I am not a fan of Adobe’s photoshop. It’s not because it’s not good, it’s because I find it very complicated. But today I decided to give it one more go and start from the very basic. To help me with this, I searched up tutorials on Youtube and came across one by Flow Graphics which were just about 6 minutes long. Perfect.

Mostly if not only, the photography I do is food. I edit a lot of photos daily, but using phone apps like Polar and VSCO, and the one provided by Instagram I also enjoy using as it is simple but has all the functions that I need. Nonetheless, it’s time for me to try out editing on Photoshop.

The compact tutorials summed up pretty much all the basics that I needed to know. First of all, I opened the image that I wanted to edit. Then in the window panel, I choose “adjustment”

The “adjustment” panel has most of the functions i need, such as brightness/contrast, colour balance, brightness, etc.

The tutorial mentioned that a lot of people don’t know that the vibrance tool exists, which I find really interesting. I myself didn’t start using this tool until I found them on an photo editing app. He further explained how the vibrance tool differ from saturation, as the vibrance tool will pump up the colours without making skin tones look too “yellow”. I do use this more than saturation if I want a subtle pop of colour to my photos.

Next, I tried to put text on the photo and like the tutorial suggests, double clicked on the layer to apply some effects on it.

I applied some outer glow and drop shadows to the text. 

The tutorial also explained how effects can be copied from one layer and pasted to another by right clicking on a layer which we wanted to copy from, choose copy layer style and then right clicking the layer which we wanted to paste to and choose paste layer style.

Since all the effects I copied was glow, there wasn’t any noticeable difference in the photo itself.

Lastly, to erase a text, we need to rasterize them, which you can just click on OK when prompted.

And then we can use the erase tool to erase the text.

We can also do this by adding a layer mask, which is available on the bottom right corner of the screen.

Then we use the brush tool to erase it using the black colour, and white to fill it back in.

That’s it!

We’ve covered the very basics of Photoshop. I’ll definitely need to learn more than this but this is pretty good for now.

Below is the tutorial by Flow Graphics, I hope it’s helpful!

 

xx