Are you new to Photoshop? here is some tips to help you on the way to being a Photoshop Guru.

5. Plugins

Try and not to get into the habit of getting plugins to perform things for you. There are many plugins out there and they can do some pretty amazing things but the you can do almost all the things that the plugins perform with out them. It is easy to obtain a plugin to achieve the effect you are wanting to achieve but this teaches you nothing and you are just cheating your self. To make the same effect with out a plugin will give you a huge sense of pride that you made it by yourself and you will learn immensely in the process.

4. Actions

Tasks that you do repetitively you can save as a action or “macro” so instead of doing each of the actions all the time one after another you can just click on the saved action and the whole collection of actions will be done automatically. For example if you had to import a lot of photos and you needed to resize, change the brightness, make a border and save to a specific format this would take a long time to do all these actions to each of the photos. With actions you can do the whole process to one of the photos then save what you did as a ‘action’ and then proceed to perform the entire process to rest of the photos with a single click!

3. Save, Save, Save and SAVE!

Saving your work cannot be stressed enough, save when ever you make a major change and make a new version of the file so you can go back to previous versions of the file you are working on if you need to.

2. Tutorials

There are thousands upon thousand of Tutorials on the internet with all types of subjects and skill levels. Tutorials are one of the best ways to learn and they can be heaps of fun. As well as the internet there are many Photoshop books available as well.

1. Experiment/Play around

Don’t be scared of the program! experiment and play around with the tools. As the old adage goes, practice makes perfect. The more you use Photoshop the more comfortable you will become with it’s way of doing things and you will be able to achieve more.