Adobe Photoshop Tips,
Techniques and Resources

An edited selection of the net's best Adobe Photoshop resources.

Adobe Photoshop is an industry unto itself. I've winnowed down my hundreds of Photoshop bookmarks, piles of books and magazines, and every other Photoshop-related thing I have on hand to a short but powerful list of the best (IMHO) resources around for learning and mastering the program.

You may also be interested in the Adobe Bridge resource page, take a look.

Photoshop Tips from DesignGeek e-zine

Best Adobe Resources for Photoshop

Some links in this section require you login to the Adobe site. Registration is free and painless, and you only need to do it once in your life. So do it!

Adobe TV: Adobe launched their online TV channel in April '08 and have been loading it up with content ever since. You can catch videos on what's new in the latest release, learn about Photoshop's video editing capability, and learn program features from industry experts. You don't even need TIVO.

Adobe Video Workshop: Over a hundred fantastic, free, online video tutorials covering every program in the CS3 Suite. Beginners and seasoned pros alike can still get a lot of value from the videos posted here from CS3. There are a dozen or so clips per program, 2-20 minutes in length for quick viewing when you have a few free moments in your day. Produced by Adobe and Lynda.com, they are presented by end users who are experts in their field or by Adobe's most user-centric Creative Suite gurus. You can even download the source files and follow along with the lessons.
Photoshop 30-Day Tryout: This time around Adobe is requiring that you register before opening their vaults to their software for you. It's worth it though. You ge the latest version of Photoshop, free and fully functional for a 30 day trial period directly from Adobe's site. The 30-day clock doesn't start ticking until you install the file you downloaded. (Or, for $10.99 US you can purchase a trial version of the entire Suite on a set of DVDs. Much easier than downloading the huge installers.) Once you purchase the program or the Suite, you can convert the installed trial to a "real" one, just enter the serial number and activate it.
What's the Difference Between Photoshop and Photoshop Extended?: Looking for some kind of competition for Photoshop, Adobe has decided to go up against Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors. Is Photoshop Rocky-Road right for you? Check out their comparison page to see which of these flavors is yours.
Photoshop Extended FAQ: All your questions are answered here in the FAQ page. Well, all of the questions Adobe has heard so far about CS4!
CS3 Design Suite Workflow Guide (PDF, 10.0 M)
CS3 Web Suite Workflow Guide (PDF, 10.2 M): How do you use Photoshop to prep images for print or create web animations? How can you integrate it with the other applications in the Design or Web Suite? This heavily-illustrated guide shows the deep thinking behind the Suite concept and how you can achieve workflow Nirvana, or at least come close. I haven't seen updated CS4 versions yet, but I'll keep my eyes peeled for you. (Doesn't that saying sound gross?)
Smart Objects and Smart Guides in Photoshop (Videos): Check out this trio of Quicktime tutorials to learn how to align and edit objects on different layers using Smart Guides, edit a single Smart Object and automatically apply that same edit to all duplicates. Learn how to place Illustrator vector images into Photoshop as editable Smart Objects. The videos were made for CS2 but apply to CS3 and CS4 too.
All About the RAW Camera Format (including supported cameras): Really serious photographers know that if you want to capture the highest fidelity images you want to use the RAW format. The problem is, different cameras use different formats and not all support Photoshop's RAW format. This page lists all the cameras that support Adobe's latest RAW plug-in.; It also has a good PDF on RAW image capture (PDF, 1 MB) and some links to other good resources including information about Linear Gamma (I love that band) and Lightroom..
Adobe Bureau of Missing Features: Okay, it's not really called that, but did you notice a few things are missing from CS4? Extract, PatternMaker, ContactSheetII, and Picture Package are all absent from the latest version. Adobe felt they needed to clear away some of the lesser used features to make room for new and future components. If you think Adobe might just have thrown out the baby with the bathwater you can rescue your favorite missing features via this download page.
Adobe Exchange:: Plug-ins, add-ons, actions, gradients, effects and more. Why reinvent the wheel?

Best Ways to Get Help From Other Photoshop Users

Adobe User Support Forums: Mac | Windows: There is a lot of problem-solving going on in here. This is usually my first stop when trying to figure something out and need help, especially if it involves how Photoshop interacts with other Adobe products.
Fred Miranda Forum: Photography, illustration and more merge at this huge photography forum. Posts are categorized into presentation, equipment, forum & miscellaneous and announcements. With such an active forum, you're bound to find some Photoshop tips & techniques, but you'll have to look for them.
The Photoshop Discussion List: This is the email discussion list for Photoshop aficionados. It's friendly and helpful and doesn't have an insane amount of traffic. Lots of power-hitters here, and the newbies ask intelligent questions. The forum moderator strictly enforces the "No OT (off topic) posts" rule so the wheat to chaff ratio is close to A Bazillion:1.
Photoshop Techniques Forum: A very large user forum, collaborative competitive photo-illustration contests, and a few decent tutorials.
TeamPhotoshop Forum: Beautifully-designed version of the hoary old vBulletin makes surfing this online forum a pleasure. I like how their discussion categories are divvied up among photographers, web designers, graphic designers, and coders.
Applied Color Theory in Photoshop Mailing List: Are you seriously committed to color correction and color management in Photoshop? If so, this list is required reading. Founded and maintained by renowned Photoshop author/guru Dan Margulis (he wrote Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, see the Best Pubs list on the left), the Color Theory list has almost 2,000 subscribers. Discussions touch on Camera RAW, scanners, curves and levels, LAB, calibration hardware, and more. Lots of authors and color consultants on this list.
RetouchPro Forums: This busy forum is dedicated to Photoshop users who do digital retouching work. Advanced techniques, critiques, and useful actions and plugins are frequently posted.

Best Photoshop Online/Video Training

Lynda.com's Adobe Photoshop Lessons:
Photoshop CS4 | Photoshop CS3 | Photoshop CS2: Lynda.com already has 12 hours of Photoshop CS4 training and there's definitely more to come. CS3 now has over 170 hours of training available on their site! That doesn't even include their offerings for CS2 and CS. Lynda's huge library was created with the best trainers and authors in the business. You can buy individual DVD collections of the training and watch them on your TV at home or subscribe for online viewing and get access to every training title they produce.

Virtual Training Company's Photoshop Lessons: Photoshop CS4 |Photoshop CS3 |Photoshop CS2: VTC has a new page of Photoshop CS4 Quickstart videos, and a full course listing is sure to follow. From VTC You can learn Photoshop online in the privacy of your web browser as short, optimized-for-the-web online Quicktime movies (over 170 lessons; 12 hours total), or order all of them on a CD for $99 to get the highest quality Quicktime files. Either way, all sample files used in the lessons are included. VTC has made the first 20 or so lessons free, so why not check them out?

Total Training For Adobe Photoshop:
Photoshop CS4 | | Photoshop CS3 | Photoshop CS2

Not to be outdone, Total Training will soon be releasing their Photoshop CS4 Essentials on DVD. Lessons go from beginner to advanced. Online Training is already becoming available with a subscription. It's kind of expensive ($300) but compare that with what you'd pay for 20 hours of classroom training and you'll see how cost-effective it really is. If your looking to catch an even bigger deal (and who isn't) they're running discounts on their CS3 DVD titles.

Other Photoshop Web Resources

Photoshop.com: Adobe's answer to Flicker.com and photobucket.com. this site is their very own photo hosting website, complete with online version of Photoshop so you can immediately post your photos and edit them remotely.

Dr. Brown's Tips and Techniques: A sizeable collection of Photoshop tips from Russell Brown and Adobe. Tutorials include all kinds of stuff: Lenticular Images, Photoshop Video Editing, Green Screen Compositing, Printing and Color management, Working with Perspective, Manipulating Camera RAW image, and of course new CS4 content. You'll need patience for these large downloads and maybe for Dr. Brown's zany delivery. The content is worth it in either case. (I confess, I like his quirky style...just don't tell him I said so.)
PhotoshopCafe: The Cafe has an intensely busy forum, tutorials, book reviews, downloadable actions and more. The interface is rather ... uh... Photoshop-py but the content is first-rate. Site founder Colin Smith even sells his own line of Photoshop training DVDs, which are pretty good — free samples (as online lessons) are available on his site.
Photoshop News (blog): Interesting Photoshop blog run by some heavy hitters. The two columns of Photoshop links on the home page serve as the ultimate directory of web-based Photoshop resources. (Of course they're not annotated with pithy comments like this one. Sniff.)
Photoshop User TV (videocast): The folks at NAPP (Nat'l Assoc. of Photoshop Professionals) put together a nifty podcast that incorporates video of themselves talking ... which is pretty cool actually ... but most useful is when they show their tips and techniques on screen as part of the podcast. You can watch this in iTunes or on a video iPod, or on their site as a Flash video.
Photoshop Support: Tutorials Index: Okay, I give up. These people have the best collection of annotated links to online Photoshop tutorials I've seen. Bookmark this page!
10,000 Brushes for Photoshop: This CD collection from GraphicXtras.com comes with thousands of Photoshop .brs files that you can load in Photoshop 6, 7 and CSn as well as Photoshop Elements. Total cost: $30!; The site design isn't the most sophisticated <cough UNDERSTATEMENT cough> but that's easy to forgive, since the content is pretty good (lots of info on how to use the brushes). Be sure to explore the rest of the site, they sell tons of plug-ins, symbols, shapes, etc. for Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash too.
Gary Ballard's Photoshop Tutorials: Gary is a photographer and consultant based in San Diego, California, and an unsung Photoshop expert, especially when it comes to color management. His site design is almost as badly as GraphicXtras.com's (above), but we'll forgive him because of his superb color management information on his site.
Digital Media Designer: David Nagel has yet another "unsitely" website with a treasure trove of great content. There is an amazing amount of information here, and some can't-live-without downloads. I personally can't do a thing with my hair without Brush series 36, a series of 17 hair fur and fuzz brushes useful for adding wisps of fly-away hair back onto a masked head or creating a faux fur coat. Even more amazing: they're free.

Binary FX: The Photoshop Tech Vault: Stephen Marsh, Photoshop guru from Australia, has assembled an incredible library of articles and tutorials on the more advanced aspects of Photoshop: luminance masking, using the channel mixer, black point compensation, and so on. A stellar collection of hard-to-find information.

Painting and Illustrating with Photoshop: On the design and production side we rarely use Photoshop for anything other than photo-manipulation and correction, but there's a whole world out there using Photoshop as a digital canvas and creating art from scratch. Check out the amazing artwork on the CGSociety website and forums. Look for the 2D forum in particular for Photoshop work and if you're interested in learning to do some of this amazing artwork yourself, check out the various tutorial threads in the forum as well.

Free Textures and Vectors from Level87: UK artist Michael Tierney has posted some great Photoshop and Illustrator freebies at his site Level87 in the form of "DVD Packages." These are big downloads (300 megabytes or better) but worth your while.