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 CS3 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's CS3 Video Workshop: Over a hundred free, online video tutorials covering every program in the Suites, produced by Adobe and Lynda.com. New users can learn the basics of Photoshop; seasoned pros can get a handle on the new features in CS3. These video tutorials are FANTASTIC! There are 15-30 five-minute tutorials per program, and 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 CS3 Extended Tryout: Download the free, fully-enabled Photoshop CS3, the Extended version (includes neat extras) from Adobe's site. It's good for 30 days, but the clock doesn't start ticking until you install the file you downloaded. (Or, for $9.99 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 New in Photoshop CS3 Extended (Video) | Datasheet (PDF, 123K): The new Quick Selection tool is worth the upgrade price alone, but the folks at Adobe added a ton of more features. The video show new CS3 features as well as what the Extended version adds.
Photoshop CS3 and CS3 Extended: All your questions are answered here in the FAQ page. Yes, all!
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.
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 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 Exchange: Photoshop Most Popular: 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

Total Training For Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop CS2 | Photoshop CS
Over 20 hours of pure Photoshop CS or CS2 training from the man himself, Deke McClelland. Lessons go from beginner to advanced. Each of Total Training's training products comes with a CD containing project files so you can follow along with the instructor. It's kind of expensive ($300 each) but compare that with what you'd pay for 20 hours of classroom training and you'll see how cost-effective it really is.
Virtual Training Company's Photoshop Lessons: Photoshop CS2 | Photoshop CS: 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?

Other Photoshop Web Resources

Dr. Brown's Tips and Techniques
A sizeable collection of Photoshop CS2 tips from Russell Brown and Adobe. Tutorials include working with perspective and manipulating Camera RAW images. You'll need a speedy internet connection to download and these large Quicktime clips.
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 bad as GraphicXtras.com's (above), but we'll forgive him because of his superb color management information on his site.
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.