greater numbers of movie posters and DVD covers are being illustrated. Graphic illustration is a great way to inject a different look into a movie poster while still having a strong sense of realism.
The main aim of this project is to use illustration to create a movie poster that's different. Take this opportunity to create an image that has your personal stamp all over it and ticks all the boxes in regards to having elements of realism as well as strong evidence of the movie's plot. Illustrator and Photoshop enable us to swiftly compose and create illustrations in somewhat unusual colour schemes, and ones that are also full of energy. 01 Once you've sourced your images it's time to put together a composition in Photoshop. 03 Set the Color palette to CMYK by clicking the icon at the top right corner and selecting CMYK.
Create a rapport with your illustrations. Patterns nowadays can consist of much more than simple repetitions. With the growth of digital textile printers, Illustrator and Photoshop have become some of the most powerful tools available for developing complex and colourful designs. They also give creatives the ability to experiment and achieve a large range of results in a very short time. In this tutorial, I will present the process from scratch, selecting a theme, illustrating the elements that will be on the canvas, then building the repetition pattern (called 'rapport' in the fashion industry). As well as on fabrics, your pattern can be used in many other ways; such as within web designs and interfaces and as wrapping paper or posters. 01 Before you do anything, first look for a theme for your pattern and find some reference images. 02 After selecting your reference images, choose the elements that you want to use in your pattern and start to sketch them, either on paper or in Illustrator.
Give your photos a pattern kick. In this tutorial I'll show you how to add a bright, graphic edge to your photographic pieces by working in your own colourful pattern designs. First we'll be creating patterns in Illustrator (alternatively, you can find some I've made earlier on the disc) then blending them into photographic compositions in Photoshop.
We'll then look at the best methods of colouring and blending. In the end, it's all about having fun and experimenting with your new patterns. Click here to download the support files (1MB) 01 I always start by browsing for photography stock images. 02 Once you've made up your mind about the right stock picture, the fun starts. 03 Once I've cut my model out properly, I create my grungy background. 04 Now that I have the model and background ready to work with, I adjust the Contrast and Brightness accordingly, desaturate her and used the Burn tool to make the edges of her clothing blend into the background. 06 We'll use our Brush tool to make some painterly brush strokes. Prepare RAW images for print. One mistake that a lot of designers regularly make is to use images straight off the camera. No matter how good your photographer is, I would always strongly suggest doing your own pre-press work before sending your images to print.
Photographers often do their own colour-correction so that it looks amazing on screen, but they don't necessarily think about what happens after us designers get our hands on it. After all, there's a massive difference between seeing an image on a shiny backlit LED MacBook Pro screen and seeing it printed on the cheap, porous paper that your client is prepared to pay for. Over the next four pages I'll walk you through how I've worked on one particular photo from a shoot for my streetwear brand AnyForty, enhancing the key details and adding some extra punch before sending the final files to print. Click here to download the support files (17.8MB) 01 The first thing to do is open the file: you'll find mine to work with in the support files.
Create an outer world ambiance. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create an 'outer-world' feeling using an experimental Photoshop process. My personal works often deal with the idea of hybrid realities and extra dimensions, so in this project I have created a situation where a person is experiencing an abstract moment that transcends the regular boundaries of nature and reality. To achieve this kind of ambiance, I'll explain how to manipulate the regular laws of light and shadow by partly inverting your images, and merging positive with negative.
I'll also make use of interesting textures, and use vibrant-coloured gradients to make sure the image leads the observer into a portal where they can drift off and dream in their own personal universe. The female image used here is from a photographer named Katanza-Stock at deviantART, but you can use your own if you wish. A good site for free textures is CGTextures. 02 First of all invert your images (Ctrl/Cmd+I). 05 Paste your background image into the document.
Transform paint and pixels with blending modes. Digital art is a rapidly growing industry and it can take something special for your work to stand out. Originality is key. One solution that I recently used to create a new series of unique artworks was to go back to where I started – photography and paint – and incorporate a range of digital composition techniques.
This tutorial is all about how to combine different media to push your style further, and create new work out of the basics. I’ll show you how to manipulate photography, and experiment with both digital and analogue techniques to create your own, original artwork. 01 First, create some effects using handmade techniques and photography – I’ve taken a water-based approach. Fill a transparent vessel (like a fish tank) with water, and drip watercolour and acrylic paint into it. Big blobs make stronger shapes, darker colours are easier to photograph, and you’ll get cleaner shots with good light and a fast shutter speed. 04 Now let’s play with the main effect. Stylised gradient effects using Photoshop's channels. By using channels to create adjustment masks you can quickly and easily create very stylised photographic effects or tweaks on any kind of Photoshop work you’re doing.
In the following walkthrough you’ll see how versatile channels can be in the creative process, enabling you to make quick adjustments that affect the overall look and feel of your image. And all in a non-destructive way, too. 01 Load your RGB image into Photoshop and head over to the Channels palette. We’re going to use the Red channel as a mask later on in the process. So to store it in its current state, select the Red channel and Ctrl/Right-click on it. 02 Select the RGB channel again and go back to the Layers palette. 03 Now we’ll add a Solid Colour adjustment layer. 04 Now get rid of the selection by either deselecting or clicking somewhere else on the image with the Marquee tool, and press Ctrl/Cmd+I again while the Solid Colour layer’s mask is still selected to invert the selection.