Understanding Adobe Photoshop
January 15, 2012 12:31 PM   Subscribe

100 Free Photoshop Podcast Tutorials — While many Photoshop instructors focus on features and tools, Richard Harrington covers both the specific skills and techniques you'll need. [requires iTunes]
posted by netbros (11 comments total) 102 users marked this as a favorite
 
I haven't really done any comparison of the available videos, but after a cursory examination, it appears that much of this iTunes-only podcast series is also available via YouTube through the RHED Pixel TV account.
posted by hippybear at 1:01 PM on January 15, 2012 [3 favorites]


Also, an excellent online video tutorial for Photoshop is Pixel Perfect. Revision 3 has 160 episodes online.
posted by hippybear at 1:05 PM on January 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Is there anything similar for other Adobe tools like Illustrator or InDesign?
posted by blaisedell at 1:34 PM on January 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


CMYKilla raps a surprisingly useful photoshop tutorial (previously)
posted by memebake at 1:59 PM on January 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


The odd thing about You Suck at Photoshop is that, in the early episodes anyway, you can actually learn a thing or two.
posted by SPrintF at 3:39 PM on January 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


You know, I had a lucrative career as a Photoshop tutor. My first lessons always started the same way, "So how far have you gotten in the manual? Oh, you haven't read it? Let's start on page 1." The manuals, and now the Adobe online tutorials, are excellent. 90% of all PS users don't really need to know anything beyond the manuals. The other 10% should be capable of figuring out the effects they want to achieve, just based on what they learned in the manual.

Now on the other hand, Illustrator is far more problematic. I remember using Illustrator 88 on a Mac SE with Adobe Type Manager, and the display was never quite WYSIWYG, the imagesetter output was always different. So it was (and still is) easier to work backwards from the PostScript output you wanted, and then figure out how to implement that in Illustrator. The real manual for Illustrator is the Adobe Red Book. Oh the hours I spent fixing PostScript code in a text editor. Now get off of my lawn!
posted by charlie don't surf at 4:15 PM on January 15, 2012 [5 favorites]


I like the Real World books, especially for Illustrator, but I'll check these out.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:43 PM on January 15, 2012


These look fun and a great way to sharpen some PS skillz up, although they haven't been updated in a while (neither has his site). Which is OK for me, as I'm still stuck on CS4.
posted by alex_skazat at 8:40 PM on January 15, 2012


> The manuals, and now the Adobe online tutorials, are excellent. 90% of all PS users don't
> really need to know anything beyond the manuals. The other 10% should be capable of
> figuring out the effects they want to achieve, just based on what they learned in the
> manual.

I grant you the PS manual is very good, and clearly explains each separate item. (Though the bar for good documentation in the software world is pretty low; pop quiz--here's a broken *nix filesystem, fix it based on what you learned by reading the fsdb man page.) But there's as much more to understanding PS than understanding each function as there is between knowing the moves of each of the chess pieces and putting together a long sequence of moves to play a complete winning game. Even just a simple PS question ("I drew this frog in ink on paper and scanned it. I want to separate the scanned ink lines from the scanned white background because I want to color underneath them. What to do?") has an amazing number of different answers and variations, each of which gives a visibly different outcome. Select the lines and delete the white? Turn the lines into a mask and hide the white? Use multiply or some other not-normal layer blending mode for the lines layer? I actually have a long term PS-learning project which consists of trying out (and documenting with screen caps) every get-rid-of-white method I can dream up myself or learn from another user, each applied to a b&w line drawing, a greyscale drawing, and a pencil drawing with watercolor washes. That's a bit more than just RTFM but it appears to be what's required by my particular eyeballs and brain to master that one pretty basic subject.
posted by jfuller at 11:20 AM on January 17, 2012


> Oh the hours I spent fixing PostScript code in a text editor. Now get off of my lawn!

A Don Lancaster fan you are, we bets.
posted by jfuller at 11:23 AM on January 17, 2012


What? Do you mean, like do I own an original "TV Typewriter Cookbook?" Yes, I do.

Anyway, perhaps things have changed in recent years. The original design for Photoshop was based on common graphic arts techniques done on film and photo paper. So anyone who worked in prepress making litho films would naturally understand features that baffled people, like layer modes. And seriously now, who even uses enlargers anymore, so that they would have experience with how dodging and burning works? PS used these metaphors because they were familiar to users, but now, if I want to teach people how dodging and burning work, first I have to explain how that was done in a real darkroom.

But there's more than one way to do basically anything in PS. I still mostly use techniques I would have used in version 2.0, I don't find much need for anything more advanced. Any decent graphic artist who can think visually, can find a many different approaches, some more optimal than others. It is all about visual thinking. I sometimes challenge PS users by telling them that basically everything that could be done in PS that could be done with analog techniques. If you can wrap your mind around that, you can conquer Photoshop.
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:59 AM on January 17, 2012 [1 favorite]


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