Photoshop is hard. There’s all kinds of menus, commands, and keyboard shortcuts that you’ve got to figure out. Once you learn how it works, it’s an unbelievably useful and powerful tool, but the learning curve is enormous.
Using the Web though, you can learn how to do just about anything in Photoshop, and either become great at it or just get really good at faking it. Either way, you’re doing cool stuff.
Here are ten sites to learn Photoshop online and get you Photoshopping like a champion:
You Suck at Photoshop
You Suck at Photoshop is the place to start, just to defeat you a little bit and make you realize how badly you need to learn Photoshop. In all seriousness, though, Donnie Hoyle’s video tutorial series is both hilarious and informative. They’re helpful for learning how to do simple things, where to find particular tools, and how to mess with the pictures of people you love.
Tutorial9
Tutorial9 has a ton of different tutorials, including a lot of them for Photoshop. Every tutorial has step-by-step instructions, complete with pictures of the tools you need and the buttons you should click on (really helpful- what in the world does the “capture” tool look like?).
Then, for everything you need to do, there’s a quick video showing you what it looks like. There’s no narration, but that’s okay- the step-by-step instructions do everything you need. Tutorial9 helps you do all kinds of things with Photoshop- my favorite was creating burnt parchment. You know, without burning anything. Definitely agreat site to learn photoshop online.
PSDTUTS
With PSDTUTS, you’ll see lots and lots of pictures. Tutorials are made up almost entirely of pictures that give you the slightest detail instructions on how to do various things in Photoshop.
One of the best things about PSDTUTS are the comments on the tutorials, which help to iron out the possible issues with the tutorials as presented. The tutorials are long, because they’re so broken down, but if they can teach me to make a Web banner out of a motorcycle, they’re doing something right.
Good-Tutorials
There’s nothing terribly unique about Good-Tutorials, except that it’s more of a general guide to using Photoshop than a guide to achieving a particular effect in Photoshop.
Though Good-Tutorials does have those tutorials, it’s also got things like “Create a Photoshop Action for Screenshots” to help save you time and effort in Photoshop. Simple tutorials and powerful Photoshopping both come from Good-Tutorials.
Photoshop Lady
The Photoshop Lady pulls together some of the best Photoshop tutorials from around the Web, and lets you read and watch them easily. If you create an account, you can save tutorials for later, and you can also see the “Most Viewed” and “Highest Rated” tutorials to see what other people are learning how to do. Since it’s not centralized, some tutorials are better than others, but most of it is good stuff.
Photoshop Tutorials
Photoshop Tutorials combines tutorials for Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Photography. It covers a whole range of things, and always tells you how advanced the particular tutorial is. Some are incredibly complicated, and some are great ways to do really basic things in Photoshop.
Though it doesn’t have the largest database I found, it probably wins my award for easiest-to-follow tutorials. Users also rate and comment on tutorials, so you can see what people liked and hated on the site.
Luxa
Luxa calls itself a “social learning site for Photoshop artists.” It’s a combination of tutorials, videos, and design articles. Users suggest video and tutorial topics, and Luxa helps them learn Photoshop.
To really appreciate Luxa’s community, you’ll want to become a member, which is a bit of a pain but creates a lot of benefits. There’s also a voting system (though not an oft-used one yet) that helps bring the best to the top. In addition to all the tutorials too, Luxa also has a large collection of Photoshop brushes that will let you achieve before-impossible awesomeness.
Photoshop Contest
Photoshop Contest is one part site for Photoshop ninjas, one part site for becoming one. There are contests for people doing cool things with Photoshop, but also a big repository of tutorials and videos.
Since the makers of the tutorials are usually on the site because they know Photoshop inside and out, they often have cool tips for how to take shortcuts and “cheat” an image. Most of the tutorials are pretty basic, though at least for me, there’s nothing basic about any of Photoshop.
PSHero
PSHero gets onto the list for being the most practical of the bunch, and sharing the most tutorials that the average user would actually want. If you’re looking to do things like design a website, create logos, or make your photos grungier, you’re set with PSHero.
There’s not a lot of higher-level stuff to be found, but I found that PSHero was perfect for someone like me, who’s more likely to be creating a logo than an anime airplane eating a lion on top of a mountain. The tutorials are easy to follow, and definitely geared toward the inexperienced Photoshopper.
PSDTop
Another aggregator (I think the name might have taken from AllTop), PSDTop is a great place to find all kinds of cool Photoshop Tutorials.
Though it’s not the only site to have categories, its breakdown of the tutorials into various types (Drawing, Digital Art, etc.) is a great way to become ninja-like at a particular skill in Photoshop. Since it’s an aggregator, it too will have the occasional dud tutorial, but most are good.
From introductions to Photoshop to doing things that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world, these ten sites will help you earn your black belt in the wide world of Photoshopping. But obviously many more Photoshopping tutorial websites exist out there so tell us your recommendations in the comments below.
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