Adobe Photoshop: Beginner's Guide for Photographers

Learn how to retouch and edit images to a commercial standard through a non-destructive workflow

• Welcome
• Introduction to Photoshop and the Workspace
• Navigate Through Documents
• Layers & Groups
• Transforming Images
• Brush Work
• Cloning
• Image Size, Resolution and Canvas Size
• Bit Depth and Tonal Range and Colour Theory and How It Relates to Tools in Photoshop
• File Formats
• Sharpening Images
• Practice
• Histograms & Image Quality, Brightness & Contrast
• Colour Balance and Creative Colouring
• Crop & Straighten
• Levels
• Curves
• Black and White
• Selections
• Layer Masks
• Blending Images Together
• Practice
• Power of RAW
• Local Edits in the RAW Converter
• RAW Smart Objects
• Vibrance and Hue/Saturation
• Clone to Enhance a Composition
• Enhance Important Features
• Clone in Perspective
• Sky Replacement
• Creative Effects
• Panorama
• HDR
• Multiple Exposure Action Shot
• Practice
• Cloning and Working With Adjustment Layers
• Correcting and Enhancing Skin Tones
• Removing Redness in Skin
• Brightening Eyes
• Reduce Wrinkles
• Smooth Skin
• Make the Subject Stand Out From Its Background
• Sharpening
• Practice
• Setting up and Working With a Tablet
• Making a Road Map to Plan Edit
• Working with Actions
• Understanding CMYK Composition of Skin Tones
• Dodge and Burn
• Liquify
• Frequency Separation
• Teeth & Lips
• Colour Grading & Batch Processing
• Delivering Files to a Client
• Create a Photo Logo
• Practice

Adobe Photoshop is at the core of pretty much every creative project, and even more so in those that involve photography. Photoshop’s non-destructive editing process allows photographers to experiment with all kinds of looks, settings, and, ultimately, achieve the exact image they set out to capture through editing and retouching.

Mikael Eliasson is a London-based portrait photographer who relies on Photoshop to bring that extra oomph to his photos. In this 5-course Domestika Basics, he gives a thorough walkthrough of all the photography-related tools the software has to offer.

In the first course, get to know Photoshop and its interface, learn how to create new documents, work with layers, use brushes, transform images, and more.

Continuing onto the second course, learn how to modify the three key image adjustment parameters: brightness, contrast, and color. Start with these easy tools and gradually progress to more advanced ones such as curves and levels.

The third course focuses on the particularities of retouching landscape and architectural photos. It will also be your first introduction to Camera Raw, a software designed to do more precise editing and retouching of RAW files.

Once you’re done with landscapes, it’s time to work on portraits. Explore tools such as cloning, adjustment layers, gaussian blur, and others to fine-tune your portraits by enhancing skin tones, removing redness, brightening eyes, and more.

To round off your experience, Mikael focuses a whole course on tips and tricks that will help you become a well-rounded Photoshop user. Learn how to work with a graphics tablet, use actions for a quick and efficient workflow, understand the CMYK color model, experiment with filters, and deliver a file to a client.

Technical requirements

⦁ A computer with Windows 10 or macOS 10.12 Sierra (or higher).
⦁ Adobe Photoshop CC (you can buy it or download the 7-day trial version on the Adobe website).
⦁ It is recommended to have a graphics tablet.